Help Diagnosing 50%+ Traffic Drop After Site Move

[animalstyle]

About a week and a half ago, I moved an aged, older site over into a newer site because I needed to re-brand so I could expand.

This was NOT a 'standard' re brand where the same content and URLs were moved to a new domain. The old site was absorbed as a section of the new site.

URL's changed and site structures changed, but the content came across 95% the same from old to new. Some small sections of the old site were abandoned.

Site Details

Old Site:

• 3+ yrs old.
• Had relevant niche keyword in domain .com
• No SSL
• Has held consistent rankings for a wide range of terms for years with little to no fluctuation.

New Site:

• ~4 mo old.
• Generically branded .com
• Has SSL
• Before the site move, was indexed nicely, ranking for terms, and growing.

General:

• Both sites live on the same web server, same IP.
• Both sites are white hat and neither carry any manual penalties.
• New site has a different URL structure than the old site.
  
• Content from the old site was carried over to the new site in nearly identical form.
• Set up, tested, and confirmed 301 redirects from old -> new site.
• Submitted a change of address through Google Search Console and Bing.
• Dropped ~5% of old site pages, then a week later migrated about 80% of those back online. Some recreated the content, some redirected to appropriate associated page. These sections were low traffic, but did support the high content pages with internal links and as supporting content.
• Redirected abandoned pages on the old site to a 404 page on the new site.

From everything I read, it would be a 'swap' where the new site moved into the old site's positions. What I am seeing is very different:

Monitoring keywords, I see:

• Some terms where the new site replaced the old site positions and has fully updated the search result with the new meta and schema info.
• Some terms where the results are mixed data from the old and new site. IE the meta title in the serp result is new site, url is old site etc. Rankings are a bit all over the place on these.
• Some terms where the old site has from the SERP's and the new site climbing the SERP's at the same time.
  • Of the terms that have done this, the harder the keyword, the lower the new site sits in the rankings. As if these pages are having to re-rank rather than replace the old site's position.

Monitoring the overall domain performance, I see:
Been monitoring both sites using Google Search Console and ahrefs:

• The old site is dropping rankings, visibility, traffic much quicker than the new site is gaining.
• Comparing the same timeframe:
  • Old site dropped ~200 top 3 positions, new site gained about 50
  • Old site dropped ~13,000 in organic traffic visibility, new site gained ~4000
  • And so on.
• New site grew from DR 21 up to 41 since the switch, the old site was at 49 previously.

It's reassuring to see that the new site is gaining momentum on so quickly.

Monitoring traffic, I see:
The end result after about a week and a half week has been an overall traffic drop of 50%. The first 4 days after the swap were great or even better than previous levels, then the next day the downhill slide started:

What do you think?
Has anyone had experience in a similar situation?
Any actions I should be taking?

I know this is a big old first post, tried to fit as many details as possible in here though. This has the makings of a pretty bad situation if the trend continues. I'd REALLY appreciate any help.

 

[CCarter]

About a week and a half ago

You are jumping the gun. It can take up to 3 months to fully absorb the old site into the new site.

Once the new site gas finally gone live, the impact of all the previous hard work needs to be monitored. It may be a good idea monitoring rankings and indexation on a weekly basis but in general no conclusions should be made earlier than 3-4 weeks. No matter how good or bad rankings and traffic appear to be, you need to be patient.

[..]

Rankings. They usually fluxuate for 1-3 weeks and initially they may drop. Eventually, they should recover around the same positions they were previously (or just about).

Sauce: https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
​

^^ They are talking about 3-4 weeks (this guide was written in 2012). When I was buying dropped domains back in 2012 and recreating them it took a month to get back the old traffic (100,000+ a month in SEO traffic). That was 5 years ago - a lot of new filters for 301 redirects, spam, RankBrain, and "slowing down" webmasters have been introduced since then. You are going to be looking at least 1-3 months before you are 100%. Even going by moz's ~3-4 weeks, you are expecting results way too soon - especially in this new environment.

Edit: Everything you are seeing is normal - and honestly more positive than I've seen in the past.

 

[animalstyle]

@CCarter Thank you for the response, link and reassurance. I did a bunch of searching but never found anything that talked about site migration timelines like that article. Appreciate you taking the time.

 

[turbin3]

I can confirm what CCarter said. In my experience with migrations, Google is just plain slow as hell. They're particularly slow when considering superiors waiting with baited breath in front of their analytics platforms, and breathing down your neck as if you can just turn some "traffic knob" and "turn the seo" back up.

It is the unfortunate reality. It's for that reason I always set the expectation, with relevant stake holders, that we have to be in this for the long haul because we don't have a choice.

On one site with several million indexed pages, after 6-8 months of having resolved much duplication, site/microsite migrations and other things, I've finally seen ~95-98% reduction in the old sites ranking. That means on a large site, even 6-8 months later....yeah, still some old stuff lingering. This is probably a somewhat unique case, considering the size and nature of that site.

With much smaller sites, I would expect to see significant improvement within 1 month, but there may still be legacy stuff floating around out there. I think the 1-3 month span Carter mentioned is a pretty good ballpark to factor in.

 

[animalstyle]

@turbin3 thanks for that. Do you normally see a drop in traffic like what I've got, and then a gradual rebuild?

 

[turbin3]

I've normally seen more along the lines of 10-20% for a few weeks, then progressively trending back towards previous levels or just above, so 50% is fairly high and cause for concern. It's impossible to estimate an average, as it's going to differ widely based on the type and size of site, it's historical crawl rate (how quickly the moved pages are likely to be recrawled), etc.

Indexing & Structure

What volume of indexed pages are we talking about? The volume could determine some of the other options you might have to try and "help" Google along, if it's really even possible. Also, can you give us an idea what general type/style of site it is?

Would there have been any significant changes in internal linking and content siloing that may have occurred from the migration?

Crawl Frequency

Also, try checking Google and Bing's cache dates for some of those pages, to see when they were last crawled. It's things like this where in depth analytics on traffic logs and understanding the crawl behavior of Google and Bing can be very valuable.

Also, with Bing, make sure in Bing Webmaster Tools (henceforth BWT for laziness sake) that you don't have their crawl rate restricted. People seem to rarely even touch crawl rate in GSC, so I wouldn't suspect that. In my experience, though, with large sites, people sometimes restrict Bing in BWT, as Bing has a tendency to crawl at an insane rate/volume on large sites. I've often seen Bing crawl at a volume of 300-500% higher than Google for the same site.

Interestingly enough, through enterprise-level testing and in depth crawl behavior analysis, I've also seen the speed deficiency of Bingbot. Bingbot, on average, takes 20-40% more load time than Googlebot (at least for complex, database-oriented dynamic sites), which can be hell on a massive site, hence why some restrict them and try to focus their crawls. Even more ridiculous is the "slurp" bot (Yahoo), which appears to be the same slow speed as Bingbot, or often an additional 10-20% slower (as much as 60% slower than Googlebot). They need to step up their speed game like seriously.

Also, there's the "Fetch as Google" tool in the Google Search Console. Although you have a limited volume you can crawl and submit for indexing, it's worth a shot submitting some of your key traffic/revenue driving pages and seeing if the index will update more quickly.

URL Parameters

Is the site structure such that query strings and URL modifiers are fairly common? If so, are they the types you'd normally restrict from either crawling, indexing, or both? For complex sites, ecommerce sites, search engines, etc. it can help a decent amount using things like the "URL Parameters" tool under the "Crawl" section in Google Search Console (Bing has a similar one as well). Basically you just add the parameters you want to exclude, and they'll have a few details you'll need to click through to specify the nature of the parameter.

The helpful thing is, in GSC, it will show some actual example URLs from your site that would be excluded, based on the settings you've added. This tool is often overlooked but can really help on complex sites, or even simpler sites where the crawl "budget" is simply being burned up on unimportant pages or page variations.

 

[animalstyle]

What volume of indexed pages are we talking about? The volume could determine some of the other options you might have to try and "help" Google along, if it's really even possible. Also, can you give us an idea what general type/style of site it is?

The old site is ~700 pages worth of content. The new site is now over 2000 including those 700. The site is an authority site with two main parts - articles and a database that has category pages and individual pages for each database entry. Most pages are marked up with schema.

Would there have been any significant changes in internal linking and content siloing that may have occurred from the migration?

Siloing
The article content moved over in a similar silo structure. Merged an update section that used to live in a separate silo into a single.

The silo structure for the database did change.

Old site:

• /niche/
• /niche/database-item1/
• /niche/database-item2/
• etc

New Site:

• /niche-category/
• /database-entries/database-item1/
• /database-entries/database-item2/

Basically the individual entry pages used to live under the same subdir as the categories. Now the category pages are separate from the database entry silo.

Internal Linking
On the article end, things are identical from old to new. The database entries changed a bit, but not too much. I dropped a small site section (~60 pages) that was interlinked to the database entries and from the entries back to the site section entries.

Also, there's the "Fetch as Google" tool in the Google Search Console. Although you have a limited volume you can crawl and submit for indexing, it's worth a shot submitting some of your key traffic/revenue driving pages and seeing if the index will update more quickly.

Once I did the site move I re-submitted the sitemaps of both sites for reindexing. I've done a bunch of fetch as google on individual pages as well as categories with the 'crawl all links on this page' option to try and get as much as possible crawled.

Is the site structure such that query strings and URL modifiers are fairly common?

No, and not on pages that rank. the old site had some, but the new site doesn't

Pre-Move Content

Since the new site had a larger scope, I actually created some of the popular database entries on the new site. Those pages have been indexed for months now on both sites.

In one specific example, the page that has dropped from where the old site ranks has been indexed for 3 months or so, but hasn't settled up where the old page ranked.

 

[animalstyle]

Schema Misses
Did some more digging, found that I had overlooked some details schema from old to new. Basically did a full comparison review between the two sites and fixed:

• Database pages were missing the description markup.
  • Also going to do some work to beef these up, some content was lost in the transition.
• Another handful of pages were missing the image markup.
• Fixed a logo sizing declaration mis-match in markup for content pages.
• The old site had organization markup hard coded in the footer, showing on every page. The new site only had it on the homepage. I updated the new site to show org markup on all pages.
  • I kept the old site's 'sameAs' tags for social accounts in addition to the new site's.

So focused on the front-end move, I didn't dig hard enough into the schema.

I am optimistic that these changes are going to make a big difference. Specifically the description and organization fixes hit the whole site and many major pages.

Regardless of the outcome in my case, I think the big point here is to double check your schema markup when doing a site move!

 

[animalstyle]

Little more detail, specifically on the database description markup:

I took the short (dumb) route here and had auto-generated these descriptions even though I'd hand written all of them before. Stupid.

I just went back through and updated them to the previous state. These pages have much more written content now, and lots of interlinks. That plus the description actually being marked up in schema now... well my fingers are crossed.

Submitting some manual fetches and a sitemap resubmit now.

 

[animalstyle]

Images
The layers continue to unfold. Noticed today that in ahrefs that many images had links point at them. Well... just got done with another 500+ 301 redirects from image on the old site to image on the new site.

Moving the same site from domain A -> B would be easy stuff - this rebranding to an entirely new structure is just simply not. So many little details...

 

[animalstyle]

Old 301's
For some reason I didn't pull the 3 years of legacy 301 redirects over when I did the site move 301 redirect file.

Just de-duped and pulled all legacy redirects and added them to the master file. Now these old, old, redirects land on the correct page on the new site with 1 redirect hop... .. is it obvious that I was going to get hit with this kind of traffic drop yet?

Fingers crossed that I've learned a lesson here, things turn around, and I can help just one person avoid this in the future.