Tricky Wordpress Changing Permalinks Redirection Question

[Darth]

And this is also just one day (and they did rank this high previously on the old domain, only to fall) so I haven't quite "won" yet. But it's promising.

As I said

 

[Ryuzaki]

Darth, I'd expect this bouncing like you're seeing. It could be legitimate bouncing to see if you'll react, or it could be your rank tracker connecting to different data centers each day.

I agree with your assessment that points 3, and 4 are going to make the biggest impact on the rankings of these posts, likely with 4 having the most direct impact. 3 will probably affect your posts at wide just because the flow of page rank is going to be different. You'll see movements, probably nothing too wild. Some may gain, some may lose.

But point 1 can also contribute to a site wide movement. If you start seeing that, I'd blame it on 1 and 3 and hold fast. There's nothing you can do about that and both can be easily be made up over time.

Point 2 can shake things up too though. Changing all of the HTML mark-up may not affect any of the actual on-page SEO optimization of the pages, but it can be enough to cause a bounce where Google may want to test your reaction or is having to re-calculate all of the on-page signals. They'll realize the important stuff didn't change, but you may still bounce until then.

Best of luck. This will be fun to watch, we should learn a lot. I'm glad it's really only those specific posts and not a site wide issue.

 

[Darth]

Darth, I'd expect this bouncing like you're seeing. It could be legitimate bouncing to see if you'll react, or it could be your rank tracker connecting to different data centers each day.

Yep the swings are pretty wild right now

I agree with your assessment that points 3, and 4 are going to make the biggest impact on the rankings of these posts, likely with 4 having the most direct impact. 3 will probably affect your posts at wide just because the flow of page rank is going to be different. You'll see movements, probably nothing too wild. Some may gain, some may lose.

I actually fixed point 3 over the last day or so. The nav menu is now similar to the old one and contains the key pages, but inline with the broader scope of the site. Some items might be a category deeper in the menu for example. I guess with everything going on I didn't realise I could do this so easily!

4 is tricky to fix. I had a play around today and could do it, but it would really take away from the broader focus this new site (and branding) is meant to have. So in the end I didn't change the HP body text as such, but introduced a new widget to the sidebar that has some of the key text and links. I think it is a good compromise between (hopefully) juicing those key pages more and also retaining the new branding/direction.

Best of luck. This will be fun to watch, we should learn a lot. I'm glad it's really only those specific posts and not a site wide issue.

Thank you for all your help and advice. Once this settles back to ranks and traffic prior to the domain move then it will be interesting to see if I can take the site back to levels seen before snippets and big brands started crushing me.

 

[Samwise89]

How's this going, @Darth? It's been another 10 days.

 

[Darth]

Hi! More or less stable now at rankings before I moved URLs which is great. However not seeing any uplift which was one of my goals for changing URL (I thought my old EMD may have been harming me/causing over-optimisation).

So I guess now it's on to stage 2 and trying to reverse all this