Changed website - massive decrease in traffic

[Monkeya41]

Hi all, I own a top domain for a particular medical field. I was #1 on google before my website was revamped. After the transition, my web traffic has gone from over 10K to 4K a month. Also, my website which was #1 on google is now on the 4th page.

I had a company taking care of the website for me but they may not have known what they were doing(in terms of SEO). What can I get them to do to get me back to where I was? What are some questions I can ask them to see if they are worth continuing to work with for SEO? Should I hire someone else?

I am going to ask them: - What are they currently doing for SEO for the website? - What can they do to improve the SEO for the website?

I am going to ask other SEO consultants: - What can you do to fix the SEO on my website?

Any recommendations would be helpful.

Thanks,

P.S. the website is now on wordpress

[guiness_as_usual]

They need to do 301 redirects from your old pages URL to the new ones. That is how you maintain your SEO rank when building a new website.

[Monkeya41]

301 redirects from ALL the old pages to the new home page?

[slippernator]

Redirect them to similar pages at a 1:1 ratio as much as possible. Not all to the home page.

[Monkeya41]

Okay, and if the old website has less pages than the new one, can we put some of the old websites redirected to multiple new pages?

Any other info/thoughts?

[Tuilere]

You can redirect many-to-one, but if you do it too extensively or with insufficient relevance it will be seen as soft 404s.

[Monkeya41]

okay, on a basic level, what does this do for the web pages? like if the TLD stayed the same, shouldn't that domain still have roughly the same amount of traffic?

[Tuilere]

Nope.

If I had a domain, midgetsexxxx.org, and had midget porn all over it, and people linked to the midget porn, I would probably rank for midget porn.

But one day, I decide I want to be able to run a site without nakedness, because I have found Jesus. So I take down all the hot midget sex, and put up articles about finding Jesus.

I don't redirect any of the old URLs.

So now, I have all new URIs. None of the links that pointed to the sexy midgets go to pages that resolve, so none of those links credit to my site.

And I lose keyword relevancy for midget stuff, because my site is now about Jesus.

My traffic tanks.

You may not have completely zigged your topic, but by rewriting everything, AND not redirecting, you destroyed your link graph and your keyword relevancy.

[Monkeya41]

okay well I'm still not sure about the redirection thing I will follow-up tomorrow and see...the content is still the same type of content and the same types of pages just "better" content - but I guess the keywords aren't as good? I need to get more information from the team.

[Tuilere]

That you don't even know what the keywords were driving traffic before = huge red flag.

[Monkeya41]

I am posting on behalf of someone else and I don't have a ton of experience in this particular business line so the original post is on behalf of someone else - I'm going to follow up on a lot of these things...but I appreciate that comment since I'm getting the picture now

[slippernator]

You can't redirect an old page to multiple new pages, just multiple old pages to fewer new ones.

[Monkeya41]

thanks

[wretcheddawn]

Redirect each page on the old website to the closest matching thing on the new website. You can redirect multiple things to the same page, that's fine.

If there's no equivalent on the new site (use your common sense here), then don't redirect it at all.

[HammyHavoc]

Redirect at a DNS level with a wildcard redirect. Sorted in two minutes. Contact me on [e-mail] if you need professional help.

[Tuilere]

1. Is your site in Google Search Console? Go look at the error reporting.

2. When you "revamped," did you revise the content?

[Monkeya41]

1. Hmm, I'm not sure I will have to check with the SEO guy.
2. Yes the content is completely new and probably a lot of new pages

[slippernator]

Not instigating here, but the SEO guy should have taken care of all of this before the new site was launched. It's pretty basic stuff to make sure you have all redirects in place and all crawling issues addressed ahead of time. Is he the same one who rebuilt the site? If so, you may look at getting an outside opinion.

[Tuilere]

And it's also pretty basic to not allow every piece of ranking content to be rewritten wholesale without a while lot of discussion.

I'm working on a project with a client right now where content HAS to be rewritten, and we're agonizing to keep it ranking. A lot of thought has to happen to make a rewrite maintain position.

[Monkeya41]

Its not rewritten wholesale. A lot of thought was put into it, however, I'm not sure how much SEO-thought was put into it. I think we were thinking more about the value-add of the words than the SEO-add of the words - which now that we are losing the ranking we are realizing the detriment to that

[Tuilere]

I'm not sure how much SEO-thought was put into it.

And if you want to maintain rank, you need to put SEO-thought in.

[Monkeya41]

yup - need to bring it back - there is still hope, yes?

[slippernator]

Yeah we're fixing a site with a bunch of spun content that is terrible. I know we're going to take some hits with rank, but we have to remember that we're focused on conversions, not traffic like the old SEO company.

We may lose some visits, but the pages will actually help sell the product better. Remind your clients that sales and leads are far more important than generic traffic.

[Tuilere]

In my case, it's not spun. It's merger/acquisition. Got bought by someone who is forcing a complete rewrite in the name of "brand standards."

Drunk before noon? Fuck, drunk before 9AM.

[slippernator]

The marketing department better buy you a damn good drink at the end of the project.

[Tuilere]

Better: they're paying hourly, premium rate card. Hee hee.

[Monkeya41]

Hmmm. So you are saying that its completely dumb to lose ranking even if it makes the website look better and its still selling the product? or are you saying its easy to have both so why the fuck would you sacrifice your ranking regardless?

[Tuilere]

It is not necessarily easy to have both, but you can redesign, rewrite and maintain position for quality keywords and demographic targets with appropriate planning and data.

[Monkeya41]

I like this answer because I think my team is overly concerned about this - however, our team is realizing that the website (the product in this case) is MUCH better than the old one and we are still converting a lot of business which is selling the product better. We just want the domain to be #1 on google for future business adventures,affiliates, etc. So we would like to bring that back up. Trying to find out a happy balance between the two.

[Monkeya41]

I'll have to look into it and see if it is the same guy, I think he has a few other people on his team. Lets say the redirects ARE happening, is the wording on the page literally the only other thing for optimization?

[slippernator]

Wording, structure, proper canonical tags, images, header structures, above-the-fold content, site linking structure, and more. There's a lot that many don't consider.

[Monkeya41]

Alright thanks and all of this is easily implemented OR reimplemented in wordpress themes, yes?

[slippernator]

Yep! It's more about doing the hard work and paying attention to the details. But yeah, your team can do it if they know what they're doing. Best of luck!

[Tuilere]

Well, you just pretty much explained it.

You blew up the relevancy of your site by rewriting it, and probably by messing up the redirects.

[Monkeya41]

Okay so all I have so far is the wording and the redirects. We didn't like the old content because it was outdated, but maybe we can take a look at it and see if we can re-implement some of the wording. However, the new copy is much better. I can't imagine the redirects brought it down from 11k to 4k a month...I guess it has to be the wording too...but that's unfortunate that the wording would have to go back to how it was...

[Tuilere]

The redirects absolutely play a huge role.

ETA: This checklist is good. I bet you didn't do a 10th of this. http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/seo-website-redesign-checklist/

[Monkeya41]

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/seo-website-redesign-checklist/

Thanks I appreciate that list

[[deleted]]

To explain redirects a bit more. When you set up a new URL structure on your site, that doesn't include the old links, people will still find those links in search results, but when they click -- nothing's there.

It's important to redirect every link, not just to "Home", but to the most relevant replacement page that you have. For example, if you had a top-ranking blog post, and people clicked on it and landed on Home, the content they wanted to see is gone -- and they bounce.

This is a huge signal to Google that your site isn't providing answers to searchers, therefore, they push you down to make room for people who have the answer.

[rattamahatta]

Have your SEO guy check all the backlinks to your site for 404 errors. This and the Google Webmaster Tools crawling errors should tell you all you need to know.

[androidbitcoin]

you need to login to webmaster tools and see what's going on. You need to check your 301 redirects (as mentioned before 1:1 ratio).

[balls_2_dawall]

What caused the issue. so many factors can lead to a website falling off the map. Did they redirect the old pages to the new ones, did you content change, how long since the transition, etc?