301s and serious loss of traffic

traffic loss

[ple2232009]

A few facts: mysite.co.uk had been reciving good traffic with high PR on most pages (over 400,000 indexed) until December. the site had been around for over 12 months. Some may say foolishly, but we decided around November/December 2005 to change the design of the site, which included a number of url changes. We installed the appropraite 301s and hoped for the best (although I suspect our techs may not have performed a completely thorough job on the 301s).

Perhaps not unsurprising to many out there, we lost 80% of traffic overnight. we had a few server crashes to compound matters, but traffic is still running at a constant 20% of what is used to be.

I have read all the theories and advice and respect most those who say be positive and treat this as an opportunity to attack the competition when we are finally let back in. Sadly, i don't think we can hang on much longer.

We are doing everything we can, within the rules I hasten to add, updating and encouraging more links and the like, basically ticking everything off the list but need a new approach.

i fear the simple answer is 'just wait it out', but if anyone has any fresh ideas please send over.

cheers

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, ple.

First, that's only four weeks. So, yes, more time is needed -- espcially since Google has been working with a major infrastructure change (Big Daddy) this month.

I suspect our techs may not have performed a completely thorough job on the 301s

I would spend some time auditing that work in detail. My experience is that techs often introduce problems on the first go-round of any change.

Also, drill into your old server logs to see which urls stopped performing for you. If you are getting 20% of your previous traffic, that doesn't sound like a complete ban or sandbox effect to me.

Check out your site on the Yahoo Site Explorer [siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com] for some clues about what is going on for your urls. Look for issues like many urls pointing to the same content. Also make sure that any 404 error pages are actually returning a 404 header.

[ple2232009]

Very helpful - thanks.

[buckworks]

I suspect our techs may not have performed a completely thorough job on the 301s

Double-check that and then check again. That's the most critical issue here. You don't want spiders encountering errors when old URLs have been taken out, and you don't want them encountering duplicate content if old URLs are still live. Either of those will cause problems.

Also, make sure that all links you control are updated to match the new URLs. No exceptions.

Then do some serious hunting to find external sites that are linking to old URLs, and ask them to update their links as well. You won't get them all, but the more links that point straight to the new pages instead of depending on the redirects, the better.

[ple2232009]

Thank you - yes, we are on this one and going through the links. Many links so taking a little time, but most are working and we are addressing those that are not.