From separate Mobile Site to Responsive - Affect SEO?

[devGirl]

Another thing we did at the beginning of the year was combine our two separate sites - Desktop / Mobile - to one responsive site. I know, we were late. Our host said it would help SEO and it was a nightmare to manage 2 separate sites acting as one. BUT we saw a drop in ranking/traffic after we combined.

1. We redirected m.WEBSITE.com to WEBSITE.com in .htaccess
2. We removed m.WEBSITE.com in search console (should we have kept it?)

Thx

[not2easy]

Is this the same domain as discussed in another thread [webmasterworld.com] where you also recently switched to https? Are the redirects from "mobile" to "responsive" URLs page for page redirects as from m.example.com/page/widgets.html to example.com/page/widgets.html? Or are people landing on m.example.com/page/widgets.html being redirected to example.com? I am asking because of the possibility that non-page for page redirects (especially those rewrites that are not inherited) can make it much more difficult to index the new structure.

You should maintain the old structure in your GSC account at least until you can see that the indexed pages have declined to zero and you see the new structure is completely indexed in the GSC account for the responsive version.

[devGirl]

Yes, same site and yes, the redirects are page-to-page, not just to the main index.

Thanks

[not2easy]

It looks good then. If you have taken care of the rewrites inheritance then it should begin to shape up in the indexing. I would definitely paste a few of the old URLs into the browser's address bar, especially with and without the www and https variables and checking subdirectory pages to see how that's going.

If you can, you should also check the headers as the rewrites are executed, just to be sure that everything is getting a 301 response.