: How Late is Too Late to Redirect Pages of Domain for SEO Our company recently had a new website designed for them to replace the old one that was literally made sometime in the mid-90's.
Our company recently had a new website designed for them to replace the old one that was literally made sometime in the mid-90's. The new site went live a couple of months ago. I have just been asked to figure out why our search ranking went from top 5 to 2nd+ page oblivion in the Google organic results for our target keywords. I am an application developer not a web designer, but on my initial investigations I notice that our old sub-pages (pages describing certain products and services) do a 301 redirect straight to the new homepage.
The problem here is that I believe all of the search authority for the old site came from these pages located off the main domain, i.e. - .com/. Because our home page was basically just a collection of links that pointed to these other pages, which actually had a bit of text on them. Ideally I think these would need to redirect to pages on the new site that serve as a replacement. Is it too late to re-redirect the bots. It appears that all browsers will have permanently cached the redirect, but perhaps not the crawlers? Would it be too late to try and tell the bots exactly what new pages replace the old ones and provide a similar amount of text on the new page with similar content to regain our search ranking?
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Firstly, it’s definitely not too late to sort out the redirects. As others have mentioned search engines will periodically crawl old URLs and pick up any changes and update where appropriate. I’m actually working on fixing some redirects at the moment that are over 3 years old
From the situation you describe it is quite likely that most of the problem is the fact that you are redirecting the old content pages to the homepage of the new site rather than doing one to one mapping where possible to the same or similar content on the new URL
Google provide a good guide on the steps of moving to a new domain which obviously you would normally go through during the process but it can certainly be used in retrospect as well.
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033085?hl=en&ref_topic=6033084
Although it sounds like there have been issues with this migration. even with all content mapping and redirects correctly set up it is quite normal to see some fluctuations in the first month or so after a move.
Also bear in mind that there are a lot of other factors that can have an impact such as page layout, quality of code, site performance, whether content is being dynamically served, internal linking etc and all of these can also impact rankings.
Google have some fairly clear guidelines on what they are looking for in a good site in terms of general performance, quality and content
support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
If you are able to post the old and new URL’s then we might be able to see if there are any other issues with the new site.
In my experience it is not too late even a year later if the site had a good reputation in Google's eyes. I have seen a site be off-line for months and then reappear after it has been found live again.
The strategy to do a 301 redirect is an important one in SEO and it is based on relevance. What the OP says about the first redirect is clearly not relevant, ie. pages deep on the site had different topics to the home page of the site and they ranked for those subjects. Now a redirect from off-topic (ie other than the home page) will lose the relevance factor and thusly drop in the rankings.
The reason why a change in a redirect will work even much later, is the fact that Google keeps on indexing your site and its pages and when it finds changes, it will simply take these into account. Thusly a change can't ever be too late.
I am going to be doing a site revamp with several hundreds of pages later this year and the job of 301 is a top priority on my list of todos.
Oh yeah OK i see. So you redirected the links for pages you didn't want to use anymore to go to the homepage thus elimination that content.
I ran into something similar with this site i'm on now. it had TONS of pages and text i wanted to pare it down to something reasonable.... when i cut out a lot of the text overloaded pages we dropped in seo which i attribute to visitors spending less time on the site as well as a few other things
Can you add the content back in as archived blog posts? or if not blog just maybe a menu item called archive or something?
My gut says your right about the seo drop I would look for ways to optimize what you have and possibly add the old stuff in some organized way
Also try running Youst (SP) if the sites on WP i've had really good luck with it and have several rebuilt sites ranking top 3 for our most used keywords
Imo it's never too late to upgrade seo. There are so many factors that affect seo (estimated 200ish) with Google. Definitely need to get your text optimized for rank brain and Google search (long tail conversational searches)
I'm reworking one from the early 90s old Yahoo Builder.
If you rebuilt it why do you need the redirects? Are you sitting on the old URL?
What program is the new site built in?
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