Jen Slegg’s post on Google’s Updated Site Move Recommendations for Webmasters is timely in that we are working on multiple large domain migrations at moment – tis the season I guess. As I have often said, redesigning a website and migrating the domain at the same time is the SEO equivalent of diamond cutting. There are not many ways to get it right and an infinite number of ways to get it wrong. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some observations on a domain change we worked on this year to add to the collective wisdom.
Site A had a lot of content on multiple topics and a lot of organic traffic. Site B had a lot of content on a single topic and decent organic traffic, but about 4x less than Site A. The client had decided to shut down Site B in order to focus on Site A which would be a much better business. The migration plan was to redirect related Site B content to Site A URLs whenever possible, but all non-related content, which was about 90% of the site, would be redirected to a selection of top-level pages. The client didn’t want to do anything more finely mapped than that, as it would have taken a lot of time/effort/$, etc.
The redirects went live and for the first week the organic traffic to Site A popped strongly. But this was a false positive. It was merely the result of searchers clicking on Site B’s URLs in the SERPs before Google had a chance to crawl and purge/demote them. Over the next two weeks, organic traffic fell to about where it would have been (based on the 2015 trend) indicating almost no demonstrable benefit from the move.
It’s possible Site A’s traffic would have been worse off without doing the migration due to algorithm updates, competition, etc. but at a high level it looks like this site migration was not worth doing.
An interesting data point was that average bounce rate from Google visits to Site A the week after the migration ticked up by almost ten percentage points and over the following two weeks drifted back down to where it was pre-migration.
This makes sense as searchers were clicking on Site B results in Google and getting redirected to irrelevant URLs which inflated bounce rates. As Site B results lost their rankings, the bounce rate returned to normal.
It would have been impractical to do detailed redirects on a site of Site B’s size (and impossible as there was no similar content on Site A to map redirects), but too often I see these kinds of outcomes from domain migrations, and even URL migrations within a single site, where the business owners don’t fully understand the downside of these choices. To most SEOs this stuff is obvious, but to everyone else it’s often the lowest priority, until it’s not…
If you want to read a happy story on this subject, check out my SEL post From oDesk To Upwork: How To Migrate A Domain And Not Kill Your SEO.
And of course if you need help, we provide Domain Migration SEO Services.
6 Response Comments
Even if you properly redirect websites, it will still face a drop. Because if site A had example.com/cars for a long time, which usually with due time it ranks higher. That age starts over when all of a sudden example2.com/cars starts getting that traffic.
Hey Apex,
While I don’t disagree that age could play a part in some rankings, in our experience this is typically not the case with redirects of this kind. It could certainly occur because a URL/domain doesn’t have as many backlinks which I guess is a proxy for age, but I don’t think Google cares all that much if your average URL is 10 years old or 10 days old.
Redirects are so tricky and finicky even when you do them right. I’ve seen both better rankings because of a redirect and no reduction in traffic right off the bat, but then sometimes a page will drop significantly and lag behind on back pages for a few weeks before bouncing back. Any thoughts on this?
Hey Mitch, hard to say but I think the case you are describing is when Google treats the target URL like a new URL where it tests it out, drops it then lets it gradually float back up. This kind of thing can occur particularly when you are redirecting to a brand new domain that has no link equity. See https://www.localseoguide.com/forget-linkbuilding-do-a-groupon/
I see people make a mess all the time with too many redirects. When done properly, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, but it can break a lot of stuff in the process. Thanks for sharing your data!
Hey Andrew, you have any thoughts on how many is too many? (As in entire site redirects to the target domain)