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I am hoping to see if anyone in the Moz community would be able to help troubleshoot or lend any advice on a major organic search traffic issue we've been experiencing over the last 8 months. In a nutshell, we decided our ~4.5-year-old business needed to undergo a rebrand in October 2015. After changing domains & redesigning our website (more below), our search-driven sessions have dropped 20% in 2016 v.s. 2015. We made quite a few on-site modifications (with some success) post-redesign but are still deep in a rut and not sure what more we can do to recover. I've listed my theories below as to why we're still suffering this hit. If anyone could weigh in on these and/or share any other troubleshooting ideas, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it (and owe you a lunch/beverage of your choice the next time I'm in your city!). ****Backlinks - despite our efforts to 301 all links, I sense we have lost many backlinks. According to Open Site Explorer, our old domain has 1,172 backlinks (some from some very authoritative pages domains), 1,068 of which are passing link equity. In contrast, our new domain has 367 backlinks, 321 are passing link equity, and very few overlap with our old domain. Domain Age - we may have lost much of our reputation with Google as our new domain is much younger than our old domain (1-year-old v.s. 5.5 years old). Domain Name - although I thought to have common keywords in one's domain was a myth, I am now questioning that belief. Our old domain contained a popular, topical keyword and our new domain is derived from a term that is topical, but very uncommon. New URLs - our developer has insisted all links were moved to the new domain, but I have a hunch they were not. When conducting a "site search" (i.e. "site:websitename.com"), the new domain returns 7,740 results. Prior to our switch, a site search with the old domain yielded 30,000+ results. 404s - we found and fixed 100-200 404'd links after the domain switch. We still see a few pop-up today and I'm wondering if this is a red flag in Google's eyes. For a little more background too, here are the nitty gritty details with a rough timeline: Pre-October 12, 2015 - registered new domain and designed the new website on Wordpress, while researching a range of articles and resources for a successful site migration (e.g. this and this Moz guide). October 12, 2015 - flipped the switch on the website design, domain, minor content reorganization, and social handles. We announced the change to our audience via an article, newsletter, and social; informed Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) of the new address, 301'd all links from the old to the new domain, and submitted new sitemap in GWT. October 12 - 16, 2015 - traffic is normal, everything seems to be okay. October 17, 2015 - search traffic drops by 54% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand. October 26, 2015 - search traffic rises, so now only down by 30% v.s. the same day of week pre-rebrand. November/December 2015 - re-added numerous elements from the old website such as category, tag, and page pagination and a few sidebar modules that linked to other important pages and tags. Search traffic rises slightly in November (down 27% year-on-year), dips again in December (down 31% year-on-year). January 2016 - today (June 17, 2016) - we published more content on a daily basis and search traffic fluctuates around the 20% versus the same period in 2015. January 2016 - down 23% year-on-year February 2016 - down 17% year-on-year March 2016 - down 20% year-on-year April 2016 - down 21% year-on-year May 2016 - down 21% year-on-year June 2016 (until the 17th) - down 23% year-on-year Thank you all in advance for your time and help, please let me know if you have any questions!

Hi all, Hoping someone can she some light on a fix with ref to wordpress and the search function it uses as Moz is craling some pages which reference the search domain.com/?s=keyword Errors showing up are duplicate pages, descriptions and titles. The search function is not important on this site and I have tried to use a plugin which disables the search page which it does but these errors still show up. Can anyone assist as this is the final piece of the puzzle and then we're down to 0 issues on the site.

I have been looking into making my website for iphone friendly as my analytics are not great for the iphone and I know when I try to navigate around it on an iphone it can be tough. I was told that if I make changes to the layout that it would affect my layout across everything, which I did not want to do. So I have two questions: Is this correct regarding the layout? If so, if you did something like m.waikoloavacationrentals.com which would be the mobile version how would that possibly effect your rankings with regards to the traffic distribution? Any feedback would be appreciated.  Also if anyone has any experience in doing this I would be interested in discussing further.

I am busy structuring URL's for a client and an issue i have come across is as follows: i have a URL that is a long one, we cant remove words in it so the question is which one is better structurally: root/courses/businessmanagementandadministration.aspx or root/courses/business-management-and-administration.aspx ​please help.

Hi all, I have been testing different configurations for my on-site SEO for a while now and I think I am pretty much there. However it is always nice to know what other SEO's think about my keyword density and usage. My site is http://www.tomlondonmagic.com I am curious as to what you think regarding landing page content, whether you need lots or text or little text? I have just removed links in the text as I feel I want to keep as much juice on my landing page as possible. Thanks all!

Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks

I'm in the midst of converting a fairly large website (500+ pages) into WordPress as a content management system. I know that there are two schools of thought regarding site architecture: Those who believe that everything should be categorized, I.E.- website.com/shoes/reebok/running People who believe that the less clicks it takes from the homepage the better. As it stands, our current site has a completely flat architecture, with landing pages being added randomly to the root, I.E.- website.com/affordable-shoes-in-louisville-ky I'm beginning to think that there is a gray area with this. I spoke to someone who says that you should never have a page more than 2 categories/subfolders deep. But if we plan on adding a lot of content doesn't it make sense to set the site up into many categories so we can set a good foundation for adding massive amounts of content. Also, will 301 redirecting to the new structure cause us to lose rankings for certain terms? Any help here is appreciated.

Currently experiencing duplicate pages for all hotel pages. What would be recommendation to fix the pop up pages that uses javascript? | http://www.solmelia.com/hoteles/espana/tenerife/redlevel-at-gran-melia-palacio-de-isora/en/visor.html?pest=fotos http://www.solmelia.com/hoteles/espana/tenerife/redlevel-at-gran-melia-palacio-de-isora/en/visor.html?pest=localizacion http://www.solmelia.com/hoteles/espana/tenerife/redlevel-at-gran-melia-palacio-de-isora/en/visor.html?pest=panorama http://www.solmelia.com/hoteles/espana/tenerife/redlevel-at-gran-melia-palacio-de-isora/en/visor.html?pest=tourVisual |