Working w/ a website that's been around for 10 years. Site is a publishing site that supports a print publication targeting a national AND local audience (there are local issues of this publication.) The site has moderate traffic (280,000 visits a month w/ 1.5 million page views.) Primary revenue sources are from ads (so the page views are pretty important.) Most of our content is listings for local advertisers, although we do have content and articles.
Site was in poor shape architecturally and not well optimized. Development team went back to basics... redesigned the site with a new architecture. We reorganized the data into a logical hierarchy (categories and subcategories). We optimized URL structure, title tags, header tags. We put links to more popular content on the site home page and tried to sculpt our internal linking for both users and for search. We managed 301's from old URL's to new URL's very carefully. We checked reports daily for 404's and corrected those as soon as possible when they were found. We beta tested everything as much as possible (although we shoulda/coulda done more.)
I feel like this was all the right thing to do. The one thing that did come out of this were the creations of thousands of new pages. These were mostly other ways of organizing data and advertisers. Rather than just navigating from home page > category > sub-category > vendor listing, we also provided ways for the user to search by a zip code (zip code > category > sub-category > vendor listing) and by city (city > category > sub-category > vendor listing). Listings aren't duplicated... rather they reside in one place - we just created different ways of getting to that data based on user preference.
We relaunched on July 7th at midnight. Unfortunately, IT had decided to change co-location facilities on the 1st. Once the new stuff hit the site, performance shot to hell. Timeouts and huge load times. After about a week and a half, the developers had fixed a lot of problems (by caching data on some pages so the database wasn't being hit so hard). Performance has been really good for the last week or 2.
Since the launch, our visits have dropped by about 30% and page views by 40%. Page views/visit have dropped by about 2 pages per visit. Leads are down about 50%. Referrals from search have dropped by about half of what it was before (Google was sending about 8,000 visitors to our site each day, now it ranges from 5,000 to 6,000.)
I checked the number of pages indexed by Google, and it has slowly gone up since the launch. I've udpated our XML sitemap and I check some search terms that we generally get traffic from and those positions, which HAD fallen a few days after the launch, have us back to where we were previously. So that seems good. But referrals from search are still way down.
I keep looking for a ray of light - some little something that will at least assure the President and CEO that things WILL get better. So far, other than the key terms that we've tracked in the past, there seems to be nothing much. Referrals and leads are still down.
We're looking at usability and navigation, and there's some streamlining that needs to be done, but nothing that I can see that is a huge change than before the launch.
Is it just going to take time? How much time? Did I screw up royally by allowing so many pages to be pushed out at one time? Am I obsessing over nothing or worrying too much? The higher up's are antsy and I've tried to manage expectations as best as I can, but I must admit, I'm getting a little worried myself.
