5 replies to this topic

[WaldenPond]

I just designed a new site for a local company and read and followed Jill's great article "3 SEO Traps to Avoid During Your Redesign"

Company wanted to change their domain name. Thus 301 redirects for the main pages to go to relevant new pages were setup. Minor changes were made to content and title tags were beefed up.

However, the site is ranking poorly for long tail key word searches that should put it on the first page, e.g. "oil pan manufacturer guilford ct".

Their google local listing as well as their facebook business page appears on the first page, however, the website appears on the middle of page two.

Is it the google aging delay for the NEW domain causing the problem ?. Domain is less than 4 months old.

[Michael Martinez]

If you're counting on the link value passing through the 301-redirects, there is a lag time (could be up to 2 months) before that is fully transferred over. It's always a good idea to get as many of the old links updated as possible. Don't just rely on 301-redirects. Google deducts a small amount of PageRank from 301-redirects.

[Jill]

Is it the google aging delay for the NEW domain causing the problem ?

No, there's no such thing anymore.

If you're counting on the link value passing through the 301-redirects, there is a lag time (could be up to 2 months) before that is fully transferred over.

I disagree. It shouldn't be a problem, and should happen immediately.

But if they changed the site architecture, then all bets are off.

@WaldenPond did you also change the address via your Google Webmaster Tools account. That's critical.

[Michael Martinez]

The transfer of value through 301-redirects has NOT happened immediately for a number of sites I have observed over the past year (some were personal sites -- others I cannot really talk about).

The only pattern I can see in the lag times appears to be related to how well-linked the redirected page is. Clearly, a root page should transfer value quickly, but a leaf page that is only crawled infrequently may not pass value for weeks.

The lag times can pile up and sites with thousands or more pages just seem to take a really long time to move all the PageRank around.

As I have noted in many past discussions, we can't really track and measure the flow of PageRank but we can see its effects in the SERPs. So new sites just take a while to recapture all that long tail power the old sites had. The larger the site, the longer it takes -- unless you point new links (or repoint old links) to the new site.

Sometimes I have been fortunate enough to be able to redirect a lot of links quickly. With one of my personal sites, which I moved twice, I could not implement the redirects on the second hop. Hence, the new site is now accruing PageRank on its own. I was able to repoint one older link to the new site.

So the process went like this:

Old Site Alpha redirected to New Site Beta -- PageRank passed in about 30 days for all pages (my best guestimate)
New Site Beta taken down, replaced by New Site Gamma -- No PageRank redirect possible
Link placed on Old Site Alpha pointing to New Site Gamma -- Some PageRank seems to have been transferred

New site GAMMA is fully indexed. It's just not getting the traffic that the original site ALPHA used to get. It's got so little value it will probably take 1-2 years to replace all the lost PageRank (assuming it attracts links at a pace similar to the original site).

[WaldenPond]

Thanks Jill.

>>But if they changed the site architecture, then all bets are off.
Can you please explain. Old site was flat HTML new site is in WordPress. However, individual 301 per each page was setup

>>@WaldenPond did you also change the address via your Google Webmaster Tools account. That's critical.
Just made the change ;-(. Do I need to resubmit in 180 days ?

[Jill]

It's not so much what the URL shows but how you're linking to each page within your navigation. If you change that, you change the amount of internal link pop various pages receive. That in turn can effect whether it (any given page) shows up in google for its relevant phrases.