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I have recently moved my old site (built with DreamWeaver) to a new one (with new design and using WordPress). It was done last August, 1st and as the URLs with WP changed completely, I had to do redirects 301 with my htaccess file to all my old URLs.

It occurs now that my new site results worse than the old one (bounce rate, time on site, sales conversion, traffic, etc) and I am considering seriously move back to the old pages.

My question are:

  1. how should I handle the redirects in these case? Should I now keep the redirects already done (old to new URLs) and now create also a new redirects from the new one to the old uURLsls?
  2. How is the best way to handle it in order to avoid losing traffic with search engines?
  3. Does anybody have already faced this situation and move back to the old URLs? if yes, what were the consequences related to your SEO and positioning in search engines ?Did you recovered the old search positioning?
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To make this easier to explain I will refer to the old site that you want to switch back to as site 1 and the current site that you want to move away from as site 2

1) how should I handle the redirects in these case? Should I now keep the redirects already done (old to new urls) and now create also a new redirects from the new one to the old urls?

If you do as you say n your second question you will create an infinite loop. Do 301 redirects from the site 2's URLs to site 1's URLs. This is necessary since site 2's URLs are what Google is showing in their search results. You will want to remove the redirects you currently have set up since those pages will be live again.

2) How is the best way to handle it in order to avoid losing traffic with search engines?

Just do 301 redirects as I have mentioned above. It probably won't hurt to also create an XML sitemap (and HTML sitemap) as well to make sure the new pages are all found properly.

3) Does anybody have already faced this situation and move back to the old urls? if yes, what were the consequences related to your SEO and positioning in search engines ? Did you recovered the old search positioning?

I have never done this but have spoken to others who have. Apparently their rankings did eventually return to previous levels. So if site 2 is performing poorly this probably is not a bad strategy to take.

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  • Many, many thanks, John. Really useful!! I do appreciate if someone else could share his/her experience related to have applied this strategy, i mean, go back to the old site and its impact in SEO. It is a critical situation and even though the new results are terrible, I do not want to move forward with this change without get more opinions/experiences related to the seo results. I am afraid to make the current situation even worse.
    – Adriana
    Aug 26, 2011 at 15:27

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