Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have a website mysite.com, which had a subdomain which was very popular in Google: abc.mysite.com.
Due to a site redesign we had to consolidate the domains and the content of abc.mysite.com/* now started appearing in mysite.com/abc/*.
After this change I am seeing sharp decline in SEO traffic. I have proper 301 redirects in place, but still the SEO is degrading by day.
Any insights on why this may be happening?
The best scenario for SEO is not to change URLs with a redesign.
Changing your url structure will definitely have quite an impact on your rankings because SEO traffic changes when URLs Change.
However, it takes time for the search engine to understand the new site structure to determine what is on the new version of the site.
All the intricate relationships between the pages of the site have been restructured, and this may take weeks or even months for the search engine to understand. In the meantime, they may feel a need to devalue your site somewhat.
Implementing 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages will help with this problem, but it doesn't eliminate it entirely.
301 redirects just minimize URL change impact on SEO, but 301 redirects recover organic search performance after a short period of time.
You have to wait for your site re-indexing. It will take sometime.
It is normal situation. If you llok at this, you will reveal, that subdomain is like an independent site for Google, while folder belongs to the same site. It was a huge change for Google and he has reduced the traffic. If all your page-to-page 301 redirects are right, Google will restore your site after a full reindexing. It may take a few weeks.
