Family small business having SEO troubles

What's been the total time frame since launching of the new domain?

Completely agree with what @MikeFriedman said.

Yep. He didn't need the local vicinity in there to localize the site. And sounds like original domain was already well branded in the time it was up.

Sounding like the old site is completely wiped out and just redirecting - which if that is the case any old web pages will just be gone. Hope it's still in tact somewhere.

First breath and smile

Provided they have not deleted the old site no permanent damage

Second beware taking forum advice. the guys above might be right or incredibly wrong. Frankly I don;t know how they are coming to the conclusions they are drawing based on what you provided.

first big question - how much traffic was the old site bringing in? This is HUGE issue that I haven;t seen anyone ask. You did say this but its unclear if you meant any products or just one

so it would help to know because when you wrote "I.e the same type of thing you would type in to google to find stores like us in the area."

It seems to suggest its something different than what you used to rank for

Second big question - since the old site was very basic and not optimized did the redesign refocus the content of the site specific to products you offer. Before anyone can say building a new site is moronic those two key questions have to be provided. depending on the niche even for branding reasons a new name MIGHT be in order. Did the company just pick the domain themselves or was there a discussion on what product you wanted to highlight or target?


Anyway PLEASE do not toast a good relationship based on what a few online forum members who don't know your niche or what the details are have to say.They just might be right but coming to conclusions without getting all the data is never the right way of going at things.

Thats because when you redirect one domain to another no crawler visits the old site. The crawler is sent to the new site so from Google's view the site IS gone. its there to you but its invisible to the crawler that indexes the site. Its like you had two houses for a photographer to take pictures of to put into an ad. If the photographer is sent immediately to the second house anytime he goes to the first the pictures will all be of the second house only.

Are you a bot, or perhaps stoned off your ass? How does this relate to this thread?

Kind of, but at this point it's not as simple as that. If you've got a new site that works reasonably well I would do everything I can to not bring the old one back. I'd have the new site to use the old domain. If your old and new site have some of the same content you should only run one of them. Otherwise you'd end up competing with yourself, and that doesn't make much sense.

If you want to use the new domain, make sure every important URL from the old site redirects to the corresponding page on the new site. And make sure it's a proper 301 redirect.

Ask them why they're doing it. If it's branding or something like that, I might give them a pass, but branding-related things are ultimately your responsibility. They can't hijack your site just because of their own random reasons for doing things in a certain way. If they're giving you a speech about the new domain affecting SEO you can pretty much conclude that they're talking bollocks, and that they don't know SEO from their bunghole.

Domain names do not rank pages. Keywords in domain names are a minor ranking signal at best.

If there's permanent damage from this debacle it's already happened. Take a deep breath, and move forward. However, you still have the old domain that did well, and probably most of the backlinks that were pointing to it. Just make sure that this domain redirects to your new site in a way that brings you the link juice.

If I didn't yet make it abundantly clear: your old domain name is probably more important as an asset than your old and new website combined.

The original site was text with some royalty free pictures. The new site has original trade dress and branding, new logos and much cleaner layout and design. Old site was about a dozen pages and the new one is maybe 5 right now.

Based on that, it sounds like there really was zero benefit in moving to a new domain and really on negatives.

Like I said, if you wanted to develop a second site on the new domain to capture more traffic, that is a perfectly viable marketing strategy.

Branding and a newer site design is nice, but it really sounds like it should have all been done on the original domain. Unless there was some really bad press about that domain, from what you are saying there was no reason to abandon it.

Now there could be a 301-redirect done from the individual pages of the old site to the corresponding pages on the new site, and that should help to recover most, if not all, of the rankings.

Again though, I see no reason for leaving the old domain.

I would have built the new design on that domain, not on a new one.

This is pretty much what I thought you had said. In a way you confirmed my rather rude but tentative assessment of the SEO skills of your web design company.

The domain change has nothing to do with SEO. However, the links pointing at your existing domain are a major ranking factor for you. If you have solid backlinks that is, and I get the feeling that it's probably the case since you've been in the business for more than a decade.

Can you verify if they redirected individual pages, and if the answer is yes what kind of redirect did they use?

It should be the so-called 301 redirect. This is what you'd need to do in a case where the domain changes. If they did this the problem with rankings might be somewhere else. Redirects are said to lose a bit of your "Google juice", but they're still the best option if there's a change of domain.

I'd also just use the new site and old domain, but if you're moving forward make sure that the redirect was properly done.

Note: make sure that the old domain stays in your hands, and stays redirected to the new domain (if that's what you end up doing). Do not lose that domain.

If you're talking about Alexa that's a site you should just ignore. The data is based on their browser toolbar and copious amounts of interpolation. In many cases their guess is not even in the ballpark.


Just a random thought: make sure you've got full control of your site in case that you need it. This is potentially a problematic situation because of your relationship to these people. If you know they're probably not good at something that's not their core business - well, that's not a reason to sever your ties. But see that you've got full admin account to the site, and FTP access as well.

Based on that more complete picture then I would agree the new domain name was not necessary (in terms of SEO). He probably thought including the town name with the product would give you some extra benefit but it doesn't do very much and is a negative considering. Still I would cut the friend some slack. If I am reading you right it sounds like he was mainly contracted to redesign the site not primarily for SEO. If he really has brought the site into the modern era including making the site responsive for mobile and tablets it is STILL a positive move (even for SEO on mobile devices).

Plus the fact that he did not destroy the old site means its all very likely temporary. He should be able to just move the new site over to the old domain again - only as mike and others have suggested making sure urls are setup as before.

I still don't think he was being stupid.It seems the design and the modernizing of your site was the primary thing he was contracted for. in time its even possible the new site would outrank where the old one did or for more terms (if its a brand new domain google holds it as less authoritative for a few months) but redirecting the old one made the site invisible to google.

As long as he can correct that i personally wouldn't hold him in lower esteem as a friend or designer. He probably had technical reasons whey he preferred to just start out with a new site or he wants to brand you as the defacto supplier for your area with that name. We can't all know everything about everything

No "family small business" should even give
a rat's behind about having SEO troubles.

Why? Because if SEO and/or google was the reason
for your "family small business" to succeed, then
you really had no real "family small business"
to begin with.

Now if a major highway is now by-passing your
business, that would be a major problem.

Just saw an ad on TV for McDonald's.

Have no clue why they advertise. I mean
seriously, shouldn't they have the money
for SEO?

Never knew people had such problems with
opioid constipation....until I saw an ad
during the Super Bowl.

Sometimes I think real small business
owners are constipated with the
stools of SEO.

I find it equally frustrating that people
with a business rely on a business(google)
that makes it their main business to sell ad space.

Paul

Ok, will do. Does the actions they are taking now sound right?