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Migrated to new domain, 70% drop in traffic

by squeebo
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
11 days ago I moved my Wordpress site from a subdomain to its own new domain with its own branding. It had previously fallen under the branding of the main domain.

There has been a drop in Google search traffic each day since the move. On day 10-11 the traffic appears to have leveled off at 70% below where I was before. I'm concerned about whether this is long term.

I have done the following relevant to SEO so far:
  1. Purchased the new domain 3 weeks prior to the move. It was never used in the past.
  2. Changed my old htaccess to a wildcard 301 redirect for all pages. They are redirecting fine.
  3. Cleaned my new site of all references to the old domain and old name
  4. Updated all my other website links to point to the new site
  5. Registered new social media profiles for the new site, worked on building them
  6. Created a new Google Analytics property. Is recording traffic fine.
  7. Created Search Console site, submitted change of address from old subdomain to new site, submitted sitemap and target country. Search Console shows no significant issues.
  8. Requested backlink updates from authoritative sites

Anything I'm missing?

Any idea how long I may be in the dumps? Could this be a permanent demotion from moving away from the trusted domain?
#70% #domain #drop #migrated #traffic
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  • Profile picture of the author Janice Sperry
    Good job! Maybe someone else will see some glaring thing you missed but I don't. Looks to me like you took all the right steps.

    I have seen big changes like that affect rankings and traffic anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

    It might not be your whole site overall. There might be a few keywords that got a lot of clicks that have dropped in ranking. There might be a few pages/posts that were getting a lot of traffic that have gone down to almost zero. Update those posts with some new content even just a few sentences, a new image, a new H2 subheading, etc. Then "Fetch" it through your Google Search Console. Get a new quality backlink or two to the post(s).

    The idea is not to just wait on Google but to be proactive.
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    • Profile picture of the author squeebo
      It's definitely the site as a whole. All the top pages dropped in views, presumably while Google gradually deindexed the old site over several days and replaced it with the new one that for whatever reason it isn't ranking as high.
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