Web Page Migration and Traffic Trends

People often ask me to explain what will happen to their web traffic when they migrate a site. More to the point, clients sometimes want or need to migrate content from one domain to another. This can be because they are amalgamating two web sites, consolidating a network of sites, or cleaning up multiple domain issues. We’ve advised a number of clients through this process. We always warn them that done right, there will be a significant drop in Google traffic, but that drop will turn around quickly, and that over a three to four month period, the site will recover completely. Done wrong, and it can last a very long time.

So why would you take such a hit? Sometimes you just need to. When we updated our site back in late February, early March, we decided to migrate this blog from a subdomain (blog.metamend.com) to its present location as an integrated part of the main site. I can’t remember why we didn’t set it up this way to start, but the redesign offered the perfect opportunity to make the necessary update. Here’s what happened to the traffic:

Referring Search Engine

So there you have it! A visual representation of what should happen to a domain when you migrate it from one location to another. We track the pages within the blog separately from the rest of the site, so it was easy to show.

Basically, within a week of the migration (end February, beginning March), Google had noted the 301 redirects, but was monitoring the change. every post url was 301′ed from blog.metamend.com to metamend.com/blog. The result was plummeting search engine traffic. Within a week, new posts were being properly referred traffic, but older posts (the ones most affected by the migration), were not getting their normal traffic from Google. Yahoo, MSN and others reacted almost immediated. That said, they don’t account for much of the traffic.

Two and a half months out, and percentage of traffic is back where it was pre-migration.

If you are planning a site migration, or a major site update where pages will be moved, or will disappear. Do it right, and the impact will be short. Also, don’t do it for a couple of months prior to your peak selling season.