We had 20,000 uniques a day before migrating, but because of this high traffic we had to switch to a new host to handle the traffic. We did so, however our SEO is now killed, we are making nothing from advertising revenue and I have to pay a hefty hosting fee every month. We had a 404 page for many hours during the switchover due to propogation taking ages. This caused Google to drop our rankings a huge amount. I was told however that these would come back very quickly. Its now been a month nearly and we can't get past 5,000 uniques a day with the same content, style and SEO we have always done. The site in question is http://suckmytrend.com - Its fast, minimalistic and Google did like adding our content within minutes, but now we can't compete at all. Our images also used to rank very high. I have tried building more relevant links on high PR sites, and I have tried writing more original, unique content that people like and can share, but nothing is boosting us and we are losing more traffic every single day with the bigger the site gets which is not how it is supposed to be. I know that I need to optimise the content I have and rely on my other writers for a while to add new content, so we can get back on track, but I am running out of ideas. Guest Blogging does not seem very effective, but I will continue to try it. Do you have any ideas for what I can do? We were a massive site, and its just literally died completely, and with 5,000 uniques a day I cannot manage the hosting fees. I need to increase it somehow. Any ideas you have would be great. Thanks
It is happening to every one. My suggestion is to change the content and use the keywords in different way in title.
Thanks for your reply. We were fine before the 404 error page. I understand the Penguin update is causing some issues for most people who use particular tactics, however we just added unique content written by a number of writers originally that was apppreciated by search engines, including Google. Its the downtime from the 404 thats caused the problem, not Penguin. We arent doing anything that would cause a drop due to penguin update. Also, I can't change our content as it is the essense of our site. We are a full proper website, not just a niche subject blog that has content for one particular topic for example. If you check out our site, you will see we are quite established, and almost at 100k Alexa Rank too. http://suckmytrend.com Does anyone else have any ideas. Relating to the Post 404 issues.
I think it's more likely that something has changed during the migration in regard to the settings and how the search engines perceive the site. While it's possible that multiple 404's over a few hours could cause it, it doesn't seem likely. Google is smart enough to know that sites will crash (Facebook and Twitter have done) and would rectify it once the bot revisits. Are you using Wordpress? Have you checked that the new site is set to allow search engines? Some web hosts block them. Have you checked your robots.txt file and .htaccess file to make sure there are no problems there that are blocking Googlebot from crawling your site? What about caching plugins that might be serving old, outdated content? I've had downtime and 404's all over the place before and it didn't affect rankings. Hope you get to the bottom of it, because that's a really nice site.
Did you transfer your site to a dedicated server or a VPS box? Do you have a shared IP address or a static IP? If you have a static IP does the chain end in zero?
Am I right in thinking that everything is absolutely indentical except for the site now resolves to a different IP address? If that is the case your rankings will return in due course, I would expect it to take a few weeks. Just out of interest, it is still hosted in the same country as it originally was?
Did you redirect the old domain to the new one? And I do not mean just a simple redirect to the home page of the new website but making 301s to every transferred page.
Hey guys, thanks for your replies. I switched hosts to WP Engine, and they do all the caching and speed so thats all fine and static content is stored in a CDN which is actually the issue I believe. The images were our big traffic gainers, and the image URL's changed, obviously because they switched to the CDN as static content. Image URLs are now like this: http://suckmytrend.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/miley_cyrus_haircut-141x88.jpg Of course they load super fast and it works great, but its also changed the address, as it used to be just suckmytrend.com/wp-content/uploads of course. So, as the last poster said, its probably too late now, but the redirects 301 may have been needed for the images. The URLs for posts etc are the same, but any static content is not. The site is hosted in the same country as before. Also, is the site fast for you? I am paying a lot, and I hope its nice and fast all around the world. Its been more than a few weeks now, and its not rectified automatically sadly. What do you suggest I do? Should I wait for the images to be reindexed by Google, or should I set up this 301 redirect from the images on the old URL. I could do a 301 redirect that changes any http://suckmytrend.com/wp-content/uploads to http://suckmytrend.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads, right?
Yeah, I'd do a redirect rule in .htaccess for the image folder and it should hopefully right itself within a few weeks. Might not get the full juice back, but it definitely can't hurt.
Hello, So basically you just migrated from host to host, which only affected your IP address, right? Since you didn't change the domain, it should have been fine. I did this so many times. That mere host swap shouldn't have influenced your site. Wasn't there a new Google update meanwhile? From what I understand, there was a downtime for a while with 404 errors. Hmm, sounds a bits strange, but I would check if there are any more 404 errors, broken links, anything like that...