Website redesign without redirects - huge break-in in impressions and ranking, why?
Hi,
we've done a website redesign in October 2022 and have changed the complete structure of our website, we're a real estate agency. Most of our old pages do not have any resembling new page, and we also changed some of our property search interface to eliminate categories we weren't using. Additionally, there's been a partial change of domain, the property search now is located on a subdomain and the main page is located on the main domain.
I did not set up redirects for two reasons, 1 is that most of the pages of the main content do not have really well meeting new pages, so matching was not making much sense and I also wanted the old pages to be eliminated from the Google index. Reason 2 is that due to the categories on the property search, there were thousands of page combinations and we were very, very short on time. So I thought, we'd launch new, the Google algorithm will take out most of our pages from ranking and clean it up, but at the same time will index the new pages which have much better on-page SEO than the old ones.
What happened is that since about 2 months, the NOT indexed pages have dropped from 11.500 to 3.900, and the indexed pages have dropped from 346 to 17, which is the actual number of main content pages we have now. Obviously traffic has broken in tremendously. I knew it was going to take some times, but it's been 8 months now, and things are not starting to look up. What can I do to speed up our page ranking?
All the obvious on-page things are done (meta data, internal linking, alt texts on photos, all hand-written texts with keywords, titles with keywords, ...). But before, when you searched for "real estate agency + city" you could find us, and now, we're not appearing until scrolling very far down and then it's only the subdomain of the property search that appears, not our main page. Indexing is allowed in WordPress and YoastSEO is signaling that all is OK, SiteHealth Check is coming back OK.
Backlinks. The key to getting your website to rank high again are backlinks. Technical SEO is important, but It won't increase your ranking near as much as backlinks. Things like meta descriptions and title tags will really only influence your CTR.
So, create high quality content for your blog, build relationships with bloggers in your industry and take a stab at getting backlinks
@matt_mirecki Can you make sense of these data? It's like suddenly, everything dropped, I don't even have a line anymore, just dots on the positions - what does that mean? The newly indicated pages apparently rank much higher, but there's barely any indexing, and the website changes have been in October, not sure why there is this huge drop in impressions and rankings now in February?
Thanks in advance for any help, I really don't know what to do with this.
I would suggest that any removed indexed page should have a 301 redirect. If there's no proper page to link to, link to the homepage.
I think you have already looked at everything on your site that could cause such a drop. Is your site growing now? Are there any changes in the indicators?
