SEO Horror Story #8
The rebranding that went horribly wrong
We had 3000 pages of content that, despite our complete lack of attention to SEO details, had managed to rank well and drive about 120,000 pageviews per month from search. Unfortunately we didn’t realize how much traffic we were getting from search until after we’d changed every URL during a rebranding project. 40% of our search traffic evaporated over night. We lost another 20% slowly, painfully, over the next three months. That section of our website bottomed out with roughly 1/3 as much search traffic as before.
We had done our homework — the new URLs were, technically speaking, far superior to the old ones. The filenames were more descriptive. Directory names used good keywords. Page titles were improved across the board. META descriptions were hand-crafted by contract writers. And yes, the old URLs 301′d to the new. We followed every best-practice we could find documentation for.
Except for one. Not everybody knew about this one. Not until months later. And even then, it smacked of suspicion more than anything else. Although in hindsight, it was perfectly clear.
What was the last rule about changing URLs, the one rule we didn’t follow?
Don’t change them all at once!
It took over six months for our search traffic to recover.
