Dropped Ranking Due to URL Change

[pooja121]

Dear All,

I have a website having domain age of 4 months. When I started SEO for certain keywords it began to show results with improved ranking. In the meanwhile we redesigned the website and changed the URLs of few pages. Now ranking is dropped and my website is nowhere for those certain keywords and its showing lots of "Not Found Error" in Google Webmasters Tools.

Can anyone suggest how to overcome from this and could regain the previous ranking again.

Thanks in advance.

 

[asap1]

Im no expert in this but if you changed the URL of the page you pretty much have a brand new page with 0 links

You would have to redirect the old url to the new one.

Again im not 100% sure about this but I think thats how it works

 

[pooja121]

Thanks for your suggestion.
I'm making links for new pages now but the old pages have been indexed by Google earlier and now its showing not found error as those pages do not exist now and also its showing error in Google Webmaster Tools.

 

[asap1]

Thanks for your suggestion.
I'm making links for new pages now but the old pages have been indexed by Google earlier and now its showing not found error as those pages do not exist now and also its showing error in Google Webmaster Tools.

I dont know why that is happening maybe someone else will help you with that.

But you should redirect the old url to the new one I believe that will transfer the link juice to your new URL

Good Luck

 

[RuthSam]

You would need to either do a 301 redirect to the old links or simple just start over from scratch. Most time you can get some plugin that let you redirect broken links to working..

 

[upstarter]

If you still know those urls that were ranking before you made the redesign, you should redirect it to the new urls. If you're on Wordpress, you can use the Redirection plugin for that. If you do not redirect, those rankings will be lost.

 

[pooja121]

Thanks so much everyone for your assistance

 

[bartosimpsonio]

The number 1 rule in SEO : never change your URLs

Yeah, you'll take a hit for a few weeks/months.

 

[pooja121]

The number 1 rule in SEO : never change your URLs

Yeah, you'll take a hit for a few weeks/months.

Thanks for your feedback!

 

[Nivlak]

These stories make me sweat a little when I have to access my domain registrar, even if I'm just changing DNS settings. I always think that I'll make a wrong click somewhere and destroy my SEO.

Keep us posted and good luck

 

[aukint]

you have to redirect the old URL's to new one using htaccess / php script or whatever script you are using. It might help you to gain ranking!

 

[Geron1m0]

You make 301 redirects from old URLs to new one, if you use wordpress there are many plagins to do it easy if no use htaccess fire. Anyway I changes URLs on three projects already. 1 never felt anything we only added categories, the other started to redirect to another, traffic dropped totally, but in two weeks everything was back and even better.
Just don't forget to redirect, because if no, you loose all links you had before and page authority.

 

[pooja121]

Thanks everyone for your support and advice

 

[todman2112]

It was to young to see good ranks. So don't worry. Keep up the natural SEO work and you will recover it.