301 redirects and total loss of rankings

Med2021 · Jan 22, 2021

Hi,

We had a very old HTML website which now has been redesigned residing on the wordpress platform, the old HTML site had about ten main links in the menu and then approx 250 other HTML pages which we used to target various areas that we service. The issue that I found even after carrying out extensive 301 redirects is that the majority of key words that we was ranking page one on google for have completely lost the rankings.

I have confirmed this by opening an account with Ahref SEO tools. Google search console does not show any areas for the domain name and sitemaps are successfully fetched by Google.

I noticed that when we launched the new wordpress site that we had some rouge posts somehow that would direct people to a torrent website but this was swiftly resolved. My questions are:

1. Would the rouge torrent links cause this sudden drop in rankings?
2. As we had over 250 old HTML pages targeting local areas, is it necessary for me to use the same content in each one of those 250 pages into the new design, I would hope not as I wouldn't know how to link them all up without it filling the site with a load of content
3. Could the loss in rankings simply be a temporary drop?

To add I have tested ALL of the old HTML links and they successfully redirect to the new website, which is the same domain.

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

praetserge · Jan 23, 2021

I did a revamp on my site a few months ago... improved pages and moved to wp.
Took about a month for google to re-evaluate the site and now it's ranking much better than before.

D'aconia · Jan 23, 2021

So how exactly you made redirect ? 301 redirect from all old urls to the new page ?
Usually I would recommend to redirect each old version url to the same content on the new url. But if you don't plan to return all those page. You need to redirect them the the most relevant/closest by meaning and keys page on your website... Also there is no need to transfer all 250 pages. I'm sure really valuable of them are few that brought traffic and were set by good keywords (also check backlinks to them).

1. I could be one of the reasons. How fast you resolved it ? If in 1-2 hours. Unlikely this is the case.
2. Already answered that in the first part.
3. The easy answer. It could be a temporarily. But more looks like issues with wrong redirects and structure changes.

Have you lost all keywords positions ? Maybe only keywords from those 250 keys. How main pages is indexing ? The number of keywords for exact page. You can check in ahrefs also the keywords movement history.

danielparker · Oct 14, 2026

When you redesign a site, map every old URL to a new one with 301 redirects. I have seen sites lose half their traffic by skipping this.

AdSyntra · Oct 14, 2026

You don't need to copy all 250 pages word for word, but pages targeting different locations may still be useful if they offer relevant local information.

barin.bennett · Oct 14, 2026

AdSyntra said:
You don't need to copy all 250 pages word for word, but pages targeting different locations may still be useful if they offer relevant local information.

Sure, local pages will do well if each of them offers unique information that adds value to the users in that locality. Just changing the city names on 250 pages will create thin content problems.

StackOverlordd · Oct 14, 2026

Med2021 said:
Hi,

We had a very old HTML website which now has been redesigned residing on the wordpress platform, the old HTML site had about ten main links in the menu and then approx 250 other HTML pages which we used to target various areas that we service. The issue that I found even after carrying out extensive 301 redirects is that the majority of key words that we was ranking page one on google for have completely lost the rankings.

I have confirmed this by opening an account with Ahref SEO tools. Google search console does not show any areas for the domain name and sitemaps are successfully fetched by Google.

I noticed that when we launched the new wordpress site that we had some rouge posts somehow that would direct people to a torrent website but this was swiftly resolved. My questions are:

1. Would the rouge torrent links cause this sudden drop in rankings?
2. As we had over 250 old HTML pages targeting local areas, is it necessary for me to use the same content in each one of those 250 pages into the new design, I would hope not as I wouldn't know how to link them all up without it filling the site with a load of content
3. Could the loss in rankings simply be a temporary drop?

To add I have tested ALL of the old HTML links and they successfully redirect to the new website, which is the same domain.

Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

well, I think one should first try checking the old URLs against their intended URLs. It might happen that though the redirects do not fail to work properly, yet there is no relevant match in the destination URLs. also, one may look in the Google Search Console (GSC) for indexing issues and whether there is anything useful for the old URL in terms of links/traffic.

301 redirects and total loss of rankings

Med2021

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praetserge

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D'aconia

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danielparker

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AdSyntra

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barin.bennett

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StackOverlordd

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