301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.

Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated

This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?!

I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone.

I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!?

Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/

Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/

If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?

Hi Dirk

My opinion somewhat varies. They have been requesting webmasters unblock css, js and images for some time now so they can evaluate the layout and design with their algo. Most of the elements I mentioned can be done algorithmically. The poor font color, the lact of padding / margins, the lack of social buttons, poor text readability because of no line breaks.

I'm wary of user engagement metrics, especially as being reported 3rd hand.

Side-note - as we all know, they do have a "mobile-friendly" UX test, which evaluates basically the same types of things for mobile - there's no reason they can't for desktop but just haven't told us.

Dan,

I do agree with you that design is a ranking factor - but it can only be indirect. Google is unable to judge if the quality of the design is good or bad. The only way it can judge this is by analysing the behaviour of the visitors on the site. Nechemia did indicate however that after migration user engagement improved rather than decreased.

Dirk

Hi There

I think the issue is the design. Believe it or not, this is likely a ranking factor. I've seen the opposite - a site will get a new design and rankings will improve.

I think in your case, being totally honest - the old design was much better. Here's some issues I see with the new design that make it hard for me as a user to enjoy using the site.

The top menu text (home, about us...) blends almost complete in with the background - you can barely read it (at least I can barely read it)
You breadcrumbs sit way off to the left --> http://screencast.com/t/rsGKJ8cZc -- they are not within a container or anything, which makes it look odd.
A shotcode is showing up in the content --> http://screencast.com/t/AoaexaPcL -- [get_laughing_image]
The old site links out to facebook, twitter, RSS etc much more prominently - on the new site it's hard to find those buttons at all.
So many of the jokes, especially with dialog, don't even have line breaks - it makes it incredibly difficult to read --> http://screencast.com/t/7udxq536

I'm sure we could find more, but the point is that I think the old design was better.

Have you tried the old design on the new domain?

Just to mention, the site: searches are very artificial and the rankings for those searches does not have much meaning or hold any clues about how Google views the site.

That's so nice of you to ask

Unfortunately no! I even took out the whole front page (and just made it into the latest posts) which had almost all of the customizations, and still nothing doing. My traffic now is down to 1560 a day (from around 13,000) and only 117 of them are from google.

I just can't imagine what the issue can possibly be. I mean if the issue doesn't have to do with 301 (because it went down when I changed to this design even when it was still under greatcleanjokes.com) and it doesn't have to do with the customizations of the front page (because that's gone) what can the issue possibly be??!

Any ideas?

Hi Nechemia! Did any of the suggestions resolve your issue? We'd love an update, thanks!

Christy

ok I think I will. Maybe I'll just wait a day to see if any of the suggestions worked.

Thanks again!

Summarising (this thread is becoming extremely long):

redirects seem to be implement as they should
user engagement seems to be improved after migration

Performance seems to be & has been an issue - with unresponsive scripts & pages which are loading quite slow. Quality of HTML is (was) quite lousy.

I would stick to my original advice - and ask an HTML / CSS guru to have a look at your code, clean it & implement some of the performance improvements that were already mentioned before (to reduce the time to first byte). One thing you could already correct in the code is the location of an embedded javascript - it should be in the body or head - currently one script is outside the HTML tag.

Good luck

Dirk

Yes the page views did increase a bit.

Small update - if I compare the results of both old & new site - the order of the results seems identical (don't know if the order of the results was different before migration)

Hi,

I did a site:www.greatcleanjokes.com/ and sampled a few of the url's - all of them seem to redirect to the appropriate page on the new site. To be sure - I tested a few of them with web-sniffer.org, and it returned a proper 301 status. The cached version of the results is also showing the version of the new site.

A site:chokeonajoke.com returned slightly more results (probably new content you added) - so on first sight not really an issue

To be honest - I don't think the problem is related to the redirect. You could double check - download the 1000 most popular pages from the old site & crawl these using Screaming Frog to see if the redirects are ok (you can do this in the free version - no need to buy the licence if you use list mode).

Did the number of pageviews/visit decrease or increase after migration. Longer time on page is normally a good sign, could also indicate however that people struggle to find the info they are looking for (which I doubt is the case on your site)

rgds,

Dirk

Thanks again for your response!

In google analytics the new site was doing better, ie. more time per page,

I still think it's weird that when you search for site:chokeonajoke.com not one subcategory shows up until page 35, just a couple of main categories show up, but mostly what shows up is post pages. Why would the post pages out rank the subcategory pages?

I'm also wondering if it is ok to use hostmonster's dashboard to redirect or if I should be doing it myself using .htacess file. The only reason I'm asking is because no search engine seems to be picking up on the 301

I would highly recommend this guide if you are looking to speed up your site (I note it is wordpress):

https://www.besthostnews.com/guide-to-w3-total-cache-settings-with-cloudflare/

Nechemia,

The problem was not a 404, but a technical issue coming from your plugins, css, etc. Now, after checking again things seem working much better. As Dirk said, you only have to wait for rankings coming back but its not necessary to go back to the old page.... Make sure you clean and optimize your code in order to have your rankings back sooner.

And please, remember to click on "I like this" if you are happy with all our answers and help, and please select an answer like the Good Answer to close this Q&A.

Regards,

Luis

If performance decreased dramatically between the old & the new site it can have a very strong impact on search results. You're in a competitive area, and most of the jokes published on your site also exist on other sites, so the content is not really unique. It's difficult to say post-launch if it is the only reason why your site dropped. I assume you redirected all the old pages to the new one & did a change of domain in WMT?

Did you see changes in google analytics (like increased bounce rate, lower time on page, ...) the moment you changed the site?

Page speed improved - but Time to first byte is still quite high. You might want to check out this article on how to optimise your WP site: http://www.webpagetest.org/forums/showthread.php?tid=13520

rgds,

Dirk

Thanks Luis,

DO you think that was a problem because of the 404? Or are you basing it on something else?

Thank you so much for your detailed answer.

I really appreciate you taking the time to look at it.

I deleted quite a few plugins and the speed definitely picked up quite a bit.

You are right that there is a lot of java script and css (I guess that's what happens when u hire a foreigner from odesk

Although it's hard to believe that that will completely knock me off the serps

I guess I'll wait a few days and see if picking up the speed makes a difference.

Thanks again!

Of course! But the problem is that I was even unable to load the page 1 of one category. Now surprisingly I am able to load them normally, and the good point is I think I found the problem. You have a plugin called "all sub categories" that you should check (maybe upgrade it, or remove it and reinstall it) since I think is causing all your issues.

Let's be clear. If your pages are slow, or have some technical issues.... this affect your rankings, and of course your traffic (SEO is balance of a well-structured site, good content, social, user experience and linkbuilding....you need all of these things working well to avoid losing your rankings

This is now no more a SEO problem, but a Wordpress plugin problem.

Hope to have been helpful !!!

Luis

Well yeah every category has a few pages so pages 2, 3 ect. are all noindexed but that shouldn't effect traffic to the 1st page in the category.

The crawler is telling me that you have 122 pages blocked. Please check this:

Meta robots tag (same thing...), but this time not from your wordpress admin panel. Now you go to a category page (whichever), and check the source code and copy-paste it here.
Check your .htaccess file too in order to see if there's any blocking point out there (you can copy-paste it here too).

A question....are you able to load your category pages? I mean, if you go here http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/ everything is OK??? Because I really can't access it!

List of the pages blocked for crawlers :

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/cute-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/relationship-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/corny-jokes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/short-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/marriage-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/best-joke-contest/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/work-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/knock-knock-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/10/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/pet-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/funny-sayings/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/husband-wife-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/little-johnny-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/drunk-humor/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/witty-one-liners/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/religious-humor/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/clever-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/men-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-memes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/lawyer-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/old-people-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/wife-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/funny-quotes/cute-quotes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/10/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/relationship-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-puns/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-videos/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-stories/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/old-people-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/cheesy-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/disses/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/text-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/food-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/death-humor/death-joke/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/marriage-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-videos/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/6/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/10/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/laffy-taffy-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/best-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/drunk-humor/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/women-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/corny-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/short-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/funny-thoughts/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/long-jokes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/disses/funny-insults/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/pet-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/witty-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/work-humor/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/disses/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/blonde-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/latest-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/6/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/men-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/11/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/one-liners/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/doctor-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/senior-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/husband-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/page/13/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/cute-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/doctor-humor/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-memes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/sms-jokes/one-liners/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/kids-jokes/corny-jokes/page/3/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/marriage-humor/page/8/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/page/4/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/10/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/people-jokes/women-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-memes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/school-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-riddles/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/fun-stuff/funny-cartoons/page/5/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/other-joke-types/page/16/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/drunk-humor/drunk-jokes/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/death-humor/page/2/

http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/life-jokes/page/9/

Good try

But no I just checked and the box is unchecked.

Any other ideas?

Hello Nechemia,

Please, do the following:

Login at your wordpress
Left menu > SEO > Titles & Metas > Taxonomies
Please check the status of the Meta Robots for categories.

Luis

Hey there

You're going to get a lot of self promotion potentially here from members.

I recommend looking at Moz's recommended list here: http://moz.com/community/recommended

Hello Nechemia,

I was checking at your sitemaps. I couldn't enter any category page in your site, but I had no problem with posts & pages.

I think the source of all your problems is right there at the categories level (no SEO problem!), I'm crawling your site right now. I will come up with the results in 20 minutes with some more info, but yeah probably you have a problem at your wordpress settings.

Hope this helps!

Luis

Hi,

There seem to be some technical issues with your site:

site speed - even though the webpagetest result is not that bad - every page I visited on your site seemed to load very slow (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150423_8J_1E1E/). Screaming Frog indicate that 30% of your pages needs more than 3 sec's to load (and Screaming Frog is normally very soft in judging site speed)
Google insights for speed: again the score is not great but not really bad either - but if you see the number of blocking .js & .css files it's a bit terrifying (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fchokeonajoke.com%2Fjokes%2Fbest-jokes%2Fgood-jokes%2F&tab=mobile)
most pages call a css file that doesn't exist: http://chokeonajoke.com/wp-content/plugins/all-sub-categories/catstyle.css?ver=4.1.2
on some pages example http://chokeonajoke.com/jokes/best-jokes/good-jokes/ (same for /jokes/death-humor) I was unable to load them in Chrome - in Firefox I got the message: non-responsive script: Script: http://chokeonajoke.com/wp-con…/jquery-2.1.3.min.js?ver=2.1.3:2. Checking w3c validator indicates line 1627, Column 8: Stray start tag script. (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fchokeonajoke.com%2Fjokes%2Fdeath-humor%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0)
6% of your content is >10 clicks from the homepage

If I were you I'd hire a good css/html/js programmer & ask him to clean your code. For a rather simple site you seem to use an awful lot of javascript. Cleaning the code & working on performance will probably solve most of the problems. It can take sometime however before you regain your initial search traffic.

rgds,

Dirk

Thanks for responding. 1. Yes I did submit a sitemap 2. The reason I went back and forth is because the traffic kept going down, so I switched back before it would cause long term damage. That wasn't the cause of the issue, that was in response to the issue, you understand?

Do you have anyone who you would recommend that I hire to look at it?

Hi there

Do you update your sitemap, correct all internal links, and upload said sitemap to your Webmaster Tools?

Try that method if you haven't already. Otherwise, I would hold off on changing your domain often. 3 seems like a lot!

Hope this helps! Good luck!

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