OOps.. I fucked myself (Sitemove Problems)
 

Hey everyone,

Hope you are all well and doing good. I've had a bit of an issue recently and I was hoping maybe some of you awesome folks could give me some tips or info on what to do next.

Here's what happened. I was running a wordpress version of one of my websites. It wasn't very mobile friendly so I started up a second one on the same domain just in a different folder. I'm not sure if that was the correct move or not but I started working on a new design that was totally responsive.

Fast forward a bit, I wake up and the old version of the website starts going into CPU meltdown mode. After a day of trying to figure it out with the host and trying everything but having no luck I said fuck this and dumped it.

Anyways, it's been a few weeks since then and traffic from google and other search engines has had a massive drop. I had thousands of 404 errors because the old website was gone and they've been slowly un-indexing the older pages. Also, a lot of the old incoming links from other websites are still pointing to pages that don't exist anymore.

I put 302 redirects up for the external links with the highest numbers to the same or equivalent page on the new version. Is this something I should have done?

What would be the next move to get back to at least some of the traffic I used to get from search engines?

Should I look into getting more backlinks to the new site?

Should I actually go in and manually remove the old URLS myself? Would google like that?

Is this a time I should look into buying traffic or advertising to increase the users on site? (Maybe google will notice through analytics?)

Has anyone had this problem before and know how long it takes to recover and become friends with search engines again? lol.

Thanks everyone,

Have a good one :)

- DumpManager

Strange thing your wp went into meltdown mode, probably because you didn't create a subdomain before making your site responsive. (Same database= big trouble.)
I suggest you do 301 redirects of the urls to the new one if same content and the url changed, so it's a permanent change.
Also rebuild your sitemap once the new design is set up and then wait for google to take care of it. A little drop for a week in traffic isn't always bad if you remade the whole structure of the website. And of course, wait... google isn't always this fast (I think?).

Thanks for the help Nightslit. The old version went absolutely nuts I am not sure why possibly an automated update that caused a conflict of sorts. Anyways, I had a separate database for the new version as well.
I have new sitemap and google has it too, I guess it's just a waiting game now.
I'll try switching the 302's to 301's as you suggest, thanks.

Well I'm sure you have a new database for the responsive part but if you don't work on a predefined subdomain the request will go from the new site to the old database as the watevaeradresseofyousite.com will only allow those requests. (Can't say why but yeah WP and other CMS dont 'like' subdomains etc... don't ask me why. Good luck.

Ah ok, thanks Nightslit,

I actually went from website.com/new/ to website.com/2/
Probably not the smartest move, but I wasn't actually planning on it happening this way, the new site was more live but temporary but since the old one went supernova I had to just use this one.

Thanks for the help :)

Why not just use Wordpress' live preview feature and just upload or use a theme from the wp theme database? Pretty much all themes released through the official wp theme database are responsive/work well with mobile nowadays so it's really easy to switch themes and do minor changes without messing up your site.

Change from 302 to 301 usually take minimum 5 days to re-index domain and next 7-14 days to move links. I strong suggest to get for a short period some quality links 2-3 weeks for new domain to improve indexation.

Also pls connect two domains to one GWT account and do "move domain" top site right from domain settings.

tnx.