Lost Backlinks Diagnosis After Website Redesign Using AHREFs

Hey everyone.

This is Graham's at GainTap.

What I'm going to be doing todayis illustrating what can go wrong when a web design is donewithout taking into consideration the SEO, the Search Engine Optimization of that site.

I'm familiar with the websiteI'm going to show you here.

We designed and developed it about three years ago.

Since then, it's common for people to redo the look of their siteand things like that.

I just happen to take a look at the siteand I noticed that it had been changed.

It got migrated to a whole new platform.

A lot of things can happen in just during a regular designbut when you switch platforms, you can have a lot of big issues.

I'm not trying to call these people out.

If this were screenshot, I would blur the URL but quite honestly I don't know how to do that with video, especially multiple frame of videosso I am just going to proceed like this.

Let's take a look at this site.

If you lookat this site, it's a nice looking site.

It's clearly a very photography-heavy website but what I want to look at here is when you put that site into software.

There's a lot of different SEO softwares outthey that can do.

Something similar to this.

When you put it into some software, we can see that it looks like something happenedjust around this area.

You've got a lot of links going to your sites.

One of the big things that happensduring your redesign is pages get merged or removed altogether or the URLs gets changed and links break.

That's just something that happens when it's donewithout taking into account the SEO.

It looks like maybe a dozen or so pages or domains may have stoppedlinking to this site.

That's the thing I see initially.

You can see I confirmed here.

These things on the bottom here are showing your lost domains.

Initially I'm thinking, “Looks like maybe there's some broken links on this site.

” If we click over to the organic search, you can certainly see that they were getting some visitsthen it's down to roughly almost none to a day.

This is more accurate.

This shows you the keywords, the volume of keywordsthat site ranks for.

If you see this, something went wrong.

You're showing for 400and something keywords and now you're down to 25, 27 maybe? Unless those are extremelyhigh volume keywords that are awesome for your business, that is probably a big problem.

Again you can see here none in the top three, one in the top ten, you're not getting very much traffic, further illustrated hereby this position heat map.

The darker colors indicate more keywords in that range.

For example zero in the first position, 11 in the 42nd position, which isn't super helpful.

Now you can see essentially you're looking at zeros and onesand things of that nature.

Here is something we would do to diagnose.

Looking at this, hands down, we've got a problem.

We can confirm that with– There's tools like thatthat can actually show you the broken links.

These are really your big ranking signals, are good links.

If we take a look at the broken links– Sometimes during a redesignmaybe pages get merged and you lose links that don't really matter much.

Sometimes there are links that you lose that are actually really good links.

You can see here, this site is about fashion, style, consulting, wardrobes styling.

You look here and what is this?This is about street fashion, women's wear.

It's an older link.

It's from 2013.

I would definitely want this link.

This page, you can see, is an older page.

I know from this slog and just from experiencethis is an older WordPress post.

If we go here, it's a dead link.

That link is not carrying anymore valuefor this website.

That is going to not help the rankings.

If you get enough of those like you see here, you've got other ones here.

I'm sure that these are legitimate links and not just spam.

Let's take another look.

Tourism Toronto, this looks fairly legit.

If you have links from legitimate pages– Department 34.

You can see someof the numbers here.

These are higher ranking sites.

Rue Magazine.

There are peoplethat would kill for these links.

This is months, if not a year's worth of outreach efforts.

Especially when you start getting Three pages of links.

Some of these might be garbage.

There's at least a dozen, maybe six, but half dozen or so of good links.

These don't look like they're worth very much here.

Those initial links look likethey were actually really high value.

When it comes to doinga site redesign like that, you really have to think about balancing the new look of your site with the– you can see down herepowered by Squarespace.

You have to think aboutthe new look of your site, then your Search Engine Optimization.

Now, this might be totally fine for thembecause they might get all of their business from referrals, they might get all of their business from social media, things of that nature.

If we do a search for just their brand name, we'll see if they show up.

They still show up.

They might be fine.

They might be fine with thisif they just show up for their brand and keywordsand stuff like that.

It really depends on the business.

From someone who looks at Search EngineOptimization and things of that nature, it doesn't take very muchto redirect some of these big money links that were on the first page, this here.

Some of those like Rue magazineand things of that nature.

You can redirect those other pagesand maintain that.

On top of removing that content, you're also removing contextual cues and things like that, they go to Google.

The summary of this is to just tell you, really think aboutwhat content you're removing when you remove itand how that might actually affect your business.

If you don't know, then you should work with an SEOwho can help you do that.

You should definitelyget a little bit of advice, especially if you really rely on your websiteto drive leads for your business.

Just doing a web designto make your site look pretty isn't a business goal.

If you rely on your websiteto send leads to your business, you need to be really carefulwhen you do a redesign because there is a lotof stuff behind the scenes that you have to take into account.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

Maybe giving you a little insightinto your own situation, your own business, your own website.

If you need anything, feel free to comment or shoot me an email.

.