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