Google says your url adjustments from a 12 months in the past in all probability weren’t inflicting your website positioning decline

Google’s John Mueller responded to an SEO question that asked him if he should undo the URL site migration changes made a year ago in order to restore the blog’s traffic. In which John Mueller said his guess is that the “traffic change had nothing to do with the URL changes they made a year ago”.

John continued Twitter “My guess is that the traffic change is unrelated, so I’d recommend looking long-term for what you want so you don’t have to change the URL structure again.”

So he suggests that the url change and decrease in traffic, at least the long-term consequences of those url changes, have nothing to do with a long-term decrease in traffic that Google’s website might see. When 301s are in place, these traffic changes are generally short-lived and do not result in long-term SEO dips.

What John seems to be implying is that the website may have other issues, maybe quality issues, and the timing of the url changes and SEO junk is just a fluke?

Here are these tweets:

Hey Twitter SEOs, question: A customer migrated their CMS and changed the blog url from / keyword-blog / (which worked very well for him) to / newkeyword-blog / and fueled the traffic (url was the only change except the CMS). That was over a year ago.

– Ian Keir (@ iankeir1) November 29, 2021

I suspect the traffic change is unrelated, so I’d recommend long-term looking for what you want so you don’t have to change the URL structure again.

– 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) November 29, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.