Google: URL Changes From A Year Ago Not The Reason For Your SEO Decline - Search Engine Roundtable

Google's John Mueller responded to an SEO asking if he should undo the URL site migration changes made a year ago to restore the traffic the blog had previously. In which John Mueller said that his guess is the "traffic change is unrelated" to the URL changes they made a year ago.

John said on Twitter "My guess is the traffic change is unrelated, so I'd recommend looking long term what they want, so that they don't have to change URL structure again."

So he is suggesting that the URL change and the traffic drop, at least the long term consequence es of those URL changes are unrelated to any long term traffic drops that site might see from Google. Generally, if 301s are in place, those traffic changes are short lived and do not lead to long term SEO drops.

What John seems to be implying is that the site may have other issues, maybe quality issues, and the timing of the URL changes and the SEO drop is just a coincidence?

Here are those tweets:

Hey Twitter SEOs, question: A client migrated their CMS and changed the blog URL from /keyword-blog/ (which performed very well for them) to /newkeyword-blog/ and traffic tanked (the URL was the only change other than the CMS). This was over a year ago.

— Ian Keir (@iankeir1) November 29, 2021

My guess is the traffic change is unrelated, so I'd recommend looking long term what they want, so that they don't have to change URL structure again.

— John (@JohnMu)

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