The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Should you always expect a traffic drop during a site/URL migration, even a temporary one?
In case you didn't notice, Moz recently launched a shiny new SEO Q&A platform[1] for all the world to see, explore, and use to learn about SEO.
Originally launched as a private feature for Pro members many years ago, the Q&A was opened for public — and search engine — viewing back in 2011.
In the years since, it grew to over 60,000 posts covering every SEO topic imaginable, and tens of millions of page views. For a long time, a significant portion of Moz's organic traffic came from the Q&A.
Sadly, though, as often happens, over time the Q&A saw serious neglect. As a result:
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The platform accumulated a ton of technical debt, making it nearly impossible to update
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Pages loaded so slowly many users gave up entirely
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Spam became more and more common
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Moderation tools were outdated, and couldn't keep up
For these reasons, two predictable things happened:
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The Q&A became less useful and satisfying to users
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Over time, traffic dropped significantly
So Moz had a choice: improve the Q&A immediately, or kill it.
Thankfully, we choose to improve it.
Working with the fantastic team at NodeBB[2] (highly recommended, by the way), we quickly spun up a new Q&A using our existing database, but with entirely modern technology on the front and backend.
Why this migration was challenging
We were under intense time constraints. What might normally take months, we needed to accomplish in a couple of weeks. This presented unique challenges from an