Website goes dark on Google and were in panic mode..

My company that has realized a steady increase in unique traffic from about 80 to 200 visitors per day over the past two years. For budgetary reasons, a decision maker at my company decided to go with a cheaper SEO vendor than the one we had been working with and the new vendor prematurely had us point our DNS records to their server and uploaded an incomplete sitemap in webmaster tools. After realizing days later that we had switched to an incomplete website without any 301 redirects set up and half the content we had gone, we re-pointed the DNS back to the old host/website and resubmitted our old sitemap. Fast forward a week and our traffic has dropped from 200 visitors a day to about 20 and our website is not showing up in the search engine results save for some local listings that we are ranking for. My question is, are we fucked? Is there anything we can do to get back to where we were before the drop that we haven't already done? I'd hate to think that all the hard work of our previous vendor was for naught. Any insight would be appreciated here.

[–]MAVERICK910

is there still any errors in webmaster? has the sitemap been indexed?
i dont understand why a "seo vendor" would need to change your dns, do you mean your hosting company? like did ye move your website from one hosting company to another?
if you want il have a look, pm me the url

[–]googies

i looked into it and the sitemap that just got indexed right when the traffic dropped is only for one page! i think our old vendor removed all of the other hundreds of pages from the sitemap. if we were to switch to the new website again which is almost ready to be published and use their sitemap, would this fix the problem you think or are we fucked?

[–]MAVERICK910

ok i think i get you now

so you moved websites to a new vendor and basically these fools made a balls of the transfer.

You have two choices, go back or push on with the new site. Ive been here before and the client had pressed ahead and by the time i appeared they had lost over a third of their traffic and it took 6 months to recover.

Imo i would get the old site back up asap as its only been a few days, resubmit the sitemap and wait till it gets indexed.

Then i would check for errors in webmaster and deal with them until they are gone.

Then fire the new vendor.

Then possibly beat whoever dreamt up a costing cutting exercise for what seems to me an important channel for your company.

Hold off moving to the new website until you have recovered, ie everything is back indexed. Do some quick heavy online marketing, maybe a months worth.

Then revisit and plan out a proper site migration.

Im sure others will have some other advice but imo getting the old site back and indexed is the main issue, forget the new site for now.

[–]googies

problem is, the old site is back up and we resubmitted the old sitemap when we switched back from new to old...however the old vendor has control of the sitemap and deleted everything except the homepage. we can't call the old vendor up because our relationship is effectively terminated, and the new vendor's website/sitemap won't be ready for a few more days. don't really have much choice but just wait for the new website to launch. I hope when google reindexes off the new sitemap we will regain our visibility but I'm not so sure.

[–]MAVERICK910

So you press on. Draw up a pretty comprehensive online marketing plan for a month. Like daily engagement on social networks, the whole shabang!

you should start to see a massive jump in 404's as they come into webmaster. Your best bet is to get the new site up and running asap and 301 these 404's to the new pages. Can you ask the new vendor to hurry up?!

Then do some serious online marketing, maybe a competition on facebook or something, twitter, adwords etc.

The speed of Recovery will be determined by how much work you but in once the new site is up.

[–]lepornjames

Your company only gets 200 a day and you're paying an SEO company? Wow, I need to charge more.

[–]seothrowawayt

I'm thinking the same thing, but you never know what his niche is or how valuable these leads can be.