The relaunch of Delia Online has cost Delia Smith half her web traffic in the last 4 weeks, according to stats from Alexa.

Any relaunch or redesign can cost you traffic from Google as it tries to work out what's gone on. But as I explained here and here, Delia Smith's relaunch involved no-nos such as deleting all the old forum posts (dumping 000s of indexed pages) and failing to do any redirects from old URLs to new one (sacrificing all the benefits of inbound links to the old pages - so instead of appearing first for a search on Eton Mess, for instance, Delia is now nowhere).

Here is the proof of what this has cost her - the relaunch was in the last week of June, so watch for changes in the graphs at that point.

Delia's traffic halves

This first graph shows the %age of all pageviews that were from deliaonline.com. You can just about see them trail off in the last month.

And this second one is a bit clearer, it shows reach - the %age of all internet users who visited delia's site. As you can see, it's gone from an average of just under .004% until the relaunch at the end of June when it plummets to just under .002%.

Is site usage up?

You might be able to glean some good news from the stats - but you can't, trust me.

This looks promising. Pageviews per user initially went up after the relaunch (but then fell again).

Even better, the bounce rate - the %age of users who only look at one page - is down (but this fall seems to predate the relaunch...)

However, this is all a bit illusory, as time on the site is down. People are clearly having a quick look round - maybe looking for the deleted pages - and then leaving (more quickly than they used to).

If you have a redesign, make sure you learn the lessons from this one ...

I recently pointed out that the Delia Online relaunch was a right cock up. They've now made things  worse ...

deliasmith.com has vanished - so links from external sites are broken and give no SEO benefit.

One of my criticisms was they had left the old site up at deliasmith.com (with no real warning that it was defunct) as well as the new one at deliaonline.com (in some good news, they've finally redirected the non-www version to the www one).

What they've done

They've now turned off deliasmith.com ... and haven't put any redirects in place to the new site. What does this mean?

• Google results useless Any results that appear in Google for deliasmith.com don't go anywhere - you just get "The server at www.deliasmith.com is taking too long to respond".
• Links broken Any links to deliasmith.com no longer work - you get the same message.
• SEO benefit thrown away. And they've thrown away the SEO benefit of the 330 links that Yahoo site explorer reports to deliasmith.com, such as the one pictured above from Maldon Salt.

What they should have done

The correct thing to do is identify which deliasmith.com pages have inbound links and redirect them to relevant new pages on deliaonline.com. Then redirect every other old page to the new site's homepage.

If you can't be bothered to do that, just redirect every deliasmith.com page to the new deliaonline.com homepage.

But don't just switch off your old domain ...