URL-structure change - former long-tail traffic gone
-
Hey people,
I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user)Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP.
But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month.
Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords.
You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped.
So I'd like to know if you observed similar results.
Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago?
Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though.
All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise...
I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!
-
I'm not saying Adwords can't be causing this - I just haven't seen where it does. Other ad networks allow users to embed links in ways that disguise that their paid ads, and many affiliate site owners hide paid ads in a way that gives them the appearance of being non-paid.
And yes, I have heard from some people that Google can sometimes confuse paid and non-paid in their analytics system.
-
Let me get this clear: What do you mean by "disguised as regular links"? Because I am only talking about Adwords and I am not aware of a way to disguise them.
If you are not talking about Adwords. For my standards, I can prove that Adwords have an impact.
Or Google Analytics is getting the seperation between paid and non-paid mixed up. Ever heard of anything like this?
-
paid ads are not supposed to impact SEO at all. While I have not seen AdWords cause this, I have seen paid ads in other networks do so when those paid ads were disguised as regular links on sites displaying them.
-
Hey Alan,
thank you for your answer. I really appreciate it.
Best believe me, I'm just as curious, probably even a little more.
I've been looking into it today and the outcome was pretty surprising: You know how Google always maintains that Adwords doesn't affect organic ranking in any way, i.e. neither positively nor negatively.
Well, apparantly, the "signal somewhere" is exactly there with Adwords. The project I took over was before managed by someone who did it to the best of his knowledge. Sadly though, despite a quite good results, his product knowledge was pretty limited, so he advertised with Adwords using keywords that didn't match the product at all. So imagine we are selling Mercedes SL600 but he advertised for Citroen 2CV. Not exactly our targeted customer segment.
But what really suprises me is that these Adwords ads generated non-paid traffic onto our website for those keywords.
Or do I miss something here? Can Adwords be a signal for Google as to what the page is about?
-
dumperama, I'm curious - if all those keywords the site has nothing to do were found within the site, or perhaps were they in links pointing to the previous version pages? There's got to be some signal somewhere that said " this page is related to this topic". That's something I'd look further into. It's possible, if it was low-level links, that once the URL changes were made, you essentially helped Google get further confirmation on the true topical focus, and that in turn devalued the source indicators that drove those other phrases.
Ultimately Google refreshes their evaluations frequently - though not necessarily very often on a site that doesn't show regularly updated content or regularly changing other off-site factors.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL structure for a product that belongs to several categories
Hi, We are setting up the URL structure for a big webshop and this raised the following questions regarding the URL's for products that belong to several categories (most of the products do, so the same approach would be used for products that just belong to one category). There are three options in my point of view: Use root-level product page URLs (limits trackability in Analytics software because you can not specify on product types)
Reporting & Analytics | | Mat_C
URL: example.com/product-1/ Use product type URL directories for all products (which at least offers minimum trackability of all separate product types in Analytics software)
URL: example.com/book/product-1/ Use product URLs built upon category URL structures, but ensure that each product page URL has a single, designated canonical URL.
URL: example.com/category-A/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/ URL: example.com/category-B/product-1/ with canonical= example.com/category-A/product-1/ Which option is the preferred one? Thanks!0 -
Dark Traffic Mystery!
Hey everyone, My team and I have been digging into this problem and can't find an answer - and it turns out this has been an issue for over year. I'll try to explain the best I can, but let me know if you have any questions. My predecessor noticed a non-existent page URL getting traffic in GA. He had the web dev team create a page so he could see where the traffic is coming from. The page has every directive under the sun on it; noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir, noimageindex, notranslate All of the traffic is (direct) / (none). It gets about 300 visits per day. Avg. time on page is 15:40, bounce rate is 99.6% and it doesn't show up in the funnel. Previous page path is 92% entrance; 8% homepage. Geo is 92% US; then diversified across countries. Browser is predominately Chrome. OS is only Windows, and device is only desktop. I've run this page through a backlink checker, and we get nothing. I've run it through Screaming Frog and it has no internal links pointing to it. I've tried putting quotes around the URL and googling it and we get a few websites, but they're very low authority and it isn't likely that they're sending 300+ visits per day. Also, since all of the traffic is direct, I don't think it's coming from a backlink anyway. This has become a personal quest for several of us, as we really want to figure out where that traffic is coming from. Any thoughts? What am I missing? It's kind of driving me crazy because I can't figure out what I've missed, so if anyone figures this out and is coming to Pubcon in November, I'll buy you a beer!! 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | rachelmeyer0 -
Alternative tools for Keyword Traffic
Hi There, Wondering if anyone has any other tools they would recommend using for finding out keyword traffic on websites. Currently (and I'm sure like most), my website is connected to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. My biggest frustration becomes the "(not set)" variable that appears when I go to review the keywords section. It's always such a large number and I have no way of finding out what people might be typing in and coming across my website. Of course, I understand the privacy factor as to why Google must do this but it's certainly difficult to analyze what's working and what's not. Any tips, tricks or suggestions are greatly appreciated! Thanks, Lindsay
Reporting & Analytics | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Google SERP showing a URL with UTM_source attached - why? Can I stop it?
I just found a Google search results page showing a URL with a UTM source tag attached. Any idea how or why this has happened? How can I stop it as I'm guessing this is overwriting my organic visits with referrals from this site. See attached photo for pic of SERP page. The link is going here: http://employment.govt.nz/er/holidaysandleave/parentalleave/?utm_source=newzealandnow.govt.nz 5vxTDTi.png
Reporting & Analytics | | DanielleNZ0 -
URLS are top keywords in GA?
Hey Moz, For some reason on my father's website, michaelpadway.com, the top 2 keywords from organic are complete urls from his site. This doesn't makeugh sense to me. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | MarloSchneider1 -
Segment G-news one box traffic
Hey Guys, This might be an over spoken topic but I havent been able to find a proper answer or solution for this issue. So far, the closest solution I came across is this article --> http://moz.com/blog/decoding-googles-referral-string-or-how-i-survived-secure-search I would like to know if there is any other solution for this matter. I have been searching the web for quite while now and I havent found a reasonable solution to segmenting the traffic from google news one box.News onebox traffic is counted as organic/google in GA.Is there a way to measure the traffic coming from the onebox news??Please note that news.google.com is not the same thing.I really appreciate any help.
Reporting & Analytics | | Mr.bfz0 -
Finding organic keywords driving traffic
Is there any way to know which organic keywords are driving traffic to my landing pages in Google analytics ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050 -
Why are we not seeing similar traffic patterns in a new market?
Good afternoon! We have a large real estate site with over 400,000 urls. We do pretty well with long-tailed search terms (like addresses--- 123 Main Street, Atlanta GA) so we get a decent amount of traffic (3,500-4,000 uniques a day). 2 months ago we opened up in a new market (Nashville) and hoped to see similar traffic for that market after a few of months, but so far we haven't. In fact, we only get about 200 visits a day. I can't seem to figure out why it's taking so long for us to generate similar traffic in Nashville that we see in Atlanta. All of the Nashville properties are in our sitemap and are being indexed by Google. Any ideas why we aren't seeing similar effects?Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! David
Reporting & Analytics | | clickscape0