Traffic has dropped off a cliff
-
I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why?
-
yes, thanks for the follow up. I have already done that and am awaiting results. thanks again
-
I just looked in Google for your site and it looks like it's indexed again. Hope everything is recovering quickly for you! I'd suggest running a campaign in SEOmoz for that site (if you haven't yet) to pick up any duplicate content issues and other suggestions that we have that can further help your site.
-
It looks like you may be telling Google to ignore your site via noindex nofollow. There are two possible places this could be set:
In the Yoast plugin you can tell it how you want the robots to behave: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta You want it to check both Index and Follow.
Similarly in Wordpress itself there is an option under Settings > Privacy. You want to check I want my blog to be visible to everyone.
-
wow, that's confusing! I was just assuming Yoast was the gatekeeper of the robots, but that's not the case. Your right, in my privacy settings it was set to block! Thanks a lot!
-
The redirects are necessary for pages that are indexed in the search engines (so people coming from a search result can get to the right page) and for pages that are linked, bookmarked, etc. You generally want to make sure that most pages you change get a redirect.
-
I am getting ready to add WordPress too and change some url's. My understanding is that redirects are only necessary if you have links on those pages....is that correct?
-
Take a look under settings (not via Yoast, but just regular WP settings) and privacy and make sure that your blog is not set to private.
Also, if you've paid someone a bunch of money to redesign your site, they should really have taken better care than to leave the noindex,nofollow on afterwards. You might want to drop them a note saying they did you a major disservice.
-
thanks, yes, i see it on Yoast, but it is set to Allow
-
thanks for the reply
are google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
yes, i have a warning in my webmaster account that states robots are being blocked by this code: User-agent: *
Disallow: /but i have no idea how to change that in wordpress
-
Ahh, I found a robots noindex,nofollow on your home page and at least one internal. That would do it!
There should be a setting in Wordpress that asks if you want your blog to be private/ not indexed by the search engines. Did that setting stay checked after you went live by chance?
-
If you're able to give us a little more information that would help.
Has the organic traffic dropped from all of the search engines, or just one?
Has it dropped for all of your pages or just some of your pages?
Has it dropped for all of your keywords or just some of your keywords?
Have you verified the site in Google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
When you redesigned, did you put in redirects from the old pages to the new pages (if your URL structure changed)?
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
-
Huge organic drop following new site go live
Hi Guys, I am currently working on a site that's organic traffic suffered ( and is still suffering ) a huge drop in organic traffic. From a consistent 3-400 organic visits a day to almost zero. This happened as soon as the new site went live. I am now digging to find out why. 301s were put in place ( over 2, 500 over them ) and there are still over 1,100 outstanding after review search console this morning. Having looked at the redirect file that was put in place when the new site went live, it all look OK, apart from the redirects look like this... http://www.physiotherapystore.com/ to http://physiotherapystore.com/ Where the new URL is missing www. - I am concerned this is causing a large duplicate issue as both www. and non www. work fine. I am right to have concern or is this something not to worry about?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr0 -
Across the board drops in DA
Hi, has anyone noticed across the board drops in DA in specific industries lately? If you're tracking 5 companies in one industry it seems odd that all five would drop 2-3 DA points all at once don't you think? Just peculiar I think and would love some insight if there is some to be had / shared.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Blog Traffic
Hi all, As of today, we put up approximately 900 high-quality, 100% original articles on our blog. However, we have not been able to generate any good traffic since July when it was first launched (blog.ostanding.com). Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | businessowner0 -
Organic Brand Traffic Tanking
Hey Guys, We recently launched a new website in late February. Since then, we have seen a drop in organic traffic from most of our top organic keywords. My major concern is the drop that we've seen from our branded keywords. Since the new site launch, our #1 organic traffic and revenue-driving keyword (brand name) dropped over 31%! It should be noted that all of our URLs changed, however, I've updated the sitemap in GWT and we have utilized 301 redirects on all old URLs. Any insights or recommendations on where I should be looking or what I should be doing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shorething0 -
How to get traffic from a particular Geographical region?
Our company is based out of India and has a web site with .in domain ; however our target customers are from North America and Australia.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TPS2013
The problem is we get as high as 70% of organic traffic from India.
This 70% traffic from India has little use to us. Possibly because we have ”.in “ domain the Google local search is active.
How to reverse this situation; I mean we are looking for more traffic from across the globe except India.
Any suggestions ? P.S. Changing domain from .in to .com is not an option as its the part of our brand advertised for last 7 years1 -
Why are Pages returning 404 errors not being dropped?
Our webmaster tools continues to return anywhere upwards of 750 pages that have 404 errors. These are from pages of a previous site no longer used. However this was over 1 year ago these pages were dropped along with the 301 re-directs. Why is Google not clearing these from webmaster tools but re-listing them again after 3 month cycle? Is it because external sites have links to these pages? If so should I put a 301 in place (most of these site are forums and potentially dodgy directories etc from previous poor link building programs) or ask for a manual removal?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
UK Company Major drop in traffic & rankings on one primary keyword since March
I am helping out a small UK company who have had a sudden drop in organic search traffic since March 24th. Investigation highlights some issues with the site,e.g. Potential canonicalization of home page, a few html errors, some inbound links to the /index.html version of the homepage rather than /. But, nothing particualrly major and nothing that is different to pre-March 24th. The indexed pages looks ok in Google (although Bing is ranking the non-www version of the homepage) but this does not appear in Google's index. Searches for the company name on Google.co.uk show it as top result & some keywords are ranking reasonably well (based on homepage). Selecting blocks of text from the homepage and it ranks #1, but its Google rank for the primary keyword has gone from #2 pre-March 24th to not in the top 100 results since. SEOMOZ is grading the page A for the keyword which appears prominently on the page & keyword is the first characters of the title. It is not a particularly competitive keyword. Adding UK to the keyword and the page is Google.co.uk ranked #3. It's almost as if they are being penalised for a single keyword which I've never seen or heard of before. Any ideas? ** The company has never carried out any SEO - white hat or black hat. The site is perfectly normal, nothing dodgy or concerning about it at all.** Thanks in advance for your advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjalc20110 -
Does using robots.txt to block pages decrease search traffic?
I know you can use robots.txt to tell search engines not to spend their resources crawling certain pages. So, if you have a section of your website that is good content, but is never updated, and you want the search engines to index new content faster, would it work to block the good, un-changed content with robots.txt? Would this content loose any search traffic if it were blocked by robots.txt? Does anyone have any available case studies?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0