Traffic drop 98% in two days

[Gotmoxie]

I changed my theme on April 12th and within 24 hours my traffic plummeted 98%.  I have also seen a huge difference in my keyword ranking.  A few things have been tweaked, but with no results.

I need to get to the bottom of this fairly quickly. Do you have any recommendations of a trustworthy someone I could hire to dig deeper and find out what the %#^!$@ is going on?  I didn't see that SEOmoz does the "hire and let us check it" thing.

Of course, if anyone has any free suggestions...I'm open to those as well.

Thanks

Heather

[Gotmoxie]

Yes, that sounds really plausible.  Thanks for explaining that to me! I'm passing your comment on to my programmer for him to take a look.

I have a few "tech smart" people I know, I'll ask them to take a look as well - Wisdom in many counselors!

Thanks so much!

[StreamlineMetrics]

I'm willing to bet that the reason you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic from simply changing a theme is that the Google Analytics tracking code was not properly installed on the new theme.  I know you already mentioned that you checked with your programmer and didn't find any problems with the tracking code itself, but I can see that the GA account numbers are two different accounts. I checked the source code of a page using the current theme as well as a cached version from the old theme and the Google Analytics tracking account numbers are different.

This is the page in question - http://www.incredibleinfant.com/safety/pacifier-use/

**Current theme -  ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-28262936-1']);

**Cached theme - ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-32310484-1']);  (Google cache from April 5th, 2013)

So if you are looking at the Google Analytics data for the 323 account, then that's why you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic once the new theme was installed. The actual data should be captured in the 282 profile, which you hopefully have access to.

And it's not surprising that you've noticed some rankings drop since that often happens when doing a site overhaul if the site architecture, internal linking structure, on-site SEO are not kept exactly the same. This decrease in rankings is likely only temporary as the search engines will recrawl and reindex the new versions of the pages.

Hope that helps!

[Gotmoxie]

Matt, the old theme was custom.  I'm just going to remove the squeeze page entirely and see what happens.  That way the homepage will be the blog roll.  I've also added the meta description for the blog page.  Thanks.

[Gotmoxie]

Those are great suggestions Matt!  Thank you!  I will send those to my programmer and see if I can add a blog link on the squeeze page and see if that helps also.

Perhaps it's the combination of these other issues AND the squeeze page that tipped the scale...

[Gotmoxie]

I will go through the plugins idea, Moosa and check that.  Good idea. thanks

[Gotmoxie]

That's true there isn't Federico.  The blog is being relaunched.  Since I'm not currently adding new posts, the homepage is a squeeze page.

I had it set it up that way for about 2 months before this dip happened, so I'm doubting that's the issue.  It was gaining in traffic actually.

[MattAntonino]

I have a couple theories but I'm having trouble finding a cached old page.  What theme DID you have?

I'm going to posit a few theories and maybe some direction for you to check out.

First, there is definitely a problem here somewhere.

On this link: http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/page/2/

I see: Sunscreen, Muppets, Bad Parents, New Foods, Breastfeed, Earn money at home,

On this link: http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/page/3/

I see the same exact posts.

Same on page 4, page 5.

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Also, according to your archives, you have one May post - the Sunscreen post.  But

http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/

is showing Muppets most recently.  It's not picking up your posts or updating correctly

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Also, I see 43 validation errors and some warnings. Usually these aren't a big deal, a bit of coding oops here & there.  Yours are not what I normally see.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.incredibleinfant.com%2Fblog%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Some of the worst errors here may be contributing to problems.  I'm not sure how the new theme compares to the old but this one looks like it has some coding issues - one of which may be causing Google to not like your site as much.  (Imagine if you turned all your H3s into H2s at once. Google would probably not like that.  Same if you went the other way.

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The fact that the homepage doesn't link to the blog is probably "stopping" any juice from flowing through. You have over 6000 links pointed at your homepage and about 30 pointed at the blog.  A tiny link on the squeeze page from the home to the blog may make all the difference.

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The actual blog link (http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/) doesn't have a meta description at all.  This really isn't good and it should have one. You are using Yoast so this should be a simple fix.  If you used to have one (ie. it was built into the theme) this could hurt.  I know description isn't an SEO "factor" but not having one at all likely is, especially if the old one was related to your content.

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I think your pagination issues and some of your validation errors are likely the issue, as is the theme change - I'm sure it changed either your headers, important bits of code, etc. and lacking the link from homepage - yeah, that would not help.

Hope the direction helps!

[MoosaHemani]

I really don’t think that the problem is with indexation as when i search for post title i still can see the post appearing in the search results...The only different thing is when I use this simple search “site:www.incredibleinfant.com” I see categories are appearing in the search results instead of the post titles... which is kind of different then usual.

I can be wrong but is there any plug-in that you was using in the older theme and actually not using in the current theme? Just wondering!

P.S: Idea by Fede also makes lot of sense to me!

[FedeEinhorn]

Hi Heather,

There's no link in the homepage to your Blog...?

First thing you should do is remove that page and have the blog as the index page.

Then you can see what happens.

[Gotmoxie]

I've had a programmer check the code, and so far they haven't found any issues with the analytics implementation or noidexing.  Not sure about the malware.

I've also taken your suggestion and contacted Marie Haynes for a consultation estimation.  Thanks!

[Gotmoxie]

Sorry, I should have included the URL...it's late and my brain isn't functioning...

the website URL is http://www.incredibleinfant.com - but that is a squeeze page while I do a re-launch.

to see the back door, go to http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog.

This squeeze home page was in place for months using the old design and Google didn't seem to have a problem indexing my articles and bringing me traffic.

Thanks

[EGOL]

That is a traffic drop so steep and fast that it probably extends beyond Google.  It could be...

bad analytics implementation

malware

unintentional noindex

If this was my site I would hope that I could hire Marie Haynes to look at it.

[NakulGoyal]

Post or PM the URL in question. So that me and others can provide some thoughts.