Traffic and impressions down
-
I am confused on what is going on.
I recently converted my website to wordpress. I kept the same url structure to the best of my abilities (without the .html) and 301 all .html to / So whatever was www.domain.com/page.html to www.domain.com/page/
The old CMS was a proprietary cms done by the company who originally designed the website. It was poorly put together and was really buggy. I decided to move to wordpress due to many limitations particularly for SEO.
Now traffic is down about 10% and looks like the downward trend will continue, also, impressions are down by about 75%.
Any thoughts on what could be happening?
-
Also Mike, you may want to have a look a Ahrefs.com. I have just checked it and there are alot more backlinks showing up you need to look at. If you google for a coupon, you can get it half price, or just get a refund within 7 days. It can be useful for these sort of situations, even though Moz does alot more analytics etc.
-
No worries. This is another good article that I found is quite good:
http://moz.com/ugc/should-domain-authority-be-used-to-determine-which-backlinks-to-remove
-
Thanks Jonathan!
-
OK, I have had a quick look and I do see some potential problems:
Check that page. You will see this particular term (Holtorf Medical Group) seems overly used, thanks to a few sitewide sidebar links for example realitynibs.com
You should either get those sitewide links nofollowed, or removed,... or failing that dissavowed. There may be other examples in that link, but I believe that is a potential cause of your problems. I am seeing sitewide links be the cause of alot of problems lately.
Also if you go down the dissavow route, this might be worth reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel
Obviously, be careful not to remove any decent high quality links.
-
I've worked very hard for the content to be very high quality.
Before I was in charge of SEO a so called SEO agency did a lot of low quality link building. Looks like it finally caught up to us.
-
It is very hard without seeing the site. But check for low quality content \ duplicate content. Look at your link profiles for spammy links (over optimised anchor texts, low quality links etc).
You'll just need to do a bit of research into I am afraid. If you want to post your link we can see if something obvious sticks out.
-
Jonathan, thank you.
I looked at all possibilities, except that. Wow, such a big coincidence. Any thoughts on how to recover?
-
That's the date of the last big Google Panda update (22nd). I think you have your answer.
-
Yeah, I am with you on that. I doubt google updates rankings that fast.
However, I switched the site the night of august 22nd and on the 23rd I noticed a decline and keep seeing the traffic decline, traffic is actually down 25% (not 10%) from last month.
If it isn't caused by the migration then what is it?
-
I very much doubt Google will have updated your rankings that fast...
Do you have a date you made the change? It doesn't sound like the drop was because of your site move, if it dropped the very next day. Even if you had lots of 404's those listings would still have retained their place in google for a short while.
-
The thing is. Besides the url difference (.html to /) the content is identical, meta tags, headers, etc is the same as before the migration. I noticed the drop in traffic the very day after the wordpress version of the site went live. I am so bummed.
-
Yeh, there are lots of things really that can cause this. WordPress sites are slower but you can mitigate this by installing caching. Check all your redirects are working fine. WordPress will have a slightly different site structure with all the categories \ tags etc, so that may affect is slightly.
But, before you worry too much about that, it might be that you have been caught by one of the recent Google Updates. Was there a date when you particularly noticed the change? It could be that other sites benefited from the Google Update rather than you being penalised. Even a few serp places drop can affect traffic quite a bit.
Unfortunately, without seeing all the analytics data \ site data it is hard to pin it down to anything.
-
Oof. Well without more information it's hard to say; it could be any number of things. On-page optimization would be my first guess:
- keyword placement
- title tags
- alt tags
- etc
Not sure what to say, honestly.
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
-
Organic search traffic stats "leaking" into other channels?
Hi Everyone I have a website and am slowly getting to grips with SEO. Last week I enabled a new channel in google analytics which was "email" so I could track effectiveness of the weekly emails we send out. The good news is that a ton of traffic is now being assigned to the email "channel" in GA but my organic search traffic in channels is now down week on week. That feels odd as my overall traffic to the site is up, week on week. Does anyone have any experience of new channels coming on stream and canniballising old ones? Could it be that some of the traffic associated to organic search previously was actually coming from my email, I just didn't know it? thanks all!
Technical SEO | | NappyValleyNet1 -
Retaining old brand traffic after a rebrand
Hi, How would you retain the organic search traffic for your old brand after a full rebrand? Website redesign, new company name, new domain name etc If we change from blahservices.com to fooservices.com and do all the things you would for a regular domain migration, will Google still return pages from the new brand fooservices.com when a user searches for old brand "blah services keyword"? We will be doing the following to try and not lose organic search traffic for our old brand: Keep PPC running on our old brand name keywords
Technical SEO | | SeenDigital.co.uk
Mention our old brand on the new website in the footer i.e. "Copyright blah services trading as foo services"
Publish a press release about the rebrand on our blog
Say something like "blah services has rebranded as foo services" in meta descriptions for a while
Put old and new brands in meta title for a while
Keep 301 redirects from old domain in place forever Is there anything else you would add to that? Thanks, K0 -
Traffic on my website hasn't gone up since
Anyone please I am looking for some help!! My website used to get around 40 to 50 visitors a day, as soon as I created the new website and put it live, traffic has dropped by 25%, page authority for the new and some of the old URL's are only 1, but my keywords are still doing well? I have made sure that I have redirected all the old URL's to the new ones, the tracking code in at the end section of the head section. Any ideas anyone?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
Sudden traffic down after mobile site
Hi to all. I have a huge problem about my web site traffic. We published our mobile site version under mobile domain in m.etilercerrental.com. And we published mobile site sitemap under main site such as sitemap-mobile.xml and notify google from webmaster tools. After a while whole site traffic gone down so badly. Almost 60% gone down which doesnt make sense. Mobile sitemap is hosted under desktop site. And we didnt add any link to switch sites between mobile and desktop version. We automaticly redirect between desktop and mobile versiyons by detecting useragent. One another this is we have announcement section in dekstop version but we dont have it in mobile. But we are not making any redirection to mobile site when user visits the announcement section even by mobile phone. Because we are not displaying it in mobile version.
Technical SEO | | gkhnrtk
One last this is we are making redirections automatically and not asking user preference such as showing a link in the bottom of page to switch sites betwenn mobile and pc version. While developing mobile site we followed instructions in this https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/?hl=tr For find the details I would like to give you some site urls. Site Url : http://www.etilercarrental.com/
Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap.xml
Mobile Sitemap Xml : http://www.etilercarrental.com/sitemap-mobile.xml0 -
Discontinuing a site & Redirecting Traffic to an Internal Page
We are wondering the best way to redirect the traffic from a site that will no longer exist. The Scenario:
Technical SEO | | TopFloor
Our client wants to discontinue this website http://www.animalcarepackaging.com/. We’d like to redirect the traffic from this site to an internal page on our client's other website: http://www.glenroy.com/packaging/. This internal page is the most appropriate to the content that appears on animalcarepackaging.com (as opposed to just the entire site glenroy.com). Possible Options We Are Considering:
Option 1: Keep hosting animalcarepackaging.com and add a 301 redirect for all pages to glenroy.com/packaging/. Our concern with this option is that Google/Bing will see animalcarepackaging.com as a gateway, which could hurt glenroy.com. Option 2: Keep hosting animalcarepackaging.com and add a 301 redirect so all pages are sent to glenroy.com/packaging/; AND file a change of address with Google and Bing. We believe this will allow people who have bookmarked animalcarepackaging.com to go to glenroy.com/packaging/; while people searching for animalcarepackaging.com will go to glenroy.com's home page. We would augment this by posting a message on the homepage of animalcarepackaging.com notifiying users that the site will be discontinued and info will be found at glenroy.com/packaging. Option 3: Do a change of address with Google/Bing and send all traffic to glenroy.com (rather than an internal page). Post information on the homepage of animalcarepackaging.com that the site will be discontinued on X-date, and info about animalcarepackaging.com will be able to be found at glenroy.com/packaging. Looking for feedback on our options and suggestions on how this can be handled.0 -
My blog homepage deindexed, other pages indexing, still traffic not changed.
Hello! Today when I check my blog site search on Google, I can't see my blog home page. Though all my posts and pages are still on the Google results. Today I published a test post, then it also indexed by the Google less than 3 minutes. Still I can't see any traffic changes. 10th of April (yesterday) when I perform a site search (site:mydomain.com), I saw my site on the Google search result. Today I installed the Ulitmate SEO plug-in and deactivated WordPress SEO plug-in. After a few hours I saw this issue. (I'm not saying this is the issue, I just mentioned it). In addition to that I never used any black hat SEO methods to improve my ranking. my site:- http://goo.gl/6mvQT Any help really appreciate!
Technical SEO | | Godad0 -
Seek help correcting large number of 404 errors generated, 95% traffic halt
Hi, The following GWT screen tells a bit of the story: site: http://bit.ly/mrgdD0 http://www.diigo.com/item/image/1dbpl/wrbp On about Feb 8 I decided to fix a large number of 'duplicate title' warnings being reported in GWT "HTML Suggestions" -- these were for URLs which differed only in parameter case, and which had Canonical tags, but were still reported as dups in GWT. My traffic had been steady at about 1000 clicks/day. At midnight on 2/10, google traffic completely halted, down to 11 clicks/day. I submitted a recon request and was told 'no manual penalty' Also, the 'sitemap' indexes in GWT showed 'pending' for 24x7 starting then. By about the 18th, the 'duplicate titles' count dropped to about 600 or so... the next day traffic hopped right back to about 800 clicks/day - for a week - then stopped again, down to 10/day, a week later, on the 26th. I then noticed that GWT was reporting 20K page-not found errors - this has now grown to 35K such errors! I realized that bogus internal links were being generated as I failed to disable the PHP warning messages.... so I disabled PHP warnings and fixed what I thought was the source of the errors. However, the not-found count continues to climb -- and I don't know where these bad internal links are coming from, because the GWT report lists these link sources as 'unavailable'. I'v been through a similar problem last year and it took months (4) for google to digest all the bogus pages ad recover. If I have to wait that long again I will lose much $$. Assuming that the large number of 404 internal errors is the reason for the sudden shutoff... How can I a) verify the source of these internal links, given that google says the source pages are 'unavailable'.. Most critically, how can I do a 'RESET" and have google re-spider my site -- or block the signature of these URLs in order to get rid of these errors ASAP?? thanks
Technical SEO | | mantucket0 -
Site indexing and traffic increased so dramatically overnight
Number of indexed pages jumped from 39000 to 52000 and traffic increased around 50% in my site.Note: used "site" command to check the indexed pages. I understand this is approximate.In addition, number of crawled pages/day also increased dramatically.No change in the robots.txt, sitemap, crawl errors and duplicate issues. But server migrated to different IT infrastructure. Before any celebration, want to identify the helper. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670