Website design chnage and massive traffic drop?
-
I changed my Drupal theme to "Bootstrap 3" and now my traffic is down 50% gradually in past 5 days, can this be theme related?
Answers to checks below :
1). There were no redirects involved, I just flipped a switch and changed theme for my Drupal blog.
2). No issues reported by Google WMT except the fact that impressions fell, see stat images for comparison at - http://imgur.com/a/5PssH#0.
3). site:mysiteurl.com shows healthy "About 201,000 results".
4). Checked slow loading times and browser issue, nothing there.
5). It's not a seasonal drop.
Pls. suggest what else should I focus upon to find the reason. @Prateek_Chandra where can I share my analytic report with you privately. I can also enable guest access to my account for you to have a look.
-
Hi , I am sorry for the late response. For some reason I did not get any notifications for your message. Please check my private message to you.
-
Oh Crap! I hate those moments. : ) I've been there.
Here's some questions you can ask yourself to get you on the right track to fixing your problem:
- Did you change your site from noindex/nofollow to index/follow? - I know this is pretty basic but I see it happen all the time during dev work.
- URL structure change - when you switched over to a new site did you use the exact URL structure that your previous site had?
- 301 redirects - following the previous question, if URL structure did change, you'll need to 301 redirect all URL's properly. On this note, the authority of your 301 redirects will not fully pass over to your new URL's for about a month (if you're doing good social promotion you won't really notice a difference).
- Proper use of the canonical tag - You'll want to make sure your site is using proper attribution with the rel canonical tag (if you're using canonicals). More then likely this is not the problem you're dealing with unless you have a large eCommerce site or multiple category blog with potential duplicate content issues.
- Indexing issues - if you have a ton of 404 pages you're also going to experience some indexing issues (this would be part of the URL structure change). Plus, if those 404 pages were quite authoritative, you probably lost a lot of ranking juice as well. Load times - if you're new site is loading really slow this will also cause indexing issues. Google's picky, the only time they crawl really slow sites is if they have significant authority.
Aside from those tips, I'd really need to see the site and do an analysis for you.
Valuable resources for you:
http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects http://moz.com/blog/restructuring-your-website-and-how-to-minimize-traffic-loss -
Hi,
Sorry to hear that you are in the situation but its a problem many website owners face when they change / upgrade the website.
You have mentioned that your website traffic is down by 50% gradually in past 5 days. While there could be many reasons for the same but there are some basic checks you should do:
1. Ensure that all the indexed links in the old website are either live on the new site or redirected (301) to their corresponding pages on the new site.
2. Ensure from google webmaster tools that your new site is not facing any indexing problems. You can also do a quick check to see what pages are indexed. (Use "site:www.yoursite.com" in google search or check webmaster tools.)
3. Ensure that there are no technical issues like, slow site loading time, browser compatibility issues etc. Sometimes some scripts on your new site may affect the website loading times significantly so much that on many occasions the site fails to load.
4. Verify from google analytics if your website traffic has dropped or the avg time , bounce rate etc have changed. There is a high chance that your website's average visit duration would have dropped or bounce rate would have increased which would affect your site's conversions significantly.
If the above things are in place we can get into some advanced analysis:
1. Check your google analytics report and compare same time frame for last month or year to ensure this is not a seasonal slow down of traffic for your industry in general.
2. Check google analytics to find out if your traffic sources (organic keywords, referrals etc) are showing some abnormality compared to your website's average weekly report. You would need to compare this over few intervals of time to be able to point out any significant variations. If there are huge variations, specially in organic sources and referral sources, chances are its an impact of google's recent updates which would have affected your website's rankings.
If you still don't find a solution, please share with me your google analytics report for last 6 months.
I am hoping my answers could be of some help to you but in case these are things you have already checked, I will be glad to assist you further.
Regards,
Prateek
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
-
Ranking of non-homepage leads to decrease in website ranking?
Hi all, Google picks up a non-homepage to rank for primary keyword where homepage is actually optimised to rank for same keyword. This means Google is ignoring the actual page and ranking other page. Does this scenario means that we are ranking lower as the homepage is not considered here? We may rank much better if homepage is preferred by Google? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Website organic traffic unchanged, impressions took a 98% drop in the last week.
Hi all, I have a very curious predicament and I'd be grateful if someone could shed some light on the situation. As mentioned in the title, organic traffic to our website has remained unchanged, but organic impressions have taken a 98% drop in the last week. This happened suddenly over one day; on October 22, impressions were 700, on October 23, they were 500, and on October 24 they drastically dropped to 50. The next two days they were at 22 and then up to 35. Organic traffic, however, showed the normal "weekend drop" as of October 24, and is still showing normal level (even increased a bit) continuing into this week. These are organic impressions according to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. We did perform a complete site redesign a month ago. Could this be an effect from the redesign? We also noticed drop in Domain Authority, but our competitors suffered a similar (if not greater) drop as well, so we wondered if it could be due in part to the algorithm update. If anyone could shed some light on the situation I would be so appreciative! Thanks!
Web Design | | Joanne_Pendon0 -
Link juice passing from a .org.uk link to a .org/uk websites
Hi all, A client I am working on had a CMS built in recently which has resulted in all their canonicals tags being taken off the website, and as such the same page with both a .org/uk and .org.uk/uk domain have appeared in the search results and I am wondering what your guys take is on the best cause of action. For further background: Historically they have always used .org.uk/uk (not sure why) for their UK website and used .org/xxx for other countries (they also have a .org splashpage FYI). Having seen the .org/uk pages, and knowing they have to choose one to avoid duplication, they would like to move their uk website to the .org/uk domain to fit in with the rest of the divisions. However due to the historical use of .org.uk/uk their backlink profile contains links to both the .org.uk and .org domains. My question then: would a canonical tag on all the .org.uk/uk pages pointing to the .org/uk pages be strong enough to pass on link juice to the .org/uk pages (from all links pointing to .org.uk) or would a 301 redirect be required in this instance, or indeed would it be best to stay with the .org.uk/uk domain? Thanks, Diana
Web Design | | Diana.varbanescu0 -
Website redesign testing environment
An external company is redesigning our website. They have a draft version active in a folder on their website to enable us to view it (example: www.externalcompanywebsite.com/ourwebsite/). There is no permission required to view the website, anyone with the url could just go there. I am not sure if they're using the robots.txt to block crawlers, or if they're blocking specific ip addresses. If the engines are allowed to crawl their website and they index pages of our draft website, does that affect our website negatively in the future once we host it on our domain?
Web Design | | jdossetti0 -
Is this causing me to drop in rank?
Today I noticed I was dropping (pretty big jump) for some keywords, so I checked out the source of a page, and noticed that my source code has two canonical urls. One to the home page, and one to the /page-title. I just changed themes recently, and the dropped happened after I changed themes. Is this what's causing me to drop in rank for certain terms? You can view the source here: http://noahsdad.com/physical-characteristics/
Web Design | | NoahsDad0 -
Facing design issue in IE6 and IE7
Hi, I implemented custom search code on my website which is on a test url http://61.246.241.232/. It is working perfectly fine on all the browsers except on IE6 and IE7. Can anyone please let me know the solution to this problem. Thanks & Regards
Web Design | | IM_Learner0 -
Using Wordpress as CMS for large Websites
Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind. Cheers!
Web Design | | RishadShaikh590