Image ranking plummet help
-
Hi Moz Community,
I need help understanding why my site is dropping rankings and traffic significantly. We were hit the hardest with doing a image query filter ~6/2-6/3 (image attached).
We also had a site migration on this exact date, but didn't change URL structure or domain names, just switched hosting sites. I'm assuming this plummet is from the migration, but can't figure out why. I may also not be understanding this filter clearly so let me know.
Shoot any questions my way that could help your understanding of the problem be more clear.
Thanks,
-Reed -
Haha yeah I tend to get OCD on a lot of things. Awesome, thanks for taking the time to get back to me on this. I have learned to love the Moz community these days.
And that's a good answer, that's what I was hoping, but I guess anytime I see a traffic dip I immediately panic rather than take into mind what you just said.
Thanks again,
-Reed
-
Nice work moving over to the "hyphen" as opposed to the "underscore", being that the big G doesn't recognize underscores as a space.
I also agree with cleaning up the URL's to not have the .jsp extension. That could just be my OCD kicking in lol
If you are able to create a script to do all that heavy lifting, certainly the best approach.
To answer your question: IMO I would think the combination of all the changes the site went through has cause Google's algo to be in shock when it crawls your site. Give it time, continue cleaning it up and I think you will recover just fine. If anything, I think you will be better than you were before the move as a result of your house cleaning.
-
Hey Ryan, I actually have another question if you wouldn't mind helping out.
Before our migration, our old team was creating all URLS with underscores as separators and ending in .jsp. I changed this to not have .jsp and to only use "-" as word separators in URLs.
However, we have a lot of backlinks with content linking to those .jsp URLs (and our old blog posts all link to those pages), which are 404 product pages. (I can redirect, but there are thousands of them). I could probably develop a script to automatically rewrite too.
My question: could this be a contributing factor to our organic downfall too?
-
The struggle is REAL ha haa I feel your pain brother. Get some good quality blog articles out and share them on your social platforms. That may help push the new data and get it circulating.Wishing all the best!
-
Thanks for helping out Bryan and Donford, it's been about a month and a half since migration so I'll definitely wait it out another month, implement some good marketing/content and see what it looks like after that.
Ahh, the waiting game of organic traffic.
-
Yeah, if a new IP was assigned to the site that is more than likely the cause of the dip. It should recover though, just needs time to propagate. Certainly wish you all the best with this! Keep us posted
-
Hi ICEReed,
If you received a new IP, than I am fairly certain that is the issue. DNS has to propagate across the net before traffic returns to normal. I have had a few experiences with this, and have seen it take up to 3 months before traffic was returned to normal.
-
Thanks for responding Bryan,
I have referenced the tips in the website migration guide, but it's never a bad move to go over them one more time.
A new ip address was assigned to the site when we migrated.
I initially had a lot of indexing issues that are now fixed, but were a problem at the start of the migration. For instance, our sitemap.xml just vanished as did our robots.txt file. They are back up and running, but the dev team didn't migrate them over.
-
Hey Reed!
We experienced a similar dip for a site when migrating to a new server back in September 2013. Did you reference the tips listed in the post from Moz? Website Migration Guide
Its unfortunate that you made a few tweaks at the same time, which makes this more difficult to pin down.
When you migrated, did you carry over the original ip address or was a new one assigned to the site?
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
-
Alexa Rank and Sem Rush Rank
Just wondering if these rankings even matter? One will go up while the other goes down.. and the Alexa ranking doesn't seem to follow any rhyme or reason in relation to the data I see in Google analytics. Anyone else using these tools? Is one a better indicator of a websites health than the other or should we scrap both from our reports?
Reporting & Analytics | | unikey0 -
Impressions in GWT have dropped to nothing, but my page is still ranking normally
Hello Everyone, I'm seeing a strange issue. On the 22nd of this month Webmasters tools started showing 6 impressions per day down from hundreds or thousands. I thought I was hit with a huge penalty for my keywords but they are still ranking where they have for the past month or two on Google. In analytics my organic traffic is stable. It just seems to be GWT showing the massive drop. My domain is: http://Patchofland.com Any Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | PatchofLand0 -
Multiple-Domain tracking for sister sites- NO retail checkout- Please help
Hello, I have about 5 sites I want to set up multiple-domain tracking in google analytics. All posts I read seem to be focused on cross-domain tracking for the purpose of tracking a visitor from one domain across another domain for shopping cart check outs. I don't need that. I have about 3 sister sites (mastersite.com, sistersite1.com, sistersite2.com, sistersite3.com) related to my primary site. I want 1 Master Analytics Profile to track traffic for all of these sites combined. My visitors will not jump from mastersite.com over to sistersite1.com. There will be no cross-domain visits. How can I set up 1 master google analytics profile that will aggregate traffic data from all sites and present the data to me in one analytics profile. Please help
Reporting & Analytics | | AndreGant0 -
What's the final word on Image Search tracking in Google Analytics?
Sorry if this has been answered but I can't seem to get a straight answer to my questions by searching around. How is traffic referred by Google Images counted in Google Analytics? I know it used to be referral traffic from google.com/imgres. A lot of things I have read say that it should all be under google/organic now, but my site still gets referral traffic from google.com/imgres, so that can't be. However I also get traffic as google/organic that I am pretty sure is from image search, because we don't rank for the keyword normally, but we do for image search. What's the deal? How is traffic from an embedded image in a regular result page counted? How can I segment my image search traffic better? It would be great to see image search traffic as it's own medium. I found a script here -- http://jrom.net/google-images-in-google-analytics -- that looks promising, has anyone used it or can recommend another way? I haven't used the GA API very much so I want to make sure the script is kosher and won't screw up my numbers.
Reporting & Analytics | | tact0 -
Can't figure this ranking out..
Hi, This is puzzling me. I've been in the second/third position for a week or so for my best keyword. That is for Google US unpersonalized, which is the one that brings more traffic, as far as I understand. It can't get MUCH better. Well, I can be first, but second and third position is really awesome in my case (highly competitive keyword according to SEOMOZ PRO). Then, why on earth my traffic for that keyword was 8 times better a year ago?? I mean, a year ago I received an average of 800 visits per day and now I can barely reach 90 visits per day being in the second / third place. Visits can't increase from 90 to 800 just for increasing one spot. I've never seen in my stats such drop in my rankings. I thought that due to google updates my site was sent below the 20th position or something. But my I was shocked today when I saw that I still have the second/third position Am I crazy or this looks wrong? The page title and description that shows in google hasn't changed, so people looking for that keyword are seeing the same as one year ago. It is not a seasonal or time sensitive keyword. My best guess is that people are now always logged in and results are personalized. Don't know much about personalized results but I don't think you can optimize much for those. If that's the case, then how on earth can we optimize a page if everybody is using personalized results? Is there a way to improve your rankings in those cases? Thanks, Enrique
Reporting & Analytics | | enriquef0 -
500 errors and impact on google rankings
Since the launch of our newly designed website about 6 months ago, we are experiencing a high number of 500 server errors (>2000). Attempts to resolve these errors have been unsuccessful to date. We have just started to notice a consistent and sustained drop in rankings despite our hard sought efforts to correct. Two questions... can very high levels of 500 errors adversely effect our google rankings? And, if this is the case, what type of specialist (what are they called) has expertise to investigate and fix this issue. I should also mention that the sitemap also goes down on a regular basis, which some have stated is due to the size of the site (>500 pages). Don't know if they're part of the same problem? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | ahw0 -
Tracking Social Media Logged In Users Help
Hi, I recently read Tom Anthony's post on "Monitor Which Social Networks Your Visitors are Logged Into With Google Analytics". I have looked and re-looked at the code implemented and after two days I am still not getting any results tracking. Could somebody please take a look at my site and tell me if they see any conflicts or errors I may have made when installing the code. Thanks for any help!
Reporting & Analytics | | BryanCasson0 -
Home page rankings disappeared - Google Penalty?
Hi, I have a clients website that I have been working on for a few months now. On-page SEO for home page is A for all target keywords. All Domain / subdomain / external link data etc. much stronger than all competition. But approx 3 months ago (before Panda update) all home page rankings (except 1 keyword) dropped out sight in Google rankings. 3 months later, still can't work out why. Sometimes rankings come back onto page 9 or so then drop out again. Deeper pages are not effected, just the Home page. Looks like a Google penalty to me but can't work out why. Any suggestions would be gratefully received. Website is - www.marrikashairextensions.com Many thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | websearchseo0