Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
-
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic.
For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down.
Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last?
We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
-
Hi.
Marie is right in what she says regarding there being many possible reasons but my main guess is that you have either been hit by Panda or that your old site had better content.
Firstly I would say that if you have had a technical site audit carried out that it was either a poor quality one or that you haven't actioned the recommendations.
There are two full versions of your site on different domains:-
http://www.waytekwire.com
http://order.waytekwire.comThese domains mirror each other exactly and both home pages are claiming to be the canonical version.
The content is extremely thin and your site is pretty much an example of what the original penguin update was released to combat. This product for example has no description and no worthy content on the page - http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
This product is not alone on your site, most of your products have no descriptions.Also your site is suffering from a common ecommerce issue of your products being viewable with or without a trailing slash and there is no canonical tag in the source to say which is the canonical version. i/e:-
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-Show the same content. in fact the same content is shown on all of these urls :-
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-
http://waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-
http://order.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://order.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-As Marie says, there could many possible reason for your ranking drop, my guess is that it is a combination of multiple reasons. Until you get the very basics sorted you are going to struggle in cracking this issue.
My best advice would be to pay for a really good site audit and follow through every recommendation. Failing that, sort out your site canonicalisation issues and give every single product a good description.
Really sorry for the bad news but hopefully it helps point you in the right direction.
All the best.
Ade. -
Sorry to hear about your traffic drop. Unfortunately I think this type of question is too broad for you to get an answer in a forum. There are so many possible reasons for the traffic to drop. Here are a few:
-The initial traffic boost could have been from the "honeymoon affect".
-Do you have content that is taken from other sites or otherwise duplicated? If so, then Panda could have affected you. Have a look at your organic traffic and see if it drops on a known Panda update day.
-If you built links with too much anchor text and from easy to get sources then Penguin could have affected you.
-You could have issues with your server
-You could have malware
-You could have competitors with better SEO.
-
Thank you for responding...
Yes, we did 301 redirects.
Yes, we did change the content
And yes, we switched platforms
-
Hi John,
First question is did you 301 redirect all of the old pages over to the new pages?
Did you change just the design or all of the content as well?
Did you switch platforms. i/e from one type of CMS to another.
Can you post the link to your site?
Cheers.
Ade.
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
-
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Why is my Bing traffic dropping?
In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
How important is the optional <priority>tag in an XML sitemap of your website? Can this help search engines understand the hierarchy of a website?</priority>
Can the <priority>tag be used to tell search engines the hierarchy of a site or should it be used to let search engines know which priority to we want pages to be indexed in?</priority>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mycity4kids0 -
Best way to noindex an image?
Hi all, A client wanted a few pages noindexed, which was no problem using the meta robots noindex tag. However they now want associated images removed, some of which still appear on pages that they still want indexed. I added the images to their robots.txt file a few weeks ago (probably over a month ago actually) but they're all still showing when you do an image search. What's the best way to noindex them for good, and how do I go about implementing it? Many thanks, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | steviephil0 -
DNS or 301 Website Redirect
We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label. Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice. We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar. Will it be their url or our sub domain? Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bloomnation0