Organic Traffic Drops to Zero After Site Migration
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I know this question is terribly general . . . but I don't even know where to start in terms of sharing info, which I would be glad to post on request.
My site was recently re-designed and migrated to a new server. I certainly expected SOME drop in traffic as google gets the snew site all figured out, but as you can see this drop has been dramatic. It's a simple wordpress site, I have yoast ptimized on it, I don't have many obvious errors that have not already been fixed that I can see.
I just . ..what the heck is going on and how can I fix it? Is it normal and takes a month or two to sort out? Help! -
Grasshopper, thanks for that. My whole SEO education is full of little holes where I know some crazy deep in depth stuff, but have zero knowledge of some of the most basic things . . . the whole www vs. non ww. thing right I think is one of them.
I test on screaming frog . . on both each is full of "200" codes, but the www version has a 301 redirect on it.
Does that mean I just need to configure moz to be looking for the NON www version and perhaps it will get more accurate information?
Not even checking http vs. https . . . It's not an ecommerce site so I should be OK there.
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Have you checked your GA implementation?
1. Go into Admin > Property > Property Settings
- Is your Default URL set correctly? http vs https? www vs non-www?
2. Go into Admin > View > View Settings
- Is your Default URL set correctly? http vs https? www vs non-www?
3. Have you crawled the site with Screaming Frog to verify your tag is on every page?
This "tip" may seem shockingly obvious, but I've been blown away by how many times I've seen it go wrong.
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I would check your robots.txt to ensure the entire site isn't being blocked. This is a common mistake with site redesigns or migrations. If you see the following rule, remove it promptly:
- user-agent:*
- disallow: /
If all your other traffic sources are showing (which would verify there's no problems with the analytics tag), it certainly looks like a case of a rogue sitewide noindex meta tag or general robots.txt issue.
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would there be a difference between www and non www url preference?
One of these should be used at all times. The one that you don't use should be eliminated by code in your htaccess file, or other controls on your server.
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Looks like I'm indexed, webmaster tools says 66 pages. There WERE some redirect errors, but I just fixed those today (though really most were irrelevent . . . .links to gallery pics, even links to some plugins)
I'm wondering if analytics is installed properly . . .would there be a difference between www and non www url preference?
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One of my competitors has his site redesigned about once a year. His designers make errors like,
** upload the new site with noindex
** change all the URLs and not redirect
** use their company name in every title tag
We enjoy making his money because he usually ranks above us. They usually catch it right away but this year the site has been noindexed for a few months now.
Other problems could be bad DNS, analytics not installed properly.
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