Huge organic drop following new site go live
-
Hi Guys,
I am currently working on a site that's organic traffic suffered ( and is still suffering ) a huge drop in organic traffic.
From a consistent 3-400 organic visits a day to almost zero. This happened as soon as the new site went live. I am now digging to find out why.
301s were put in place ( over 2, 500 over them ) and there are still over 1,100 outstanding after review search console this morning.
Having looked at the redirect file that was put in place when the new site went live, it all look OK, apart from the redirects look like this...
http://www.physiotherapystore.com/ to http://physiotherapystore.com/
Where the new URL is missing www. - I am concerned this is causing a large duplicate issue as both www. and non www. work fine.
I am right to have concern or is this something not to worry about?
-
Its really hard to analyze a traffic drop like this without some critical information about serps.
The main guess here is that some high traffic ranking just dropped, that's why im asking about the SC information.
And yes, some of all of these issues combined can cause the traffic drop. I'd try to use the analytics information looking for some specific item, such as a page what recieved a lot of traffic and then stopped recieving -
canonical has now been requested on home page.
SC only shows 1096 404's due to be fixed soon.
Some pages have wrong canonicals, for example:
http://physiotherapystore.com/a60.html has a canonical to http://www.physiotherapystore.com/a60.html?SID=km31jh6kvjfcs45oq0s2qltdc3 which is incorrect. We have a few of these that are in dev to be fixed.
I'm still not sure though if these issues could have caused a huge sudden drop in traffic?
Thanks
-
- Redirection. Its not neccesarry to create a redirection. Another way is to set rel=canonical
- Its not explicit for me the sitemap. Might be good to add it in the robots.txt
- So the problem goes over 90 days ago, this makes it more difficult.
- Still SC doesnt show any errors?
-
Thank you,
Do you recommend I go into the redirect file and add in www where it is not already there?
I am aware of meta description and there is a sitemap here: http://www.physiotherapystore.com/sitemaps/physio/sitemap.xml
Search Console data doesn't go back far enough to see the sudden drop in traffic.
-
Hi there,
There are some issues:
- Bad redirect the non-www and www version. This is causing serious duplicate
- Meta description is incorrect.
- There are no sitemap.xml
- Not necesarly an issue: you are disallowing the indexing of google images.
Also, have you chequed the Search Console?It should show any error.
Can you identify whether there was a specific ranking drop (using a search console and/or analytics)?Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site once this happens?
Hi, we will be moving a clients’ site address from one domain to another and will of course be doing 301 redirects and notifying Google of the site address change in WMT. The problem is, that at some point in the future (say 3-6 months), the old domain will be going live with a new site as the current client does not own the domain and the owner will be wanting it back unfortunately. How will this affect the rankings and traffic of the new site (new domain) once this (old domain with new site) happens? Will the site address change be enough to keep the rankings but it will lose backlink traffic? Or will rankings go down since the 301 redirects will in essence no longer be in affect? Many thanks for your help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSIDW0 -
How to build PA and DA for a new site?
Hi Guys, Any good tips on how to build PA and DA for a new website about 3 months old now, and our DA is at 5 while PA 1. Any good ideas from past experiences on how to build these up? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
Separate Site or should we incorporate it into our main site
Hello, We have a website to sell personal development trainings. The owners want to start 2 blogs - one for each owner - that promotes their personal coaching practices. What's the SEO advantages of embedding both blogs in the current site vs starting 2 brand new blogs with their names as the domain names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
How long until 301 passes juice to new site?
We put up a new site for an attorney and changed his url along with total redevelopment. We used a 301 for the old to the new and it does resolve to the new. It has been one month and the old site in OSE still shows DA of 37 with PA for homepage of 15. The new site has come up.....to a DA of 6 with homepage at 1 still. For any who might wish it, the referring site is theHollandLawFirm.com and the new site is Houston-Bankruptcy-Attorney.info. Would love to know of any experience with the timing on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher0 -
New Domain Name For Site That Ranks Highly on Key Terms
Here's my problem -- which is actually a pretty good problem to have. My client is a speciality service provider in an extremely competitive field. It charges 3 to 5 times what others do for providing a super-premium level of service. It doesn't have -- nor does it want -- many customers. I can't go into details, but let's just say the business model is a bit like the charity or premium newsletter publishing model. It is extremely hard to recruit new members -- but once recruited, members tend to stay for a long time at high price points. Personal referral is key. As result of my efforts over the last 90 days, the client's SEO results have skyrocketed. After a couple of false starts, we have focussed on key terms the target demographic is likely to search, rather than the generic terms others in the industry use. We have also had great success with a social media strategy -- since the few people likely to be interested in paying such high prices know like-minded folks. For the first time, my client is getting "walk in" prospects. They are delighted! But they are not really walk-ins. They have already found the site -- either through SERPs or Facebook or Twitter. Now we need to get to the next level. Here's the problem: the client's domain name sucks. It is short, but combines an acronym with one of the words in its long-version name. It uses the British spelling version of the long name fragment, even though most Canadians now use American spelling. And it is a .ca, rather than a dot.com So I think we have to bite the bullet and change to the long, dot com version of the name, which is available and has the additional benefit of having embedded within it a key search term. I am basically an editorial/content guy and not a tech guy. The IT guys at my firm are strongly encouraging me to make the change...in very "colorful" language. We can certainly do 301 redirects at the page level. But I would like some additional validation before proceeding. My questions are: how much link juice might we lose? I've seen the figure of 10% bandied around. Is it accurate? might we see a temporary dip in results? If so, how long would it last? what questions did I forget to ask? What additional info do you need to offer informed advice ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanielFreedman0