Traffic has dropped off a cliff
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I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why?
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yes, thanks for the follow up. I have already done that and am awaiting results. thanks again
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I just looked in Google for your site and it looks like it's indexed again. Hope everything is recovering quickly for you! I'd suggest running a campaign in SEOmoz for that site (if you haven't yet) to pick up any duplicate content issues and other suggestions that we have that can further help your site.
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It looks like you may be telling Google to ignore your site via noindex nofollow. There are two possible places this could be set:
In the Yoast plugin you can tell it how you want the robots to behave: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta You want it to check both Index and Follow.
Similarly in Wordpress itself there is an option under Settings > Privacy. You want to check I want my blog to be visible to everyone.
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wow, that's confusing! I was just assuming Yoast was the gatekeeper of the robots, but that's not the case. Your right, in my privacy settings it was set to block! Thanks a lot!
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The redirects are necessary for pages that are indexed in the search engines (so people coming from a search result can get to the right page) and for pages that are linked, bookmarked, etc. You generally want to make sure that most pages you change get a redirect.
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I am getting ready to add WordPress too and change some url's. My understanding is that redirects are only necessary if you have links on those pages....is that correct?
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Take a look under settings (not via Yoast, but just regular WP settings) and privacy and make sure that your blog is not set to private.
Also, if you've paid someone a bunch of money to redesign your site, they should really have taken better care than to leave the noindex,nofollow on afterwards. You might want to drop them a note saying they did you a major disservice.
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thanks, yes, i see it on Yoast, but it is set to Allow
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thanks for the reply
are google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
yes, i have a warning in my webmaster account that states robots are being blocked by this code: User-agent: *
Disallow: /but i have no idea how to change that in wordpress
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Ahh, I found a robots noindex,nofollow on your home page and at least one internal. That would do it!
There should be a setting in Wordpress that asks if you want your blog to be private/ not indexed by the search engines. Did that setting stay checked after you went live by chance?
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If you're able to give us a little more information that would help.
Has the organic traffic dropped from all of the search engines, or just one?
Has it dropped for all of your pages or just some of your pages?
Has it dropped for all of your keywords or just some of your keywords?
Have you verified the site in Google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
When you redesigned, did you put in redirects from the old pages to the new pages (if your URL structure changed)?
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