SEO traffic had significantly dropped
-
I know this question has been asked before, but I'm hoping someone can address my specific issue.
We recently did a complete redesign of our site and moved it over to a new server. The site was even "down" for about a week, where we had a static splash page. However since relaunching (it's not been over two weeks) we've seen a significant drop in search engine traffic. We are using Yoast for Wordpress.
The site is The Tech Block. Could anyone see if there is something we're doing wrong?
Thanks
-
Dan,
Thanks a lot for your help. I was under the impression that this setting would prevent everything from page2 onwards from indexing. Isn't that a bad thing? Don't I want all my pages indexed? Could you explain why? I actually read your articles many times, and it's great!
Thanks so much for your help!
-
Hi - I think I just answered another one of your questions too Here's one more thing...
You should noindex subpages. There's a lot of them in the index. Here's the settings.
For anyone else reading this, I mentioned in the other answer to also add %%excerpt%% to all the descriptions so there's a default meta description in there as well.
And check out my article on WordPress SEO.
-Dan
-
Thank you so much!
-
Category pages are fine to leave unchecked if they are well organised and you want them to be found in SERPs.
I would tick the tags like Irving suggested so they are hidden from SERPs - otherwise you'll get 1000s of low quality pages being indexed by Google.
Don't worry about using the meta keywords tag anymore, like Irving said, it's dead and isn't a factor in the SEO algorithm anymore.
-
What would you recommend? Sorry, I'm not SEO expert like you are! But I really appreciate the help.
-
if you don't want the page indexed like the tag or category pages check it. confirm in your source code that it is showing up properly too
unchecked on the meta keywords tag, that tag is dead
-
Should noindex, follow be checked or unchecked?
should "Use meta keywords tag" be checked?
Thanks so much for your help
-
Should noindex, follow be checked or unchecked?
-
your tag pages are getting indexed, they should be noindex follow. get the yoast SEO plugin for wordpress and manage your noindex and canonical tags so that you aren't spamming google with pages of low quality and duplicate content
-
I do not believe the new site structure has changed. For instance, if you click on a link prior to the site update, it still brings you to the proper page.
-
Of course it dropped, you deleted your site. The old site should have stayed up until the new one was rolled out.
There are so many factors that could have caused your drop in a site redesign, without seeing the old site and new site it's hard to make a determination just on a URL, but did the URL structure change and if so did you 301 redirect?
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
-
PDF web traffic hitting our site
Hi there, Over the last few months our traffic has spiked due to irrelevant pdf documents sending us crap traffic, our bounce rate is sky high as well as other metrics. I don't want to just filter out this traffic in GA rather try and stop our site from being attacked. Any advice on a way forward would be great. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ICMPmarketing0 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
SEO Working GREAT! Although Keyword Rankings Only Directing to Home Page.
Since I've become a fellow MOZer I've seen an increase on my sites and proud to say that ALL of my clients have now accomplished 1st page rankings on at least 2 of their top 3 keywords. Yes, I am as stoked as them. Although I am a bit worried because as I rank keywords and test them on Google and engines alike all of our rankings direct to the homepage. I am essentially new to SEO. So as happy as I am to be doing something right I'm worried I'm losing the end user. By having them need to Search our site/menus/blog for the keywords/phrase that got them to us will turn most searchers away. They want the content now. What am I doing wrong? My pages are pretty specific so I never cared to use rel-canonical's...I dont have duplicate content, other than your typical footer/side bar consistent info. So I'm curious where I've gone wrong. Little history on my sites: I Use Joomla 2.5 & 3.x. I manage seo details through sh404seo. I've cleaned all duplicates I can up other than what these dynamic cms generate by just using one. I've done fairly well and all my pages rank A for moz's onpage grader for the keyword optimized around. Any help is appreciate, THANK YOU!
Reporting & Analytics | | Funk-Creative-Media0 -
Strange Traffic Spike In Google Analytics
Over the last two days I have seen a huge spike in the pageviews to my site www.learnbonds.com. Up to this point my average page views per visit has been less than 2. For the last couple of days it has jumped to 5 but the average time on the site has not increased. Upon further investigation under the browser and OS page of google analytics I found that traffic coming from internet explorer and IE with Chrome Frame is reporting 10+ pageviews per visit. Below is a screenshot. Any insight into what might be causing this and how to fix it that the community can provide would be appreciated. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | davidwaring
DaveZUaQWJd.png?1?21800 -
Ideas for a strange surge in direct traffic
Being the type of person that can't stop checking my Google Analytics, I noticed this morning that between the hours of 12 and 2 central time last night I recieved a strange surge of direct traffic. My site typically gets around 40 direct visits per day (most of them coming during peak hours around the time people are getting off of work). I received 150 direct visits during this random time in the middle of the night. My bounce rate soared as almost every visit was a bounce. The visitors locations are spread out as if it is natural human traffic. Every single one of the visitors is using a chrome browser. Has anyone else run into something like this? All I can think of is that someone might have an addon or toolbar for chrome that linked to my site for a while in a way that caused unsuspecting visitors to end up on my page. For now I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the traffic doesn't return, as it could be bad news for my Adsense. *Edit: Also of particular interest, each direct visit went to an internal page on my site and no two of the 150 visits went to the same internal page. I also added an image showing a normal complete day's direct traffic and my direct traffic for today so far (The bulk of the surge came yesterday but the shot from today illustrates the surge better because it is missing my naturally daily direct traffic that comes in the afternoon) heXFb#LiiEr
Reporting & Analytics | | pattersonla0 -
Why is my direct traffic down DRASTICALLY?
I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying. My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic) I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue. I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers. Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue. The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before. Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend). Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening? Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
Reporting & Analytics | | CassisGroup
Any thoughts?0 -
SEO implications of moving from https to http
We're considering moving from 100% https to http to improve performance. What, if any, SEO implications are there? Do search engines need redirects when changing from https to http pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueAcorn0 -
Our SEO is garbage. can someone answer a few questions for me?
I've seen our SEO drop to more or less the bottom of the barrel, and I don't have any answers yet as to why. SEOMoz is running it's crawl currently, and I have a few errors about duplicate titles and content, so I know I have some work cut out for me. But, why the sudden drop? The only change I made at the time was a change to our URL structure, but all links were 301'd to their new location. Does this still hurt SEO that terribly? Also, our robots.txt file is getting indexed and showing up as the first result at times. Very embarrassing. It's doing better than our other pages. 😞 I don't get what's happening here. Yrzu3,fkbYu
Reporting & Analytics | | stagl0