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
-
Measure traffic from serp feature
Hey 🙂 Does anyone know if there's a way of measuring traffic coming through serp features? I know that you can get some info on SEMrush but not traffic coming from those specific results like stories and instant answers. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Anna_90 -
Longterm wordpress blog not providing seo benefit to main site - help needed please
Hi I have a bigcommerce ecommerce store, with a Wordpress blog on a subdomain. The store and blog have been active for four years, the blog is regularly updated with original content, has many links to the store, is promoted regularly via my brand's social media channels and mailing list, and has the simplest SEO basics covered via a Yoast SEO plugin. But the store sees very little, if any, SEO benefit from the blog. My question is: based on this information, and the details below, is there an issue with the connection between the blog and main site in SEO terms? And if there is, how can I start fixing it? Further info: 1 In my Moz dashboard for the store site, the blog does not show at all as providing any inbound links or linking domains 2 Google Analytics also shows zero referral traffic to the store site from the blog since April 2015 3 Moz crawl issues is flagging ‘duplicate page content issues’ for pretty much every page of the blog, and the analysis provided suggests this may be related to tags but I have only basic SEO knowledge and am fast getting out of my depth here. 4 I have today altered the settings within the Yoast plugin on the blog to ‘noindex’ for Tags, Meta Robots, based on advice I have found in this section but am already well over my head and unsure even this is correct. An agency have been running SEO for the store since 2012 but since uncovering how little they have done in this time for the money paid, I am now taking matters back into my own hands. However I am on a very steep learning curve and this one is beyond me right now - please does anyone have any suggestions where I can start looking to uncover the root issue? Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated Thanks very much and hope to hear from someone!
Reporting & Analytics | | Warren_331 -
Bing Webmaster Tools data discrepency on traffic
Hi, For a given time period in Bing Webmaster Tools it says that combined clicks from Bing and Yahoo organic search are about 4,700 total, for the same time period in Google Analytics, combining sessions for Bing and Yahoo Organic comes out to about 8,900 total. Has anyone else experienced this discrepancy? Is this common? How can I get 8900 visits from 4700 clicks?
Reporting & Analytics | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Re-classifying a Traffic Source in Google Analytics
Hey All, I think it's inside of the Admin section of Google Analytics, right now I have a traffic source from the domain of indeed.ca that is being classified as Organic traffic when it should be classified as referring traffic, how can I tell Google Analytics that all traffic from this source should be classified as referral traffic and not organic traffic? Furthermore, after I make this change, will Google Analytics re-classify my past data so I can do a proper analysis? I can't remember how to do this and any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt1 -
Google referral drop after setting preferred domain
Hey all, After doing a lot of research, and verifying here in the forum, I set our site's preferred domain on monday. We had no preferred domain set for years, but we were already redirecting the non www site to the www one. So, it was evidently an oversight. The day after I set the preferred domain (Jan 29) our google referral traffic hit an all time low. Any other thoughts on the cause? Any ideas on why setting a preferred domain would be a bad idea? Our site is www.mnn.com. Thanks!! Lisa
Reporting & Analytics | | Aggie0 -
Traffic Down for Most Referrers - not just Google
Our traffic has taken a severe hit, over the past 3 weeks - down about 60%, which I had assumed was caused by the Penguin update. However on closer inspection of our analytics, our traffic is is down by between 30 and 50% for nearly all our referrers - including Bing and other search engines, referring sites, and even direct traffic! Google provides the vast majority of our traffic, so in terms of the absolute visitor count, the drop in Google traffic has the biggest effect - by some distance. But the fact that traffic is down by similar percentages suggest that Penguin isn't the cause of our troubles at all. We sell garden products in the UK, and it's just coming into peak season. Last year, May was one of our top months, External conditions - such as the very wet weather over the past month, economic gloom and doom - don't begin to explain this sudden and dramatic drop in traffic. We are very perplexed. If anyone has any bright ideas, I'd be interested to hear them. Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | atticus70 -
Moved Up in SERPS & Traffic, Need Help Converting
Hello, After listening to the advice of many of you on this forum, I have managed to move my site up in the SERPS, close enough to where I want/need to be. My traffic has increased heavily, yet I am still not seeing a large increase in orders being placed. I am positive that I have the lowest prices on these items, and the most information available about them, yet I still can't seem to convert a lot of this traffic into sales. Can you guys please take a look at my site and provide some guidance on what I can/should do to help convert these visitors to customers? my site is : http://goo.gl/JgK1e Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Prime850 -
Whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
whats the best way to separate Google Shopping from regular organic traffic in analytics?
Reporting & Analytics | | DavidKonigsberg0