Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
-
Hi Mozers,
I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward.
To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month.
The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then:
CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks
CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks
PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks
Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward?
Any advice is much appreciated,
Thank you!!!
-
You might also ask Volusion if they have changed your site to a new server recently. I assume you are on a shared or semi-dedicated server with them. Sometimes, as you well know, if one of the other sites on that server loses reputation, it can effect you too.
Volusion has also had some down-time recently. That may be a factor too.
You are right about shocking the engines. It happens, but then usually things bounce back. It sounds to me like you are really doing all the right things. Be patient, I think you're going to be fine. Your link profile at Ahrefs.com looks really good. It sounds like you have good instincts.
Let me know what happens!
-
Again, thank you for your feedback!
I may have changed a few of the product codes which should create a 404, but i had a catch all redirect so now they are soft 404. I only have 29 total, or 20 more than when i started. I will make sure to fix, even if this is not the cause.
With 1200 pages, and 600 products I am confident that +20 soft 404's is causing 25% week over week traffic, hurting me from 2K a week to 1K a week.
See screenshot from webmaster tools
I am so puzzled by this.
I think that I have just shocked the engines. I have done it before, hurt for 6 weeks, then back to normal, hopefully better (fingers crossed).
-
Hi Chris,
Hah! What a coincidence. Okay, so I do have a specific siggestion pertaining to Volusion. Yes, you are correct in that when you are first setting up your store, if you write SEO friendly URLs (I believe they pull it from the "Product Name Short" field), Volusion automatically takes care of the redirect in that situation. However, if you then decide to change one of those, I believe you need to manually set up a redirect in the 301 redirects database section of the back end. This may even be true if you had default URLs, launched your store, got crawled and indexed and then updated to a SEO-friendly URL. (You may want to check with Volusion on that - but sometimes their tech support is hit or miss).
You may have already done this too, so again, if so, I apologize
Also, have you checked to see if Google might still be indexing the old URLs in addition to the new ones? If so, when you click on the old one, are you getting a 404, does it stay the same, or does it redirect? If it redirects, what is the canonical tag? When I was last on Volusion they hadn't implemented a good way to manage canonical tags either. Because of their template, the canonicals were all http://www.MY-STORE.com , which wasn't good. They may have improved that since I managed one of their stores, not sure.
Also, are the stats in your original question purely out of SEOMoz, or are they from Google Analytics? I find SEOMoz can occasionally fluctuate wildly if I change targeted keywords in a campaign.
Just some thoughts to hopefully help!
Dana
-
Great question! Sorry i forgot to mention, I have been on volusion for a while, so all 301R is managed automatically.
When i switched to volusion originally (9 months ago?) the 301R was mismanaged, lost a lot of traffic, but after about 4 months it was back to normal.
Knowing that all links are redirected in my recent change, do you have any suggestions/thoughts on what to do to regain my traffic?
-
Hi Chris,
You didn't mention 301-redirects in your post. Did you set up 301-redirects for all of the URLs that you changed? If not, that explains the drop. If you did set them up, have you checked them all to make sure they are redirecting properly?
What about canonical tags? Did you update your canonical tags to reflect the new URLs?
In 2008 I worked for a company that migrated from self-hosting to Volusion and all of their URLs change. I was not doing SEO for them (yet), and they mismanaged their 301-redirects and lost about half of their traffic. It took a long time to recover. The good news is once they fixed the 301s the site traffic came back iwthin about 6 weeks (but I know 6 weeks can seem like an eternity).
Hope these questions aren't too basic and hope this helps somewhat.
Dana
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
-
Sudden Drop in Index Status on GSC
Hi all, We've seen a sudden drop in index status on GSC from 19,000 to 12,000. Rankings, referring domains, organic traffic etc. have not changed. However, we have implemented a huge number of redirects and done a site migration from http to https in the past year. Could this have an effect? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | SMVSEO0 -
Internal Referral Traffic Issue due to https/http?
Hi Mozzers, we´re running a secured https account section on our website including a messaging center where lots of non secured own URLs are being shared among the users. Is there a possibility that a user clicking on one of the shared URLs within the https section triggering another session thats been counted as direct traffic? Thanks for your help! Greets
Reporting & Analytics | | LocalIM
Manson0 -
Referral Traffic from Google
Hello, I have a question about my company's new website. I've worked in SEO and studied Google Analytics results for a few years now but have never really come across something like this. I started in this position in January of this year and when I started breaking down the traffic sources in Google Analytics, I noticed most of the traffic was coming from Google.com as a referral source. I had never seen Google.com as a referral source before so I looked into options for what it could be. It was not a paid ad and our organic traffic was coming through in Analytics, Before I could get any further, our new website was launched (we switched CRM's to WordPress) and the referral traffic from google went from 2,966 in January of 2015 to 22 in February 2015. for more comparison, in February of 2014, the referral traffic from Google was 2,496. I expected a drop when we switched CRM's but we correctly re-directed all pages and created a new sitemap and our organic traffic is up since the switch (not enough to cover drop in referral). I thought at first this had to do with our Google sellers account being de-activated when we made the switch, but I quickly fixed this over a month ago and no change. I'm wondering if anyone has ever seen Google.com come through as a referral source in Google Analytics and if they we're able to figure out what it actually was. This would be a great help! Thank you, Alex
Reporting & Analytics | | RASEO1 -
Self-Reffering Traffic After upgrading to Universal Analytics
Backstory: We have always had an issue with self-referring traffic but in waiting for the UA upgrade we put it on the backburner for getting fixed. We have now upgraded to UA and I was under the impression that GA would automatically exclude the domain associated with a property as a referral source. However this is not what I am seeing under my referral traffic source. With 10 websites having issues with this I need some help. Should I use the referral exclusion list? Also on a handful of our sites we have region specific URLs, I am also seeing these come in as self-referring traffic. I should also mention that about 85% of our sales are being attributed to the self-referring traffic. Here are two sites for example sake: ZootSports.com and K2snowboarding.com
Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports0 -
Has anybody else had unusual /feed crawl errors in GWT on normal url's?
I'm getting crawl error notifications in Google Webmaster tools for pages that do not exist on my sites?! Basically normal URL's with /feed on the end.. http://jobs-transport.co.uk/submit/feed/ http://jobs-transport.co.uk/login/feed Has any body else experienced this problem? I have no idea why this is happening. Simon
Reporting & Analytics | | simmo2350 -
Non ranking keywords driving traffic !?
Moz Analytics and Google analytics is saying some keywords are driving organic search traffic & hence MA suggesting them as keyword opportunities, yet theres no rank for any of them so how can that be so ? cheers dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Which Algorithm Change Hurt the Site? A causation/correlation issue
The attached graph is from google analytics, a correlation of about 14 months of Organic Google visits with algo changes, data from moz naturally 🙂 Is there any way to tell from this which will have affected the site? for example #1 or #2 seems to be responsible for the first dip, but #4 seems to fix it and it broke around 6, or is the rise between 4 and 7 an anomaly and actually 1 or 2 caused a slip from when it was released all the way to when 7 was released. Sorry if the graph is a little cloak and dagger, that is partly because we don't have permissions to reveal much about the identity, and partly because we were trying to do a kind of double blind, separating the data from our biases 🙂 We can say though the different between the level at the start and end of the graph is at least 10,000 visits per day JarMzoK.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Fammy0 -
Sessions in GA - need clarifications
Hello, Regarding recent change in how Google now defines a session... If a user visits a site from a different traffic source (say Google and Bing ) within 30 minutes, would that show 2 visits now ? Was earlier it considered 1 visit ? Also, sessions ends "at the end of the day" It can be different for different users ? How does Google defines end of the day ? for USA time ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050