Fixing a website redirect situation that resulted in drop in traffic

[csmm]

Hi,

I'm trying to help someone fix the following situation: they had a website, www.domain.com, that was generating a steady amount of traffic for three years. They then redesigned the website a couple of months ago, and the website developer redirected the site to domain.com but did not set up analytics on domain.com. We noticed that there was a drop in traffic to www.domain.com but have no idea if domain.com is generating any traffic since analytics wasn't installed.

To fix this situation, I was going to find out from the developer if there was a good reason to redirect the site. What would have prompted the developer to do this if www.domain.com had been used already for three years? Then, unless there was a good reason, I would change the redirect back to what it was before - domain.com redirecting to www.domain.com. Presumably this would allow us to regain the traffic to the site www.domain.com that was lost when the redirect was put in place.

Does this sound like a reasonable course of action? Is there anything that I'm missing, or anything else that I should do in this situation?

Thanks in advance!

Carolina

[IainReloadMedia]

Hey Carolina,

Jarno has nailed it.

Just on a side note, if you want to see the traffic for http://domain.com your web developer should be able to supply you with the server logs which will tell you similar stats to regular analytics.

This is achievable because log files record requests to a server. Google Analytics record requests for pages with the Analytics code installed.

Hope you can sort it

Iain - Reload Media

[csmm]

Thanks for the suggestion about using www.compete.com! I'll check it out.

[csmm]

Thank you, Jarno! This is what I suspected; I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track and not overlooking anything.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Carolina,

I'm with Jarno. As for traffic to domain.com for the past 3 months, you might take a look at www.compete.com - while not perfect, it may give you an idea if the non-www domain was receiving traffic.

[JarnoNijzing]

Carolina,

that sounds like a normal way to go, yes. If you used www.domain.com before i would definitely use it again. No only is it known by people perhaps but also for all the link juice (links pointing to your website) that were build to www.domain.com instead of domain.com. And i would urge them to install analytics on it as soon as possible.

Since it is new design site (no new content?) and the site has been redirected to another subdomain (www. is also a subdomain..) Google could possibly see this as a new website which in turn could mean that it could rank more difficult over time. This is not per se the case but it could happen.

I would urge the developer to undo the redirect immediately, and let him install analytics.If you do this you should be in the right direction again.

kind regards

Jarno