Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Fixing a website redirect situation that resulted in drop in traffic
-
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
-
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
-
Thanks for the suggestion about using www.compete.com! I'll check it out.
-
Thank you, Jarno! This is what I suspected; I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track and not overlooking anything.
-
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.
-
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
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
-
302 redirects in Magento, trying to fix
Hi all, I'm assigned a site in Magento. After the first craw, we found almost 15k 302 redirects. A sample URL ends with this /stores/store/switch/?SID=qdq9mf1u6afgodo1vtvk0ucdpb&___from_store=default&___store=german&uenc=aHR0cHM6Ly9qdWljeWZsdXRlcy5jb20vP19fX3N0b3JlPWdlcm1hbg%2C%2C And they are currently 302 redirecting to the homepage as well as other main pages and also product pages it seems. Some of these point to account pages where customers log in. Probably best for me to de-index those so no issues there. But I'm worried about the 302 redirects to public pages. The extension we have installed is SEO Suite Ultimate by MageWorx. Does anyone here have experience here specifically and how did you fix it? Thanks, JC
Technical SEO | | LASClients0 -
Huge drop in rankins, traffic and impressions after changing to CloudFlare
Hi there, In October, one of our customer's programmer made a change on their website to optimize its loading speed. Since then, the all the SEO's metrics has dropped. Apparently, the change was to move to CloudFlare and to add Gzip compression. I was talking with the programmer and he told me he had no idea why that happened. Now comes 5 months later and the SEO metrics havn't come back yet. What seems so wierd is that two keywords in particular had the most massive drop. Those two keywords were the top keywords (more than 1k of impressions a month) and now its like there is no impressions or clics at all. Did anyone had the same event occur to them? Do you have any idea what could help this case?
Technical SEO | | H.M.N.0 -
Adding https version of website: how best to redirect
If I have 4 versions of my site http://www
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
http://
https://www
https:// What is the best way to redirect without losing seo positions? i have been mainly using http://www but have recently added my ssl so https works also. I heard at Moz Con that I should get the https working. All of my marketing and ads are going to http://www 301 redirect 3 of them? Which 3? If https is becoming important, should that be my main url? will it hurt my seo to switch? Thank you so much in advance!0 -
How to track my actual traffic source using Google Analytics which are now showing as referral traffic?
Hi Mozzers, I went through many Q&As in the community this morning. I found a solution where I could just remove the referral site in analytics>admin>property>tracking info>referral exclusion list. So I removed paypal.com which was the main referral traffic. I thought the problem is solved. Later today I got another order, now the referral traffic is from eway.com, now what? Yes I know I will add this to the exclusion list but there will be many more referral sites. My main concern is I am not able to track the actual traffic source. How do I do that? 1. Do I need to use google url tracking for all my pages?
Technical SEO | | DebashishB
2. Do I need to add tracking code in each page of the site?
3. Is there a way to track the actual source of this traffic, now that the transaction is already made but reflects as referral traffic in Google Analytics? jZjTN0 -
301 Redirects, Sitemaps and Indexing - How to hide redirected urls from search engines?
We have several pages in our site like this one, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions, which redirect to deeper page, http://www.spectralink.com/solutions/work-smarter-not-harder. Both urls are listed in the sitemap and both pages are being indexed. Should we remove those redirecting pages from the site map? Should we prevent the redirecting url from being indexed? If so, what's the best way to do that?
Technical SEO | | HeroDesignStudio0 -
Redirect typo domains
Hi, What's the "correct" way of redirecting typo domains? DNS A record goes to the same ip address as the correct domain name Then 301 redirects for each typo domain in the .htaccess Subdomains on typo urls still redirect to www or should they redirect to the subdomain on the correct url in case the subdomain exists?
Technical SEO | | kuchenchef0 -
Help. Recently my organic traffic has dropped 40%. Any advice / ideas?
Lately my organic traffic has dropped significantly as well as my adsense revenue. The moz report says, for example, my traffic is down 40%, but I a still #1 for that keyword. Also, in the last week, suddenly my number of indexed pages doubled. We had done some page rewriting and maybe messed that up. We've fixed that though. Webmaster tools is still picking up all of our old pages and the new ones. Background: We recently launched our new responsive website in March. March income was about the same as February. April dropped off suddenly (maybe late march - no sure) When we changed site, we did do 301's for all the old pages to the new ones Any ideas or advice as to why my traffic and revenue has dropped off so sharply? Never submitted questions before - not sure if I am supposed to put urls here so if you just google Home Spelling Words - that's my website. Thanks everyone!!!
Technical SEO | | kimtastic0 -
How to find a specific link on my website (currently causing redirects)
Hi everyone, I've used crawlers like Xenu to find broken links before, and I love these tools. What I can't figure out is how to find specific pieces of code within my site. For example, Webmaster Tools tells me there are still links to old pages somewhere on my website but I just can't find them. Do you know of a crawler that can search for a specific link within the html? Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0