Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
-
Howdy Mozzers
I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me!
***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing
Background
The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change.
Problem
Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline.
*They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous
Organic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays.
Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get.
Redirects
During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up:
Original:
http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume
Canonical issue
On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013.
Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example).
Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda)
According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However -
Sitemap
We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index?
That page is in the sitemap.
Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z
Change Frequency: Yearly
Priority: 0.5
*GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca
What we looked at so far
-
The redirects are all currently 301’s
-
GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch
-
We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be.
-
Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank.
-
We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials
-
We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1).
-
Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)
-
-
Thanks so much for all of your insight! It's been frustrating as an in house SEO to find the root cause to this. We've found additional issues since I posted the question, and we are currently addressing them.
Really couldn't be more impressed with the moz community. I'm shocked to get such excellent answers from all of you. It helps calm the team here, knowing that we can reach out to amazing people!
Mark
-
About two years ago I did a page-by-page redirect of Domain A to KeywordDomain B. Nothing changed on the site but the domain name and the logo. Nothing. NOTHING. Every page was redirected to an identical page with 301s that worked properly.
Rankings and traffic immediately tanked. I was really surprised because that domain had held the #1 position for the exact match keyword for ten straight years - although based upon an analylsis of link metrics it should have been #2 for that entire time. I had redirected other domains and never, ever had a problem.
Now it was #2. Crap! I blew a load of dough on that domain and now my income was damaged.
I didn't do anything. No linkbuilding, no new content, no nothing.
A few months later the rankings and traffic came back. My personal opinion - and lots of people might disagree - is that Domain A was getting thousands of domain queries, type-ins and social media actions every month. When we switched to KeywordDomain.com it was getting ZERO domain queries, etc. Slowly people began typing the new domain in their queries and when a few thousand a month were occurring that is when the rankings came back. Maybe coincidence, but that's what I want to believe.
-
It's very likely due to the domain switch but to give yourself something else to do to do besides what you've done so far (and if you haven't done this already) and give yourself some direction to take while you're waiting for your rankings to come back up, go ahead and isolate how the drops in traffic are occurring:
- Research what keywords mapped to which of your old landing pages and which of those keywords are now bringing in less traffic.
- Did you completely fall out of the results for some of your keywords or have you just dropped somewhat in the rankings for all of your keywords?
- Are you now only ranking for brand terms?
- What specifically has changed with your traffic
At this time, you may do well by coming up with a strong content strategy and working the PR and G+ channels to get that content out to new and existing audience members--it can only help.
-
Experiencing a drastic drop in traffic immediately after and often for several months after a redesign/replatform is extremely common. I have seen scenarios where traffic dropped as much as 75% for as long as 4-5 months before beginning to recover. There are so many issues involved in a re-platform and so many possibilities for why and where things may have gone a little astray that pin-pointing any one thing may just be impossible.
That being said, I feel your pain! As a fellow in-house SEO I am sure there is a lot of pressure on you from stakeholders to "fix the Website." We are going to be re-platforming within the coming months and one of my main jobs has been to educate everyone on the potential hit we will take.
If it's any consolation at all, I have seen companies power through that dip and come out way better on the other side. But I've never seen it happen instantly. You may want to discuss strategies like possibly increasing PPC or other paid marketing campaigns to get the company through until things start improving. Ideally, this is a discussion you have before the replatform takes place, but it sounds to me like to came on board after the move had already taken place.
Do what you can to find any potential technical SEO problems, but also encourage your colleagues not to panic and to develop some other campaigns that can bring in traffic until things start to improve.
That was more of a pep talk than anything concrete in terms of help. I know. But Sometimes it just helps to know that what you are experiencing is par for the course for any platform change or site migration.
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
-
Product URL Optimisation
Hi guys, We are currently trying to add new products to our site but we are in a quandary on what type of URL structure to pursue. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | michel_8
Product Name: Aspect Exfoliating Cleanser 240ml https://www.example.com.au/aspect-exfoliating-cleanser-240ml (including the size)
VS
https://www.example.com.au/aspect-exfoliating-cleanser 1.) Which is a better URL structure based on SEO 2018 and why?
2.) Is there any merit in removing the size from the URL key with the aim of attracting more traffic? Keen to hear from you guys! Cheers,0 -
What is the Redirect Rule for corresponding https urls to new domain with the same https urls?
2 sites have the same urls but the owner wants just the 1 site. So I will be doing a 301 redirect with .htaccess from https://www.example.co.uk/sportsbook/SOCCER/today/ redirecting to https://www.example.com//sportsbook/SOCCER/today/ There are a lot of urls that are the same, so I was wondering what the rule is to put in the file please that will change them all to the corresponding urls? Would this be correct?... RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WSIDW
RewriteCond %{HTTPS_HOST} ^example.co.uk [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS_HOST} ^www.example.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://example.com$1 [L,R=301,NC] Or would a simple rule like this work... redirect 301 / http://www.new domain.com/ If not correct could you please give me the correct rule, thanks! Then of course doing a change of address of address in webmaster tools after. Also... do I still need to do the forwarding from the https://www.example.co.uk/ domain provider after as well? Many thanks for your help in advance.0 -
[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too): Here's how they show up: Example 1: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2 Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data): URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/ Linked From: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site) http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html Example 3: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html How do I address this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmehta10 -
Moving categories to new domain
Hello Mozzers , I'm trying to find best possible solution for this situation. So there is a website (e-commerce) and since it's grew up too much we are looking to move several categories on different domain. The reason for this is that we introduce completely different product group (example: we have products that are related to watches and everything related to watch industry but now we introduce leather products: wallets, bags etc). Do you think it is worth it to move new categories to new domain in order to better target this product group? In case of positive answer which is the best way to do it - 301 redirect or leave the products on this site and build a new site with slightly different product description and names? Regards, Nenad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Uniline0 -
Pay on Organic Search Results
Are there companies out there that accept payment on the results they get for organic search listings? I have a site that I want to be number 1 for two terms on Google UK and .com and I while I dont think it will take much effort I would like to find a decent SEO company or person that can do this and be paid for the result. What do people think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | clayts0 -
URL Shorteners. Are they SEO Friendly?
Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Is there any correlation to time and search ranking?
Is there any evidence that google acknowledges the time that a site has been online with all other things being equal for search ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0