Need advice badly domain rank loss
-
I have a main domain and a sub domain that both were doing very well and after looking at the Moz history its obvious that panda and penguin affected my site considerably. My keywords are holding rank but my search results and traffic are way down.
My question is if I just take my subdomain (which is really my bread an butter shopping cart) and I consolidate my sub domain with my main domain would this help?
I would basically make my main domain the shopping cart and make them one site.
This should change the links to all the sites. The problem is I will lose the backlinks if I do not do a 301 but I do not want to bring bad links over and my keywords are holding rank.
What to do?
-
Hey Francisco,
First and foremost, you should check why your traffic has dropped.
Check whether it has dropped on a certain search engine or on a certain set of keywords or landing pages, or is it a blanket drop everywhere.
Check whether your other sources of traffic have tanked as well (direct, referral, etc.) to see if you maybe have a website problem (Webmaster Tools can help you diagnose that as well).
Also check some of the Moz reports available. Moz cannot read Google penalties, so your Domain Authority (as well as your traffic) might have dropped due to a sudden removal of a portion of your backlinks.
As a side note, if your subdomain has been penalized due to spammy backlinks, there's a high likelihood your whole domain has been penalized as well.
-
It looks like you may need some hands on help. Moz has a list of list of recommended SEO consultants you could contact for additional assistance--you could go that route.
-
Hey Chris,
I am just at a loss. Based on my Moz reports my keywords are maintaining their rank but I have seen a massive drop in traffic and my domain authority and rank has tanked. I cant explain how my keywords maintain their rank but I continue to drop in traffic. Yes it could be that other keywords where driving the traffic but all of this is just driving me nuts.
I do not know if the Pinguin and Panda updates will continue to hurt me going forward and this is why I was considering consolidating the sites and removing any old links that could possibly be harming me.
I do not know how to proceed.
-
Francisco,
The info you provide isn't really enough to help you with any insight other than something sounds strange when you say that your rankings are the same but your traffic is going down and based on that, you are ready to start combining domains based on this information.
It would be important to have a clearer understanding of what is happening with your traffic. If your rankings are the same. why is your traffic falling? Use your analytics to isolate which keywords may be bringing in less traffic now than a month or two ago and which landing pages are receiving less traffic. Based on this information there may be a different set of options to investigate other than consolidating domains.
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
-
Redirect Chain Domain
MozPro is highlighting some redirect chain issues with our domain that I do not recall ever setting up in our redirect list. In our Moz Pro Campaign I see the Site Crawl has flagged 36 Redirect Chain Issues. I understand how the redirect chain errors can happen but I do not recall ever manually redirecting our domain, yet I have http://stickylife.com, https://stickylife.com & https://www.stickylife.com all associated in one of our redirect chain errors. When looking at our redirect files I do not see any of these domain redirects and wonder how this has happened and how to fix it. It appears as though our HTTP and HTTPS is causing some redirection. I wonder if this is coming from our DNS settings?
Technical SEO | | StickyLife0 -
Purchased domain with links - redirect page by page or entire domain?
Hi, I purchased an old domain with a lot of links that I'm redirecting to my site. I want all of their links to redirect to the same page on my site so I can approach this two different ways: Entire site
Technical SEO | | ninel_P
1.) RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com or Page by page
2). Redirect 301 /retiredpage.html http://www.xyz.com/newpage.html Is there a better option I should go with in regards to SEO effectiveness? Thanks in advance!0 -
Redirect effecting ranking?
I manage the SEO for several different regions which are also based on the same site e.g. example.com/au, example.com/us The /us site has pretty good rankings and changes I'm making to the site are having an impact. The /au site has really bad rankings, even though much of the content is the same. (The /uk site is also awful but we had an issue with 4,500 duplicate pages which were only resolved last week). Crawl diagnostics are only showing 1 major error for a 404 response, I'm receiving a domain authority of 43 and A grade page ranking for some of our targeted keywords. I could believe that this isn't necessarily going to get us a top 10 rating but I would have thought we would be in the top 50, especially for branded keywords. Could the lack of ranking be to do with how our domain redirects? If you go to example.com.au you are taken to the home page rather than being redirected to example.com/au. Once you head to an internal page the URL changes to example.com/au/page
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
Website not ranking but the blog is!
I am hoping someone might be able to help me, I am doing some work on a website. A new version of the site was recently launched and since then rankings have plummeted and the new blog pages are ranking better! When the new version of the site went live, the domain changed to the non-www version, plus an incorrect robots.txt file and we have never really been able to fully recover (both of these things were beyond my control!). The robots.txt file was corrected and some of the external links links changed to the non-www but there is a 301 redirect in place so changing to the non-www shouldn't have been the reason to drop the site out completely. Before the launch of the new website, the site was ranking on the front page of Google for a lot of relevant keywords such as outdoor blinds, outdoor blinds Perth, cafe blinds, patio blinds, etc. The quality of the links is pretty bad and I am attempting to remove them before doing a disavow of all the really bad quality links but unless we were really unlucky I don't think it's the links right now that are causing the problem. I have ran the site through numerous crawl tests, checked the robots.txt, there are no messages in GWMT, the pages are indexed but I have a feeling there is something wrong with the site that is stopping this site from ranking well. If anyone could give me any insights I would be really grateful. I know the site could be better structured from a keyword/ structure perspective but the site was ranking fine!
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Why do they rank the home page?
We are trying to rank for the key word Motorcycle Parts. We have moved up to page 2 over the past couple months; however, google is ranking our home page not our http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/s/49/61/Motorcycle-Parts page that is for motorcycle parts. We are working on internal linking to help point the right signals too. Any other thoughts? ( we have new content written to put in as well we just have to wait for an issue to be fixed before we can put it in)
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Blog.domain.co.uk or domain.co.uk/blog
Hi Guys, I'm just wondering which offers more SEO value and which is easier to set up out of: blog.domain.co.uk domain.co.uk/blog Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | Sparkstone0 -
301 for old domain to new domain - Joomla plugin or cpanel?
A client changed domains and both are being indexed. There are thousands of content pages. I can install a 301 redirect Joomla plugin and configure it so that each page redirects to the new domain. I have a feeling I will need to manual set every page. OR I can create a domain level redirect setting in cpanel using wildcards. I think this will automatically pass every old URL to the new URL. Which is the better approach? The cpanel option sounds like less work.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0