Did I cause my 70% drop in organic traffic?
-
Held top 10 SERPS for brands over the past few years, did a site redesign on May 19th, site used to have a long left hand nav consisting of each brand I carried. Site redesign was an attempt to make it cleaner and more compact. Now the site has a top nav menu with categories based on garment type and the addition of a brand category, no fly out nav menu, these links just open the sub-category page.
On the 10th I checked my SERPS and almost threw up, off the map, no where to be found at all. Would a site redesign take almost 2 months to reflect? Am I being penalized by Google(no notification in GWT). I'm lost and thinking of how to tell my landlord I'm not going to be able to pay rent in a couple weeks.
-
Hi Danny, did any of these responses answer your question?
-
Thats looks interesting!
-
I saw an increase after the redesign, that's why I'm so confused, last month was my best month ever YTD, now I'm down to 400 from 2500 organic search impressions a day. Everything dropped on the 10th, mozcast shows activity. googlebot is set to index, follow. Not familiar with record rule, i use a CMS. www.scrubcouture.com is the site in question here.
-
You may want to try Barracuda Panguin Tool. You have to connect to your analytics account first, but it shows your traffic decrease and on a timeline all penguin, panda and various algo's changes made by Google, with full explanations for each change. WIth this tool you may be able to understand wich changes affected you most, and repair
-
Make sure your category pages are linked to each other as well. So your architecture takes this form because of internal linking. Keep category page that is linked from another category page, and not the homepage, does not have as much link equity flowing to it and is now 2 levels deep into the architecture
When looking at the internal links of a website the main thing to consider is whether or not you are consistently sending the search engines to the correct page. This especially becomes a concern with large websites where the possibility of multiple pages targeting similar keywords is more apt to exist, and from a user, conversion and crawler perspective a preferred page exists.
Use http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
to make sure the site looks good to you
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7XOy2cz0aQ&feature=player_embedded
Did you use a record rule firmly making the changes to this website?
I hope this is a account sincerely,
Thomas
-
You did a site redesign on 19 May and deployed then? If you did and saw a immediate decrease in the SERPS it is normal
However after this amount of time I imagine that you would at least be ranking for your brand words or something similar to that. However it can take over three months to gain your traffic back
If you have a Google Webmaster tools account and you do not have any messages from them telling you you and penalized and you have not been penalized.
Use mozcast.com
And compare that with your analytics data it will tell you if there was a change in Google that could've triggered this result.
Last but not least some web designers forget to do a no follow no index removal make sure that is not still there. You can use this cool check or look at your source code
http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/
Sincerely,
Thomas
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
-
URLs dropping from index (Crawled, currently not indexed)
I've noticed that some of our URLs have recently dropped completely out of Google's index. When carrying out a URL inspection in GSC, it comes up with 'Crawled, currently not indexed'. Strangely, I've also noticed that under referring page it says 'None detected', which is definitely not the case. I wonder if it could be something to do with the following? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ranking-index-drop-30192.html - It seems to be a bug affecting quite a few people. Here are a few examples of the URLs that have gone missing: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/sexual-harassment-awareness-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/conflict-resolution-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/prevent-duty-training Any help here would be massively appreciated!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
Organic traffic drops a lot
Please check my url that is https://www.drmalpani.com , it was first build up in Joomla and then for security reason, I moved from Joomla to Laravel but in that mean time, I have facing steep fall in organic traffics. It was earlier 10,000 users per day and now I can see only 2500 users per day. I don't know what went wrong, each url are same as it was in Joomla as well I have worked out on all 404 urls too. Looking forward to your guidance on this. Thanks, Bharat
Technical SEO | | DrMalpani0 -
First Link Priority - Drop Down Menu
Hey Mozzers Just want to make sure I have this right - If a website offers a service, say "digital marketing" - and has this link in a dropdown menu in the header, would this make any link in the body of a page (using different anchor text) pointless in SEO terms?.. e.g. a link with "online marketing" or "digital strategy" Cheers!
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Suspended YouTube account causing havoc in ranking and traffic
Hi SEOmoz community This is my first question in the forum and I'd prefer it was more on the constructive side rather than introducing an issue on my website. I hope someone can still shed a light on the issue. Just over a week ago, YouTube has suspended my account for what I would call dubious reasons. Suspending my account meant lots of dead videos on my site and potentially other people's sites, who embedded my videos. I have only recently managed to take down all references to my blocked YouTube account (off my site). Now here it comes, literally since that week my traffic numbers have dropped below half of what it used to be and less. I hardly have any more organic search entries and my keywords have plummeted (in some cases 20 - 30 positions). Keywords, that ranked well are currently not searched via my site at all. I am not 100% what is going on and doing my reading on the side, but I am starting to get a little paranoid over a potential Google penalty that may have been issued to my site. Maybe someone has experienced similar issues or simply knows the answer. Someone suggested that due to the 'Trust' that YouTube has passed on to my site is now gone, it caused this massive drop. However, it still makes me think, is an element such as various YouTube videos on your site such a big thing that makes and breaks a site?? I appreciate your input on the issue. Many thanks everybody!!
Technical SEO | | Hermski0 -
Accidentally checked privacy setting in WP to "not to index" and dropped rank...how can I fix this?
I recently rebuilt a static website to a wordpress site...In the privacy settings ....the -"Ask search engines not to index this site" was checked and I didn't notice. I had a top ranking website now its completely gone off google and every where else. I have unchecked it, resubmitted a sitemap to google.....does anyone know if this is permanent damage or if there is something else I can do to help fix this......I'm freaking out
Technical SEO | | eversseo0 -
90% traffic loss. Pandalized?
Happened several times during this year. After launch as soon as we reach exactly 100K uniques Google kills 90% of the traffic. Then sudden recovery (pretty much without any action from us) after several weeks not connected to any algo updates/refresh. No warnings. No malware. WMT clean as a baby. Only old good whitehat SEO. Not even close to the edge of wrongdoing:) This time it happens again Aug. 22nd right after Panda 3.9.1. What is different now same exact date Bing traffic went down as well. http://bit.ly/eEu27I Need advice:)
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Bing rank drop off for multiple sites
Hi Mozzers, Seeing some wacky stuff going on on some sites I manage. In more than a few, the ranking on bing has dropped basically overnight from page one spots to not being found on the first 100 positions. Anyone else seeing similar results? Some of the sites are fairly new, some have been around for ages, some are wordpress, some are not. I've been searching for some news of a big change on bing, but keep reading about bing dropping the thin sites during black friday. In one example, I had the site set up in BWT for a while, and had a look at the data. The reports show that the pages are crawled, the index summary shows pages indexed, and there seems to be no crawl errors, but rankings are absolutely gone. Also, I can't see the sites in bing if I search "site:example.com" in bing. Here's 2 examples, the first would make sense since it's pretty thin as I havent added much content yet: http://homewindowtint.org but this one doesn't make sense to me. Sure there's a few errors, but to be dropped like a rock seems weird http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com
Technical SEO | | rosstaylor0 -
Will duplicate content on ecommerce cause harm in search results?
First off, SEO learner, not a professional, therefore question is not for any client. A new (less 1 yr) ecommerce site in a particular sector is now moving into partnership with relevant websites to be their online store. A 'store' link on the partner site will redirect to the ecommerce domain to a dedicated area (on a domain/directory path) with the partner's branding. To do this though means duplicating the entire catalogue for each partner that comes on board for this scheme. So the original ecommercesite.com/categories also delivers ecommercesite.com/partner1/categories (with partner's brand identity) ecommercesite.com/partner2/categories (with partner's brand identity) and so on Won't duplicating the product catalogue in directories cause problems in delivering effective SERPs for the original ecommerce site?
Technical SEO | | BeIntermedia0