Traffic and impressions down
-
I am confused on what is going on.
I recently converted my website to wordpress. I kept the same url structure to the best of my abilities (without the .html) and 301 all .html to / So whatever was www.domain.com/page.html to www.domain.com/page/
The old CMS was a proprietary cms done by the company who originally designed the website. It was poorly put together and was really buggy. I decided to move to wordpress due to many limitations particularly for SEO.
Now traffic is down about 10% and looks like the downward trend will continue, also, impressions are down by about 75%.
Any thoughts on what could be happening?
-
Also Mike, you may want to have a look a Ahrefs.com. I have just checked it and there are alot more backlinks showing up you need to look at. If you google for a coupon, you can get it half price, or just get a refund within 7 days. It can be useful for these sort of situations, even though Moz does alot more analytics etc.
-
No worries. This is another good article that I found is quite good:
http://moz.com/ugc/should-domain-authority-be-used-to-determine-which-backlinks-to-remove
-
Thanks Jonathan!
-
OK, I have had a quick look and I do see some potential problems:
Check that page. You will see this particular term (Holtorf Medical Group) seems overly used, thanks to a few sitewide sidebar links for example realitynibs.com
You should either get those sitewide links nofollowed, or removed,... or failing that dissavowed. There may be other examples in that link, but I believe that is a potential cause of your problems. I am seeing sitewide links be the cause of alot of problems lately.
Also if you go down the dissavow route, this might be worth reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel
Obviously, be careful not to remove any decent high quality links.
-
I've worked very hard for the content to be very high quality.
Before I was in charge of SEO a so called SEO agency did a lot of low quality link building. Looks like it finally caught up to us.
-
It is very hard without seeing the site. But check for low quality content \ duplicate content. Look at your link profiles for spammy links (over optimised anchor texts, low quality links etc).
You'll just need to do a bit of research into I am afraid. If you want to post your link we can see if something obvious sticks out.
-
Jonathan, thank you.
I looked at all possibilities, except that. Wow, such a big coincidence. Any thoughts on how to recover?
-
That's the date of the last big Google Panda update (22nd). I think you have your answer.
-
Yeah, I am with you on that. I doubt google updates rankings that fast.
However, I switched the site the night of august 22nd and on the 23rd I noticed a decline and keep seeing the traffic decline, traffic is actually down 25% (not 10%) from last month.
If it isn't caused by the migration then what is it?
-
I very much doubt Google will have updated your rankings that fast...
Do you have a date you made the change? It doesn't sound like the drop was because of your site move, if it dropped the very next day. Even if you had lots of 404's those listings would still have retained their place in google for a short while.
-
The thing is. Besides the url difference (.html to /) the content is identical, meta tags, headers, etc is the same as before the migration. I noticed the drop in traffic the very day after the wordpress version of the site went live. I am so bummed.
-
Yeh, there are lots of things really that can cause this. WordPress sites are slower but you can mitigate this by installing caching. Check all your redirects are working fine. WordPress will have a slightly different site structure with all the categories \ tags etc, so that may affect is slightly.
But, before you worry too much about that, it might be that you have been caught by one of the recent Google Updates. Was there a date when you particularly noticed the change? It could be that other sites benefited from the Google Update rather than you being penalised. Even a few serp places drop can affect traffic quite a bit.
Unfortunately, without seeing all the analytics data \ site data it is hard to pin it down to anything.
-
Oof. Well without more information it's hard to say; it could be any number of things. On-page optimization would be my first guess:
- keyword placement
- title tags
- alt tags
- etc
Not sure what to say, honestly.
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
-
Traffic goes down after migration from aws to Microsoft azure cloud service
After migration of web application from aws ec2 instance to Microsoft azure web App service, we observed that we lost our 50% traffic. Our site custom domain is ihealthmantra.com and azure web App has default domain azurewebsites.net . Azure WebApp service has drawback that default domain gets in picture after mapping to my custom domain .We have mapped azure webAPP host name to our custom domain as CNAME record in DNS Table . Now same site working with two domains i.e ihealthmantra.com as well ass azurewebsites.net . As we seen this issues we made 301 redirection from azure default domain to our custom domain, Still no change in traffic.Google is now showing external links from azurewebsites.net to healthmantra.com . We are totally confused now . We don't know what exactly affected to our search traffic . Please Help us.
Technical SEO | | DivyaDubey0 -
Decline in traffic and duplicate content in different domains
Hi, 6 months ago my customer purchased their US supplier and moved the supplier's website to their e-commerce platform. When moving to the new platform they copied the descriptions of the products from their site to the supplier's site so now both sites have the same content in the product pages. Since then they have experienced decrease in traffic in about 80%. They didn't implement canonical tag or hreflang. My customer's domain format is https://www.xxx.biz and the supplier's domain is https://www.zzz.com The last one is targeting the US and when someone from outside of the US wants to purchase a product they get a message that they need to move to the first website, the www.xxx.biz. Both sites are in English. The old site version of www.zzz.com, before the shit to the new platform, contained different product descriptions, and BTW, the old website version is still live and indexed under a subdomain of www.zzz.com. My question is what's the best thing to do in this case so that the rankings will be back to higher positions and they'll get back their traffic. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | digital19740 -
My traffic keeps going down...
My website been through many changes the last 5 months. From migrating http to https, server transfer and more. Everything was double checked all the redirects are perfect (301) to the https pages (we have like 28K backlinks so everything needs to be correct), in a matter of fact the migration to ssl made in October and in November the stats went high. The problem is that at the end of November after the server migration the traffic went down and is stably down till today. We re-checked the redirects in every aspect and more in depth and finished fixing issues around end of January. Also before 1 week we stopped the functionality of a parameter (product sort) and removed it from the website entirelly and canonicaled the urls that were using it so if google tries to test those urls with the parameter to see a canonical tag and eventually drop them out of index and stop crawling them. Generally we tried to fix the crawling efficiency and speed. The technical SEO was on fire the last weeks. Still i cant see improvement in rankings, i only see drops. What is the problem here? Where should i look? Any ideas? In webmaster tools we have no 404's and no manual actions. The visibility in Sistrix goes down (check attachment), the ahrefs organic traffic goes down, semrush stats go down... My website is: https://www.pccdkeys.com ecfp87
Technical SEO | | dos06591 -
Organic search traffic stats "leaking" into other channels?
Hi Everyone I have a website and am slowly getting to grips with SEO. Last week I enabled a new channel in google analytics which was "email" so I could track effectiveness of the weekly emails we send out. The good news is that a ton of traffic is now being assigned to the email "channel" in GA but my organic search traffic in channels is now down week on week. That feels odd as my overall traffic to the site is up, week on week. Does anyone have any experience of new channels coming on stream and canniballising old ones? Could it be that some of the traffic associated to organic search previously was actually coming from my email, I just didn't know it? thanks all!
Technical SEO | | NappyValleyNet1 -
35% Drop In Traffic Since March 23 2012
Hi, I am aware ofth e penguin and panda updates and have been monitoring my traffic for the last few months. I did notice that for some reason, from about 22nd / 23rd March we had a drop in traffic by about 50%, it stabilised in a few days but since then from april to present has been hovering around 35% drop in traffic. what perplexes me is hat I also monitored our rankings and that was fine, pretty much the same, yet traffic is down. I have noticed our longer tail keywords have lost traffic by as much as 60-900% I would really appreciate some input, do you think this could be down to panda pulling pages out. how can i find track pages indexesd for my site over time to see if this is where he problem is. I havea lso noticed that in webamster tools, a domain preferance is not set, it is set to default "do not set a preferred domain", would this not cause a dup content issue, what should it be set to, post panda? Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is really hurting our business. thanks you in advance
Technical SEO | | LiquidTech0 -
Seek help correcting large number of 404 errors generated, 95% traffic halt
Hi, The following GWT screen tells a bit of the story: site: http://bit.ly/mrgdD0 http://www.diigo.com/item/image/1dbpl/wrbp On about Feb 8 I decided to fix a large number of 'duplicate title' warnings being reported in GWT "HTML Suggestions" -- these were for URLs which differed only in parameter case, and which had Canonical tags, but were still reported as dups in GWT. My traffic had been steady at about 1000 clicks/day. At midnight on 2/10, google traffic completely halted, down to 11 clicks/day. I submitted a recon request and was told 'no manual penalty' Also, the 'sitemap' indexes in GWT showed 'pending' for 24x7 starting then. By about the 18th, the 'duplicate titles' count dropped to about 600 or so... the next day traffic hopped right back to about 800 clicks/day - for a week - then stopped again, down to 10/day, a week later, on the 26th. I then noticed that GWT was reporting 20K page-not found errors - this has now grown to 35K such errors! I realized that bogus internal links were being generated as I failed to disable the PHP warning messages.... so I disabled PHP warnings and fixed what I thought was the source of the errors. However, the not-found count continues to climb -- and I don't know where these bad internal links are coming from, because the GWT report lists these link sources as 'unavailable'. I'v been through a similar problem last year and it took months (4) for google to digest all the bogus pages ad recover. If I have to wait that long again I will lose much $$. Assuming that the large number of 404 internal errors is the reason for the sudden shutoff... How can I a) verify the source of these internal links, given that google says the source pages are 'unavailable'.. Most critically, how can I do a 'RESET" and have google re-spider my site -- or block the signature of these URLs in order to get rid of these errors ASAP?? thanks
Technical SEO | | mantucket0 -
Site indexing and traffic increased so dramatically overnight
Number of indexed pages jumped from 39000 to 52000 and traffic increased around 50% in my site.Note: used "site" command to check the indexed pages. I understand this is approximate.In addition, number of crawled pages/day also increased dramatically.No change in the robots.txt, sitemap, crawl errors and duplicate issues. But server migrated to different IT infrastructure. Before any celebration, want to identify the helper. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gmk15670 -
I had a massive ogranic traffic drop in the past 72 hours (80%). What should I do? I
I am very very worried as my organic traffic suddenly came to pretty much a halt last Friday. We have been working very hard on content in the last 2 years and have 0 duplicated content with many thousand travel guides, tips and other travel related info. We are also publishing a successful travel blog which used to get quite a bit off traffic. Everything stalled last Friday and since we are operating in the travel industry which is very competitive, this will be very hard on us. In fact, I fear that we will not survive this drop for more than 2-3 months. How do we find out about what happened and what can we do to get our SERPs back? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | madsuh0