Loss of Google referral traffic after server move / CMS move
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I have a client that changed from MoveableType to Wordpress. He also changed from a dedicated server to WP Engine.
He may have blocked search engines for a week or two, so his organic traffic is down but only by 25%. He's 301 redirecting all of the old pages. The mystery is that his referral traffic from Google is down 90%. It's a popular blog, so that's thousands. It's been going on a month now. Anyone seen this before?
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Nakul's got the right idea. You need to basically determine if any old pages are 404'ing. Webmaster tools is your #1 best in this case. Take a look at crawl errors and see if there's a spike.
When you say "referral traffic from Google" do you mean "google organic search" or do you mean actually referrals in the strict sense of "referral traffic"?
You can also check to see if something caused the rankings to drop. It sounds like the migration may not have been done totally perfect. Rather than having the site blocked from Google for a few weeks (not even a good idea) the new site would have been on a test or dev server (blocked) and when ready to switch you'd essentially unblock it, do all the redirects and make the new one live.
Which leads me to ask - what happened to the old site?
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Are you seeing any 404s in Google Webmaster Console ?
Also, it might be worth submitting an XML sitemap into GWC and seeing what percentage of your pages are indexed. Is there an unintentional noindex or something like that ? What I am trying to identify is, are your new pages 100% indexed ?
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