Search traffic down 30% this month
-
Our search traffic has been growing at a steady clip for the last year but is down about 30% this month.
As part of a redesign, we've repurposed our home page (blog.getvero.com). Rather than serve as a feed of recent posts, it's now an email signup page. We created a new page (blog.getvero.com/posts/) to display new posts.
I think this is likely the reason for the drop in search traffic but I'm frustrated that it's losing us thousands of visitors per month. A few questions:
1. How long will it take to recover from this?
2. Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery process?
3. Why are some of our best performing posts seeing less search traffic even though the URL hasn't changed?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
-
Thanks for the good info.
I don't see any warnings in Webmaster Tools but it does look like about 30 pages we un-indexed right around the time we launched the re-design.
-
1. How long will it take to recover from this? This is truly an unknown as it is really hard to say.
2. Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery process?
Since it is a sign up page there is not a lot of content for google to crawl. So if the bulk of your seo in the past revolved around the content of your blog page it will be hard to give that credit to what is now a sign up page.
3. Why are some of our best performing posts seeing less search traffic even though the URL hasn't changed?
This is due to the overall shift that your domain is going through at the moment. Within a few weeks you should know if this is a long term impact or not. I would check your google webmaster tools section to make sure there are no warnings in there.
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
-
Search console site verification
I've been going on the assumption that when verifying a website in search console, it's always good to register and verify all variants of the site URL: http https www non-www However, if you create redirects to the preferred URL, is it really necessary to register/virfy of the other three? If so, why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Creating a site search engine while keeping SEO factors in mind
I run and own my own travel photography business. (www.mickeyshannon.com) I've been looking into building a search archive of photos that don't necessarily need to be in the main galleries, as a lot of older photos are starting to really clutter up and take away the emphasis from the better work. However, I still want to keep these older photos around. My plan is to simplify my galleries, and pull out 50-75% of the lesser/older photos. All of these photos will still be reachable by a custom-build simple search engine that I'm building to house all these older photos. The photos will be searchable based on keywords that I attach to each photo as I add them to my website. The question I have is whether this will harm me for having duplicate content? Some of the keywords that would be used in the search archive would be similar or the same to the main gallery names. However, I'm also really trying to push my newer and better images out there to the front. I've read some articles that talk about noindexing search keyword results, but that would make it really difficult for search engines to even find the older photos, as searching for their keywords would be the only way to find them. Any thoughts on a way to work this out that benefits, or at least doesn't hurt me, SEO-wise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | msphotography0 -
Erratic Rankings Earlier This Month - UK
Can anybody tell me what happened here? http://5lx.co.uk/images/searchconsole2015-12-22 13.37.16.png That is the ranking pattern of my UK site on Google UK for my main keyword. It reached number 1 on 7 December but three or four days later, dropped like a stone. It has been very erratic ever since, slumping as low as the mid-30s. I checked the search console but there were no manual penalties. There is an update signalled on the chart but I can't find any info about it and anyway it seems to have happened after the drop began. I barely touched the site between its top ranking and the slump and certainly didn't do anything to deserve that roller coaster (as far as I know). Does anybody have any ideas? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neilmac0 -
Incorrect URL shown in Google search results
Can anyone offer any advice on how Google might get the url which it displays in search results wrong? It currently appears for all pages as: <cite>www.domainname.com › Register › Login</cite> When the real url is nothing like this. It should be: www.domainname.com/product-type/product-name. This could obviously affect clickthroughs. Google has indexed around 3,000 urls on the site and they are all like this. There are links at the top of the page on the website itself which look like this: Register » Login » which presumably could be affecting it? Thanks in advance for any advice or help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wagada0 -
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)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Canada_wide_media1 -
Different website is shown when searched for content
Hello, Have any body experienced this situation, When i take a content from http://www.creativethemes.net e.g. from home page and search it on google, search results shows FMEextensions with that content. FME had never ever used that data, it can not be found in sources files either, also this data was never written and placed on FME site but it is shown with FME How can this happen and what do you suggest to resolve it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MozAddict0 -
How to enable crawling for dynamic generated search result pages?
I want to enable crawling facility for dynamic generated search result pages which are generating by Magento Solr search. You can view more about it by following URLs. http://code.google.com/p/magento-solr/ http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=bamboo+table+lamp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=ceramic+table+lamp
http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=green+patio+umbrella Right now, Google is not crawling search result page because, I have added following syntax to Robots.txt file. Disallow: /*?q= So, How do I enable crawling of search result pages with best SEO practice? If any other inputs in same direction so, it will help me more to get it done.0 -
Traffic from twitter
Regarding traffic from twitter, I want to track this url - http://www.ultraseo.com/white-hat-vs-black-hat/ and generated the following URL using URL builder - http://www.ultraseo.com/white-hat-vs-black-hat/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social%2Bmedium&utm_campaign=seo Should i now pass it through a URL shortener bitLy or googles own. and tweet it. Is this what i should do ? Please reply ... where will i get a report in GA ( under which heading ? )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050