Losing Organic Traffic After A Redesign?
-
Hi,
I wonder if anyone can help me. After a recent site relaunch caused a substantial loss of organic website traffic.
http://www.health4mom.org/ the site went live 2 months ago(using the same url's as the previous one) unfortunately the organic traffic have dropped (-65%).
I would appreciate if anyone can let me know why we lost organic traffic.
Many thanks in advance.
Antonio
-
thanks for the info, I was also interested in this matter
-
Looks like you have some redirect issues to clean up. When constructing a new site, often you will find better ways of doing things, and items (such as URLs) will change. Since you have so many temporary redirects, see if your CMS has a 404 error handler installed. If so, these plugins will redirect 404 pages to the home page automatically.
Have you resubmitted everything via webmaster tools? (Google and Bing) Fetched all the pages in GWT? Submitted an accurate sitemap of the new site? In addition to the redirect errors, it feels like the search engines do not have an accurate roadmap and description of the new site. Try doing a site:www.YOURSITEHERE.com in google and clicking through the links to see what is actually out there indexed, and where its going.
After you fix the above, it will take time for them to reindex and re-rank your pages.
-
I scanned your site and noticed some problems right away:
(1) You're temporary redirecting (302) ~150 pages. Those should be permanently redirected (301) otherwise you'll lose any built-up SEO equity.
(2) You have some redirect loops going on. For example, http://www.health4mom.org/consider-group-prenatal-care and http://www.health4mom.org/consider_group_prenatal_care, http://www.health4mom.org/how-to-overcome-infertility and http://www.health4mom.org/how_to_overcome_infertility.
(3) You have a bunch of pages redirected to the home page. Not sure if that was intentional or not. e.g. http://www.health4mom.org/testing_your_babys_hearing. If not, you're redirecting the SEO equity from those pages to the home page and diminishing their ranking ability.
(4) You shouldn't be indexing category and tag pages unless they've been customized for uniqueness.
(5) Just about every file on the site resides in the root directory. You're not consolidating your efforts (and SEO equity) onto some key "money" pages.
Perhaps the combination of these items is what's contributing to your traffic loss. I'm wondering if you switched URLs away from using underscores and to using hyphens with this relaunch.
-
Are you sure that the URL's are the same, even small changes to URLs can effect your site. Look at your Google Analytics to see if there is a change at the page name level and when it occurred. This could also be a coincidence but doubtful) check your GWT to make sure that you have not been penalized at all. Lastly, while your URL may not have changed, did the page layout and/or information on each page remain the same or was it changed?
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
-
Possible to expand organic reach in multiple countries/markets without localized content?
Hi everyone, I was recently hired as Content Lead for a SaaS company. We are based in Germany with plans to expand into the UK, Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands. All of our website content is entirely in English and we don't have plans to localize content for any of the new markets. At least not yet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | localyze_mason
One of my responsibilities will be to expand our organic reach through, mostly through SEO content. Though I'm comfortable with the fundamentals of SEO, I'm no expert and I certainly don't have experience with international SEO. I consulted a couple of resources like this guide to international SEO from Moz and this video from Semrush. In a nutshell, this is what I gather: if you want to expand organic reach in foreign countries/markets, you need to 1) decide what kind of domain you want to use and then implement the necessary technical configurations and 2) create localized content in the target market's language. As I mentioned, we won't be localizing any content at first. My question, then, is can we go about creating content in English and hope to gain any kind of meaningful organic exposure in non-English speaking markets? If so, what's the best approach? I apologize in advance if any of this isn't clear or if the answer is super obvious. Happy to provide further details upon request. Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered!0 -
Using Similar Expired URLs to Send Traffic to My Site
Thanks in advance for any help! I have an existing website with content on a particular topic. I have discovered a few similar expired URLs that might still get some traffic. One in particular still has a number of valid links from other sites. Would it make sense for me to buy those URLs (which are really cheap) and just use them to send that traffic to my site? If so, am I better using a 301 redirect or having a home page on the new site that just mentions that the old site is expired, and that they might want to instead link over to my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alanjosephs0 -
Is this organic search sketchiness worth unwinding?
Started working on a site and learned that the person before me had done a fairly sketchy maneuver and am wondering if it's a net gain to fix it. The site has pages that it wanted to get third party links linking to. Thing is, the pages are not easy to naturally link to boost them in search. So, the woman before me started a new blog site in the same general topic area as the first/main site. The idea was to build up even the smallest bit of authority for the new blog, without tipping Google off to shared ownership. So, the new blog has a different owner/address/registrar/host and no Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools account to share access to. Then, as one method of adding links to the new blog, she took some links that originally pointed to the main site and re-directed them to the blog site. And voila! ...Totally controllable blog site with a bit of authority linking to select pages on the main site! At this point, I could un-redirect those links that give the blog site some of its authority. I could delete the links to the main site on the blog pages. However, on some level it may have actually helped the pages linked to on the main site. The whole thing is so sketchy I wonder if I should reverse it. I could also just leave it alone and not risk hurting the pages that the blog currently links to. What do you think? Is there a serious risk to the main site in this existing set up? The main site has hundreds of other links pointing to it, a Moz domain authority of 43, thousands of pages of content, 8 years old and Open Site Explorer Spam Score of 1. So, not a trainwreck of sketchiness besides this issue. To me, the weird connection for Google is that third party sites have links that (on-page-code-wise) still point to the main site, but that resolve via the main site's redirects to the blog site. BTW, the blog site points to other established sites besides the main site. So, it's not the exclusive slave to the main site. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
The review stars for my ecommerce site in the organic search disappeared, how can I have them shown again?
We run www.prams.net, an ecommerce store for strollers and other baby products out of the Uk. We always followed schema and the stars appeared in our product snippets in the organic search, helping us a lot. A couple of weeks ago the stars stopped appearing. When I do the site:www.prams.net they appear but not in the search results anymore. We have a french site as well. www.poussette.com, their it still works. Has anybody got tips what we can do to make the stars appear again? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Website not properly listed on google organic despite SEO efforts
Hello, I have worked thoroughly on my website tags including HTML titles, URLs, H1 headers and text on each section. The problem is that despite this effort, my website does not seem to improve in terms of ranking (the onsite optimization has been done 6 months ago already). We have a sitemap, we have done link building and everything but still no tangible progress. The anomaly I am experiencing is the following: If I search on Google.com.lb for "aparment for sale in lebanon" I don't get the section on my website that is optimized for that particular query (which is the Buy section located here http://www.ramcolb.com/apartment-sale-beirut-lebanon). my site appears only on page 6 but the Homepage appears which is very counter intuitive because it is not optimized for the "apartment for sale in Lebanon" keyword. And this anomaly is present on almost all sections and their relevant queries. The relevant section for the particular query never appears, it is always another irrelevant section that appears but far in the listings (beyond page 6). It is as if Google hasn't indexed properly my website and is mixing up the sections... Has anyone experienced this type of problems? what can be done? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ImadKaram0 -
How to increase the traffic and keywords ranking
Am working on a website http://www.greavescotton.com. A month ago most of the keywords were in first page. This month I have noticed the fall of keyword rankings. I have checked the webmaster tools for any mails and messages but I did not find any. So can anyone please visit the site and check it and please give me the suggestions accordingly to increase the traffic and keywords. Also I would like to know the advantages of commenting in Youtube.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PrasanthMohanachandran0 -
Incorrect country listed in Google organic listing.
Hi, I have a client called 'Ivana Daniell'. She is a Pilates/ Movement Therapy/ Postural Assessment practitioner based in London. She has been based in the UK since 2011. Prior to that her studio was in Singapore. Her website URL is: http://www.ivanadaniell.com If you Google her using the UK engine (www.google.co.uk) using the term 'London Pilates' she comes up in the top four, but her organic listing appears with a small tag which reads "- singapore". I have attached an image of how it appears. This makes many searchers overlook her, believing that she is based overseas. We host her website here in the UK and have removed any reference to Singapore from the website. We have even put an h card on her site to indicate that she is London based. The client believes that this might be the result of an old Google places account of hers, from her time in Singapore. However I have not been able to find any such listing by searching for it in Google and, because it was allegedly set up by her former marketing manager, she does not have her username or password to the account. She has lost touch with the marketing manager and has no way to get the login details. To reiterate however I have seen no proof to suggest that this listing even exists. So, the question! 1. What could be causing the word 'singapore' to be appearing next to the organic listing? 2. If it is the result of an inaccurate Google Places listing, how do I delete this listing without either the username or password? 3. If this is not what is causing 'singapore' to appear by the organic listing, how do I get rid of the 'singapore' word? Thanks very much and Happy New Year mozzers! Edward M6Wyd M6Wyd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GoUp0 -
What are the best strategies to organize a htaccess full of 301 re-directs
I have a client with a htaccess file that is a total mess! What are the best practices to organize all the re-directs, and make it more manageable in the future. Any resources would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave0