Losing Organic Traffic After A Redesign?
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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
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thanks for the info, I was also interested in this matter
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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.
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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.
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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?
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