Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero
-
Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with...
I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help?
Any input greatly appreciated
-
Building on that answer, Google Webmaster Console should also be able to give you a list of URLs that are resulting in 404 errors. Those are going to excellent contenders for a 301.
-
You bet! Hopefully this helps when you start digging into things!
-
Marvellous help Mr PhD - you've cleared up some crucial basics for me - many thanks!
-
Nope you dont need access. You set the 301s up on the current server. When the current server gets a request for an old page, it then knows where to send the user to, using the 301.
If also, if you don't mind, please mark my response as a "Good answer" with Moz.
Cheers!
-
...so I don't need to access the previous website on its previous hosting to set up a 301?
-
301 the old URLs to the new URLs. Try to keep a one-to-one relationship on the old page to the new pages. The old bedroom page 301s to the new bedroom page, the old dining room page 301s to the new dining room page, etc. You would not want to redirect the old bathroom URLs to the new dining room URLs.
You need to pick if the site is www or non www. Lets say you pick non www as your default. Make sure if anyone types in a www URL on your site that you 301 that page to the non www counterpart. Just as above, one-to-one relationship. Make sure that any links on your site link to the proper nonwww URL. Any tools you use (moz etc) make sure they start with the non www version of the website.
Good post here by Cyrus on redirects here at Moz as well.
-
It's worse than that - I've looked after the site for the last 5 years, so it's my own fault
Last 2 questions (I promise) -
1. once I've established the old URLs, how do I re-direct to the new site?
2. How do I combine www and non-www (if that's what I need to do)
Really appreciate your input on this - classic case of an old graphic designer thinking he can SEO after a couple of Lynda courses
-
- If you want to find out what the general structure of the old site: Google Internet Archive and then enter your site URL. You will see snapshots and be able to pull it all together. Bing webmaster tools actually does a pretty good job of showing old site structure and that may help.
If you want to try and figure out what pages used to rank: You can also use various linking tools (Moz OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs) and Google and Bing webmaster tools to find how people are linking to you. This will not give you all of the old URLs on your site, but at least the most important ones. Those are the most likely that ranked. Google webmaster tools will show some average ranking data going back about 3 months so you may be able to recover it there.
You can also look through your old analytics data and that would tell you what URLs were getting the most organic traffic there and based on the content figure out what was doing well. While the old site is not live, do you have any way to access the old analytics data.
The www vs non www would result in needing 301s as well. Those are two different subdomains and so you would have 2 different pages according to Google.
- You need to talk to the developer to see if anything happened 2 months ago. Maybe they changed from www to non www and that would need a full 301 setup to direct Google from the old site to the new site.
This just sounds like a site migration gone bad and unless you can ask around for data from the previous provider, it will be tricky to figure out.
-
Gosh - that's a fine response!
I've actually moved the site from an Adobe Business Catalyst site (html) to WordPress.
1. The previous site is no longer live, so I don't know how I could get the URLs that were ranking to make sure they 301 redirect?
2. The drop off seems to have happened in the last 2 months although the site was re-built around March time?
...also, I've submitted the site to Google as "princessdesign.co.uk" rather than "www.princessdesign.co.uk" - could that have interfered? - I'm puzzled by the internet archive reference.
I'll check out the meta descriptions - top tip. Any help with these two points would be most helpful, as it would appear I have a lot of homework to do!
Thanks
Mark
-
Hello!
I looked in the internet archive and the most recent version they have of this site is from the end of 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20141222162951/http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/
The design and URL structure is different from what you have today. Did you recently relaunch the site?
On the old site this was one of the links to the bedroom section
http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
that URL 301 redirects to this page
http://princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
and that page shows a 404 error page.
So, if you did just do a redesign and overhaul of your URL structure on the site, you need to get all the URLs that were ranking and make sure they 301 redirect to the correct page.
You should also to look in your Google webmaster tools to make sure that there are no warnings about penalties or what not. I checked your robots.txt and meta robots and there was nothing there that would have blocked Google from crawling. The recent version of the site is image and JS heavy, I almost thought it was a flash site at first (gasp!). As the current site seems to have very little text on the page and is mostly images there is very little for the search engine to read and then know what to rank based on the text it reads. Similarly, only the home page has a meta description. While meta descriptions are not important for ranking per se, they are important once you rank, to help with click through. That is, once the page ranks, Google will show the title and description and the description can influence if the person clicks through to your site or not. With all the images, the new site is probably slower than the old one, and this can penalize you as well.
This is all based on some assumptions made quickly, so I could be totally wrong. Hope this helps to point you in the right direction!
Good luck!
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
-
Google Search Console - Click Count Inconsistency
In Google's search console I see a discrepancy between click counts. At top I see this here and then beneath I see these kinds of numbers for click counts here. So the top click count says 252 and the bottom section appears to only shows less than 40. Probably a simple explanation here that I'm just not seeing. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | a_toohill0 -
Drop of traffic after massive technical issue
Hello,
Reporting & Analytics | | SharonEKG
since August i am working on a customers website on WordPress who has a costume made theme, back in October after updating some plugins we had a massive breakdown and the website went up and down and had technical issues for over a month and traffic was completely gone for a while, since we have dropped to about 40% of the monthly traffic the website was getting prior, i was waiting to see if the website will recover since we were getting some traffic and are ranking but that did not happen, is there a way to tell if there are any code issues or anything that can cause that drop? moz crawler only indicates normal meta description errors but nothing in the code, changing the theme would probably be best solution as a popular premade theme would give a definite answer but that is not possible.0 -
Can the end of a competition cause a drop in organic visitors?
Hi everyone, Over the last six months I've been running a few competitions on my largest site, but noticed a very large decrease in organic sessions just after the third one ended. For reference, the site is ~10 years old and gets a couple of million sessions per month.Organic sessions throughout last year and before the holiday periods were around 800k/month, which then increased by 50% during the holiday period alongside a competition I ran.These competitions double the pages per session and add another 1.5 minutes onto session duration. At the end of one of the competitions this year, daily organic sessions halved overnight and are now below the baseline of last year - and not improving. Some possible causes include; Google update - unlikely, because the date of the drop doesn't coincide with any increase in SERP volatility that I can find The extremely quick overnight drop in engagement (pages/session and session duration falling back to pre-comp baseline) caused Google to believe our site to be less popular and thus less deserving of rankings Visitors who've been bombarded with month-long competitions are sick of seeing them and are not searching for my site so often Email tagging - in the week before, UTM tracking parameters were added to all emails (of which there are a lot of subscribers) - as the number of Email visitors in Analytics increased, Organic did slightly decrease at the same time. I think this is unlikely, but I wonder if somehow some of our email visitors were previously being classed as Organic as well as some being Direct Incorrectly tagged as Direct - at the same time as the organic drop, Direct traffic doubled - it has since decreased back to just above the Direct baseline, however Organic has not improved I'd just be interested to know if anyone has any experience with something similar happening and, if so, what do you think the cause was and how did you rectify it? Thank you very much for your input in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | serges780 -
Changes to cookies, August 24 or 25? (organic search not being cookied?)
Hi folks. We've seen a precipitous change in the referral data that we're able to gather from cookies. Specifically: On August 24 or 25, traffic to our site that was cookied as coming from organic search dropped by ~25%, and traffic coming in with no referrer data at all (i.e., it appears to be "direct") rose by roughly the same amount. As far as we can see, we haven't changed anything in our systems that would have caused this (we're not just mis-reading the cookie info), so I'm looking for external reasons. Has anyone else seen this? Or have any ideas why it would happen?
Reporting & Analytics | | RobM4160 -
Magic UVs - PPC landing pages delivering organic traffic by magic...
I have checked and double checked this. GA is showing over the last couple of weeks mysite.com/ppc/landingpage1 as a landing page for organic traffic, where it shouldn't. Main facts: The entire /ppc/ folder is blocked from the googlebot, and doesn't appear on any internal site maps. As far as I can tell, these pages have never been cached for the main index. I cannot recreate any of the organic searches myself (i.e. typing in keywords that triggered the traffic, even the almost unique long-tail ones). We just don't appear in the organic listings with these pages. The analytics and adwords accounts are linked. We are not paying for this mystery traffic through our PPC - these keywords are not appearing in our AdWords account (though other keywords / traffic are). The traffic is real - we have received phone calls from these pages, tracked to the visits recorded as organic These pages should only receive PPC traffic. They are receiving organic traffic also, but I can't recreate it. Can anyone suggest what's going on? I'm concerned about duplicate content issues and also skewing the analysis of the PPC campaign. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | RobPell0 -
SEO traffic had significantly dropped
I know this question has been asked before, but I'm hoping someone can address my specific issue. We recently did a complete redesign of our site and moved it over to a new server. The site was even "down" for about a week, where we had a static splash page. However since relaunching (it's not been over two weeks) we've seen a significant drop in search engine traffic. We are using Yoast for Wordpress. The site is The Tech Block. Could anyone see if there is something we're doing wrong? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ttb0 -
Google Analytics Organic Keyword (Not Provided) Alternative Hacks?
I'm sure everyone is sick of the (Not Provided) keywords because I know I am, and Google reckons that you should only see 10% or less (I'm currently around 13% and growing). I am seeking alternatives or hacks that will help display the keywords? If you have a hack to actually display the keywords, please share it your ideas and thoughts? I recently implemented a hack that will show the landing page of the keywords which is better than nothing. But as an eCommerce site, I have about 10% of my transactions which not provided, knowing the keywords would really help. Would love to hear your thoughts?
Reporting & Analytics | | upick-1623911 -
My website traffic drop two times
Hi all, on our website www.watchalyzer.com I have unique content that we are writing especially for this online magazine. In last two months our traffic dropped two times. First time on October 20th and after 20 days traffic got back on November 10th. Second time traffic dropped on November 15th and it is still down Does somebody have idea what could be reason for this and how it can be fixed? thanks, Nikola
Reporting & Analytics | | GearyLSF0