Traffic Dropping To Website

[SEOguy1]

Hi

In Google Analytics:
I have noticed up to 50% of traffic coming to the website drops off at the home page point,
and drops further from other pages on the site. I realise some may possibly say that this could be down to various factors such as server issues, poor web design, or the wrong traffic reaching the site

I have did corrected the following:

1. There was an issue with there being www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home,  Screaming Frog and Moz showed that these both had duplicate meta tagging issues.  Initially I had created a separate page called 'home' to include in the main nav bar under the slider, but yesterday I replaced this page with a request in the functions.php to place 'home' in the nav bar as a redirect back to the home www.domain.com page. This works great.  So I now have the following 301 permanent redirects: non-www to www resolve in the htaccess file, plus 2 permanent 301 redirects in the nav bar. I wonder if this is acceptable protocol re the nav bar redirects, and I wonder if you could possibly advise if the actions that I have taken will have any negative impact on the web seo, link structure, crawlability or indexing.

Thanks.

[SEOguy1]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for responding.  Each menu item links to its final destination. This is the functions.php code I have used on the Wordpress site which basically allows a 'Home' text to be clickable so users can go to the home page when they are at any page on the site:

// Filter wp_nav_menu() to add additional links and other output
function new_nav_menu_items($items) {
$homelink = '

• [' . __('Home') . '](' . home_url( '/' ) . ')';
  $items = $homelink . $items;
  return $items;
  }
  add_filter( 'wp_nav_menu_items', 'new_nav_menu_items' );
  ?>

I haven't yet set up set up any crawler spam and ghost referrer spam filters for your site and Analytics. I do see 2 referring websites in Analytics that are not familiar to me.

Kind Regards.

[ThompsonPaul]

To answer your specific questions - no, you should never have your own navigation links passing through redirects. And yes, having these redirects in your primary navigation is interfering with your site's ability to distribute its page rank properly.

From your mention of the functions.php file, I assume this is a WordPress-based site? If so, you have your home page set up incorrectly if it is requiring redirects. (When correctly set up, WordPress even automatically takes care of redirecting to whichever canonical version you have selected in your WP General Settings.) Because you have full control of your own navigation, each menu item should link directly to its final destination.

As far as having so much of your traffic bouncing from the home page... have you set up correct crawler spam and ghost referrer spam filters for your site and Analytics? If not, it's entirely likely that spam data is badly skewing and distorting your real data for your home page in particular. (Referrer and crawler spam is almost entirely bounce visits to the home page.)

Hope that helps?

Paul