My website is struggling to receive traffic I think I have a serious error

[travelmagazine]

Hi,

My website would receive a lot of traffic and then I asked a SEO company who contacted me to do some work on the site. Since then, the site has dropped in the rankings and our traffic has dropped by like a lead balloon. Instead of receiving thousands of visitors, today we have received 10.

I am finding that I have articles no longer in Google but they are in Yahoo.

Here is an example of an article that was once popular

https://www.in2town.co.uk/travel-advice/how-to-save-money-booking-a-holiday-through-a-travel-agent/

I have tried everything and now I do not know where to turn. I am not sure what they have done but everything has now failed. We have not been penalized and our hosting company have said they cannot find anything wrong.

Due to this problem we have stopped writing articles and have spent all our time trying to work out what has gone wrong.

If anyone can give me advice and point me in the right direction then I would be in your debt.

[travelmagazine]

Thank you so much for this. One of the SEO companies who did this is part of a well known SEO franchise, so all what I would say is, don't use that franchise. I found out today, that the franchise in question that a lot of the people who are part of the franchise don't know much about SEO. They seem to take on the work and then they send it to someone else to do for a lot less, making what I have been told a 500% mark up on profit.

Hopefully I can now start getting my traffic back to normal and start building up my site and getting the articles out there.

[effectdigital]

As it turns out, Robin's insights here (that HTTP redirects to HTTPS via 302 redirects, instead of 301s) turns out to be pretty much hitting the nail on the head

Here's the data for anyone who is interested (and can help OP more):

• https://d.pr/f/TskHsn.xlsx (spreadsheet download)

I spent a lot of time on this data. I compiled all of OP's backlinks from many sources (Ahrefs, Majestic etc) and then re-crawled using Screaming Frog. This shows all of OPs backlinks, their current status and critically how they 'land' on OP's pages / URLs (at the destination end)

Surprise surprise, almost all links point to HTTP (not to HTTPS) and are then 302 redirected instead of 301'd, thus cutting off almost all link equity post HTTPS migration

Whoever fked up here, did an epic job of messing up OP's internal SEO authority flow**. This is probably now, the leading on-site factor in terms of OP's site struggles on Google (so thanks for that Robin Lord!)

I still think there's an off-site element, but this needs fixing ASAP. All HTTP->HTTPS oriented 302 redirects must be converted to 301s with immediate effect

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hmm, I don't think that addresses what we are trying to change. I think you will need to discuss with them the status code they are using as part of the redirect - unless I've missed something none of the above seems to include anything specifying status code.

[travelmagazine]

my hosting company have responded with the following regarding the redirects. they have said if this needs changing to contact them

The following https redirect is set for your website:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

[travelmagazine]

I don't know how they crashed it. I was away for the day and then got a number of phone calls to say the site was down. And when I checked it was down and was down for around eight hours. The company said they did a mistake on the site as they were speeding the site up and they were changing the header of the site.

[R0bin_L0rd]

If you type in the url examples you gave above but replace https with http you should hit a 302 (the ayima Google Chrome redirect plugin should show you).

Out of interest - how did the SEO agency make your site crash?

[travelmagazine]

Yes, my hosting company offer a service and they did the http to https for me. I have just contacted them now asking how they did the migration so it can be changed.

Could you give me a couple of examples of the 302 redirect please.

The change was about 16 months ago now. The site was doing very well in traffic and then we decided to get a seo company in. They did some work but then I noticed they were doing silly mistakes, so then I got a company from the uk and then noticed some daft cheap links and some errors that occurred. at one point my site crashed so I got rid of them. the traffic dropped like a led balloon and ever since I have been trying to fix things.

So, instead of concentrating on content, I have been trying to fix all the errors which is hard when you are a novice

[effectdigital]

What Robin says about 301s and 302s is pure truth and that could also be a significant contributing factor, especially if it's quite widespread. Chantelle remind me at some point via email to look into this and nail down the 'exact' URLs that are 302-ing. If there is a problem there, we can find it and address it

[R0bin_L0rd]

Wow, this is pretty thorough, good effort!

Chantelle, you mentioned that you did a http -> https migration, looking at some of the pages in http they seem to redirect to https using a 302 redirect. I would use a 301 redirect instead - 302 means "this move is temporary" so Google treats it as less strong. Essentially it doesn't give a clear enough signal to Google that the new pages are replacing the old ones, Google seems to have some http pages still indexed but I don't know whether it's just not picked up all the redirects. Once you have all the 301s sorted, I would submit a http sitemap to Google to prompt it to crawl the old http pages and realise they are redirected.

Chantelle, when did the drop happen? And how defined was it? It sounds like, from your initial message, you went from a lot of traffic to not much at all in the space of days but was it more gradual than that? Was it before the https migration/ When did the agency make the changes?

The rogue canonicals effectdigital have found sound like they might be confusing things, that could line up with the coverage issues you saw Chantelle.

effectdigital - those links you found. Does it look like they have been around and like that for a while? Or were they recently added?

[EGOL]

I believe that the content needs significant improvement to be competitive.

I don't mean this as an insult, but just that competitive content clearly and completely addresses the queries that might bring people into the site.

This is obviously a matter where opinions are many.  Here is one.

[effectdigital]

So far we have identified some potential issues:

1.) Backlinks don't seem great. I took backlink data from a load of tools (including Ahrefs, Majestic, SEOSpyGlass etc) and funneled them all into SEMRush for it to evaluate those (in addition to the ones it found by itself) and give a toxicity rating. This is what we're looking at - screenshot

2.) Because links are a state, a forensic - intelligent disavow (which doesn't disavow the decent links) is sorely needed as at this point algorithmic devaluations are in play and a penalty may be looming (not too far off)

3.) Once that's complete - the disavow will likely result in a very minor dip (as no one's view of what Google thinks are good / bad links, is perfect). Due to this some really good link building (Digital PR level link building) will be needed afterwards, to clog the wound (only a small wound, but will still need clogging)

4.) Someone has been over-zealous with the indexation sculpting. Canonical tags (which also act like no-index tags, because they tell Google that the 'active' URL is non-canonical, and point it elsewhere) could be removed from the AMP pages on this site and also from a string of parameter URLs. When you use hreflangs, you don't canonical the foreign URLs to the original language. You just use the hreflangs, on their own! Same should be true for AMP links (they're both part of the rel=/link family). Yes, it's sometimes common on a site with sprawling architecture, to reign in parameter URL indexation. Our pal here (OP), isn't in that predicament - so it's been misapplied

5.) The site wasn't registering as mobile friendly earlier. Now that seems to have been fixed but implementation may need examining in more detail (e.g: check a page of every template type in Google's mobile friendly tool, not just the homepage. Check implementation didn't hurt page-loading speeds too much)

6.) Mobile-oriented page-loading speeds, last I checked, didn't even achieve a rating of 20 on Google PSI (it was in the teens). That's real bad news and probably still needs looking into

^ This is all the stuff I've found so far. Any further help, from anyone else would be amaze-balls

[travelmagazine]

not got the answer as yet, still researching and still trying to find the problem

[travelmagazine]

Thank you, you have been amazing

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hi Chantelle, this sounds like it's been quite a concerning situation. There's a lot of information here and it looks like Effect Digital may have given some responses and have followed up on email.

This question is currently marked as "unanswered" and I don't want to mark it as answered unless you have got an answer. Would you be able to share any anonymised solution here to benefit other Moz users? If you haven't got a solution then post the latest development and we'll see what else we can do

[effectdigital]

Thanks for all the info. I got your email and replied in full

[travelmagazine]

I have just gone into google console and really do not understand google console.

It says I have 367 valid and 1.42K excluded under coverage. When I go into excluded it brings up different options, one option is Alternate page with proper canonical tag and one of those urls is https://www.in2town.co.uk/holiday-ideas/top-american-ski-resorts-50s/amp/

I have amp installed for mobile devices.

then I have the option of crawled but not indexed. here is an example and some of the articles listed in this section are old articles https://www.in2town.co.uk/feature-news/london-river-thames-must-see/

then I have crawl anomaly

https://www.in2town.co.uk/flash-hotel-benidorm-receives-bad-review-from-benidorm-regular/

then I have Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical

https://www.in2town.co.uk/pet-health/what-you-need-to-know-about-dog-kennel-cough/

Any help and advice would be great

[travelmagazine]

We had two SEO companies work on the site, one from the USA and then one from the UK. The one from the UK decided all keywords should be changed and a new design of the site. The site was doing really well until we got these two companies involved. For the past 15 months the site has now struggled with most of the traffic coming from social media.

We recently changed from http to https as well after receiving a recommendation. We are hoping to get back to the way the site was two years and improve from there. I have noticed some pages that were ranking were no longer in the search results when I went to google console. The page above was not even indexed which was really strange. The seo company came in a did a lot of redirects as well which is a bit worrying

[effectdigital]

So in the SEO industry, we have tools which measure a site's estimated worth and traffic intake (just from search, it doesn't tend to reflect anything else)

One is SEMRush:

• https://d.pr/i/zvr8cY.png (screenshot)

The other main one, is Ahrefs:

• https://d.pr/i/0EbHaI.png (screenshot)

Neither of these tools picked up extremely significant movements within the past year. Neither of them seem to think that (in terms of SEO) the site was ever doing that well to begin with.

Basically these tools contain colossal indexes of Google keywords. They monitor these high to mid-value terms frequently, and see who is ranking. They leverage CTR (click-through-rate) data against ranking positions to estimate 'search visibility' (which is like a, ultra-rough traffic estimate - never to be taken as an absolute)

If these tools aren't showing that anything bad happened (or if they're not showing that performance was ever very good), then there are some possible reasons:

1. The tools happen not to contain most of your main keywords in their keyword indexes

2. Your visits were never coming from SEO in the first place, or you had broken tracking which was inflating those numbers

3. You had good tracking and your SEO company broke it (thus making it look falsely like there's been some massive drop)

4. Your visits were coming from SEO, but mostly not from Google. Other search engines exist

It's hard to know which of these is the main offender, or whether there's another reason (some 'unknown-unknown'). I'll take a brief look into your Analytics profile if you want. It could possibly shed some light in terms of what the heck is going on!

If you want to connect further, my email is on my profile page. I can't promise I'll find a solution, but these kinds of problems intrigue me