URL-structure change - former long-tail traffic gone

[dumperama]

Hey people,

I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html. 
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user)

Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP.

But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month.

Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords.

You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped.

So I'd like to know if you observed similar results.

Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago?

Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though.

All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise...

I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'm not saying Adwords can't be causing this - I just haven't seen where it does.  Other ad networks allow users to embed links in ways that disguise that their paid ads, and many affiliate site owners hide paid ads in a way that gives them the appearance of being non-paid.

And yes, I have heard from some people that Google can sometimes confuse paid and non-paid in their analytics system.

[dumperama]

Let me get this clear: What do you mean by "disguised as regular links"? Because I am only talking about Adwords and I am not aware of a way to disguise them.

If you are not talking about Adwords. For my standards, I can prove that Adwords have an impact.

Or Google Analytics is getting the seperation between paid and non-paid mixed up. Ever heard of anything like this?

[AlanBleiweiss]

paid ads are not supposed to impact SEO at all. While I have not seen AdWords cause this, I have seen paid ads in other networks do so when those paid ads were disguised as regular links on sites displaying them.

[dumperama]

Hey Alan,

thank you for your answer. I really appreciate it.

Best believe me, I'm just as curious, probably even a little more.

I've been looking into it today and the outcome was pretty surprising: You know how Google always maintains that Adwords doesn't affect organic ranking in any way, i.e. neither positively nor negatively.

Well, apparantly, the "signal somewhere" is exactly there with Adwords. The project I took over was before managed by someone who did it to the best of his knowledge. Sadly though, despite a quite good results, his product knowledge was pretty limited, so he advertised with Adwords using keywords that didn't match the product at all. So imagine we are selling Mercedes SL600 but he advertised for Citroen 2CV. Not exactly our targeted customer segment.

But what really suprises me is that these Adwords ads generated non-paid traffic onto our website for those keywords.

Or do I miss something here? Can Adwords be a signal for Google as to what the page is about?

[AlanBleiweiss]

dumperama, I'm curious - if all those keywords the site has nothing to do were found within the site, or perhaps were they in links pointing to the previous version pages?  There's got to be some signal somewhere that said " this page is related to this topic".  That's something I'd look further into.  It's possible, if it was low-level links, that once the URL changes were made, you essentially helped Google get further confirmation on the true topical focus, and that in turn devalued the source indicators that drove those other phrases.

Ultimately Google refreshes their evaluations frequently - though not necessarily very often on a site that doesn't show regularly updated content or regularly changing other off-site factors.