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Hi Healther,

Thanks for your response.

1. There was no downtime whatsoever.

2. Yep, the comparison shows us that:

• Direct traffic is down, just slightly, though there is a trend. The downward trend is still within normal bounds. I believe it will soon a be beyond these bounds, however, as there appears to be a user experience issue. Site speed being one, but would appreciate input on any others you might be able to identify.

• Referral traffic is within normal bounds, some ups, some downs.

• Organic traffic is where the site is taking the hit. The trend is downward, though not drastically so. Might site speed be the crux of search / engagement issues? Or do you see anything else in the site that might cause a downward trend in search traffic?

Hi Andy, thanks for the checklist. Going through it now to make sure we've got all these bases covered.

Hello,

We've just relaunched this site in the last several days, and we're seeing some small (but stead) traffic decreases, as well as engagement decreases. We're aware that page speed (about 4 seconds from a non-cached browser) and some 404s are an issue, our team is currently working on both. But we're really looking for some constructive criticism here as to what we need to improve.

Other issues to be aware of: lots of our social counts went back to 0s, as lots of URLs changed, and it wasn't possible to migrate comments from the old system, so those have gone back to 0 as well. We wonder if this might be affecting both users and search engines perception of the site.

Your input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Paul

Check out Ginzametrics, it automates the kinds of tasks it sounds like you need help with (full disclosure, we have a personal relationship with the founders of Ginza, but it is outstanding SEO software): http://www.ginzametrics.com/

Frequently after relaunching a site, Google will decrease your rankings for a short period (several weeks) while they crawl the new content and establish trust with your new site / content. To figure out what's going on with the unrelated keywords, look to your analytics package to determine what landing page those keywords are hitting. If it's the blog posts, its probably the long tail effect of content in the post.

It won't create a penalty per se, however search engines will be truncating your title tags with a '...', meaning you don't have control of how your title tags look. You're better off trimming them down to something shorter and meaningful, knowing that the appearance of your meta data on SERPs affects your CTR, which affects ranking. Plus, the extra 70 chars aren't helping you, because Google isn't indexing them.

Yes it does, more info from Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

This post from Jon at Point Blank SEO has links to lots of great resources on effective link building strategy: http://pointblankseo.com/link-roundup-november-18-2011

Can you provide more detail for your question?

Here are the steps I would take:

• Wordpress is a great CMS for those who are new to CMSs. It's free, it's easy, there's great a great support community.
• Find out which pages on your site are getting traffic (check your analytics)
• Determine which pages on your site have inbound links (SEOmoz has a great module for this)
• Copy the content on these pages to your new site (inside wordpress, or whatever CMS you end up using)
• 301 redirect the old URLs to their new home inside Wordpress
• Create a sitemap for your new site

Here are the steps I would take:

• Wordpress is a great CMS for those who are new to CMSs. It's free, it's easy, there's great a great support community.
• Find out which pages on your site are getting traffic (check your analytics)
• Determine which pages on your site have inbound links (SEOmoz has a great module for this)
• Copy the content on these pages to your new site (inside wordpress, or whatever CMS you end up using)
• 301 redirect the old URLs to their new home inside Wordpress
• Create a sitemap for your new site

There is no amount of posts / day that makes a website look natural. 1,000 per day looks as natural as 1 per month, given the content of a website that produces content at either of those respective intervals.

As Keri mentions in response to your other question about auto-posting: the key to great SEO results is well marketed, great content.

Yes it does, more info from Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

You're right, it's not necessarily count of links / day, link quality and other factors (like exact match anchor text) play a huge role. If you're building with quality there can truly be no magic number. Check out this post with lots of great link building resources from Point Blank SEO: http://pointblankseo.com/link-roundup-november-18-2011

It won't create a penalty per se, however search engines will be truncating your title tags with a '...', meaning you don't have control of how your title tags look. You're better off trimming them down to something shorter and meaningful, knowing that the appearance of your meta data on SERPs affects your CTR, which affects ranking. Plus, the extra 70 chars aren't helping you, because Google isn't indexing them.

This whiteboard explains it all, pros and cons of each approach, will give you a thorough answer to your question in 10 minutes: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday