It could be, if they made the switch improperly and Google isn't transferring link equity or can't find new pages. I like checking on services like Archive.org to get backing for my ideas, but I think that you should probably reach out directly to your client and ask about their activities in April.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi there,

You've got a lot of things going on here. I'm worried that Google thinks your site is exceptionally spammy or has malware, since it's showing your .pdf or .doc files but not as many of you HTML pages. But I can't make any definitive statements because I'd need a lot more information. If I were you, I would:

• Dig into Google Analytics to get a better idea of what exactly has lost organic traffic, and when

• Look at the trend:

• Is it a slow decline or a sharp drop? Sharp drop typically means a penalty or that the company accidentally deindexed their pages or something equally horrifying. A slow decline could be an algorithm change (at least the ones I've seen take their time to really take effect) or a new competitor.

• When did it start? That way you can pinpoint what changes happened around then.

• Is it a steady decline or has it been jumping up and down? If it's a steady decline, it's probably one thing you're looking for; if traffic is erratic, there could be a bunch of problems.

• Find out which pages are losing traffic.

• _Are all pages on the site losing traffic? _If they are, it's probably an algorithm change or a change that was made by webmasters sitewide. If it's specific pages, it could be that there's now better competition for those key terms.

• Which pages are losing the most traffic? When did their traffic start to drop? Is it different from the rest of the site? You may need to investigate at a deeper level here. Individual pages could have new competition, you may have accidentally changed site structure and lessened internal links to it, and/or it may have lost some external links.

• Get an accurate list of every unique page on your site to clear up duplicate indexation and find out if anything _isn't _in Google's index.

• Add a canonical to all pages on your site pointing to the version of the URL you want in Google's index. It's a good way to make sure that parameters and other accidental variations don't lead to duplicate content.

• Divide that list into site sections and create separate XML sitemaps by section. That way you have a better idea of what is indexed and what isn't in Google Webmaster Tools. I got this idea from this guy (who is also my boss) and I swear by it.

• Based on traffic in Google Analytics, pick out pages that used to get a lot of traffic and now get none. Search for them in Google with site:[url] search to see if Google's got them indexed.

After that, if you're still stumped, definitely come back here with a little more info - we'll all be happy to help!

Kristina

Hmmm, this is a weird one. My guess is, since Google originally found those links (maybe before your site launched, but the pages were linked to and live through the IP address?), it keeps returning to them and finding them. In that case, not much you can do, but keep those canonicals on.

Canonicals really can save you from duplicate content problems: I've had clients with multiple versions of every page based on the path you take to a page, and canonicals have allowed them to rank well and avoid penalties entirely. As long as you're doing everything else right, hopefully this shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Sorry this ended up falling on you!

Hm, this could have, though. When did you first notice these backlinks from the IP address in GWT?

Well, from an SEO perspective, this hasn't lead to any penalties or reduced rankings, right?

Did you add canonicals, at least, to make sure that Google wouldn't find duplicate content? That's what I'd be most worried about, from an SEO perspective.

Hi there,

Have you run a crawl on your site to see if there are a lot of links pointing to the old URLs? If Google sees more links point to the old version of the URLs rather than the new version, it's possible that it thinks that the old pages aren't really gone for good.

• Kristina

This is a pretty thorough outline of what you need to do: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

My steps are usually:

1. Identify pages that get significant organic traffic by pulling the Organic Traffic report in Google Analytics for the past year or so.
2. Identify pages that have a significant number of links (or, have links from high traffic sources) in Open Site Explorer.
3. Map where that content should be now, and 301 redirect to new pages.
4. Completely remove all old pages from the index by 404ing them and making sure that no links on new pages point to old pages.

Sounds quick and simple, but this definitely takes time. Good luck!

There really isn't a problem with having 100,000 404 "errors." Google's telling you that it thinks 100,000 pages exist, but when it tries to find them, it's getting a 404 code. That's fine: 404s tell Google that a page doesn't exist and to remove the page from Google's index. That's what we want.

The real problem is with your site migration, as FCBM pointed out. If you properly 301 redirect old pages to new, Google will be redirected to the new page, it won't just hit a 404. If you fix the problems with the site migration (not focusing on Google too much), the 404 errors will naturally subside.

The other option is to just take the hit from the migration, and Google will eventually remove all of these pages from its index and stop reporting on them, as long as there aren't live links pointing to the removed pages.

Good luck!

No need to worry about hreflang (and therefore x-default) unless you're working with international versions of your sites! If Google doesn't see anything referencing international, it will figure out the language and country from the ccTLD and the language you're using on your site. Hreflang tells Google where the international versions of a page are, it isn't necessary to designate a language and location.

Best,

Kristina

Google has been threatening to rank sites lower in mobile search results if they're not optimized for the mobile experience for awhile. Any chance this is the case? Look at your site and other sites that rank for the keywords in question - are the other sites serving up a better user experience?

Ah, that makes sense.

In that case, best practice is to make landing pages specific to your AdWords campaigns. I know that seems like a lot more work than just adding a modal pop up, but hopefully you can get your developer to make you a template and then you can easily make a number of very similar pages with different messaging. That extra expense to make a landing page will be worthwhile, since there's no chance that Google will have a problem with it, so your ads won't get disapproved, and visitors generally expect a landing page tailored to their ad anyway.

Good luck!