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"The vast majority of the lost traffic is from local (LA, San Fran & San Diego) locations. People searching for "car insurance", "cheapest car insurance", "cheapest car insurance California" and other similar keyword phrases. You no longer have a page on your site optimized for those terms so you're not showing up in search results. "

Just curious what section of the Analytics data are you looking at to make this determination? All of the pages I used to have were supposedly moved over to the blog then 301'ed. Was this really not done or were the pages not optimized properly?

**"(1) You've got a lot of duplicate pages on the site, e.g. **

http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/
http://www.shiftins.com/blog/7-sins-car-insurance-buyers-make/www.shiftins.com

(See how the domain name is appended at the end of the second URL?) The later is redirected to the former, but it means you’ve got crawlers wasting a lot of time trying to index duplicate content and you're diluting your SEO equity. Of 269 pages, 267 are redirected duplicates. "

Are all of these duplicate pages coming from the blog? How can I identify these?

**Your bounce rates, time on site, page views and conversions all appear to have improved since the new site was deployed. That's great! **

Thank you that was the idea behind the redesign. Now I just need the traffic back!

**If you want the list of queries that were driving impressions before the conversion (and now aren't), email me (so I get your email) and I'll pass them along. **

I would greatly appreciate the list. Please email me at "greasy(at)gmail.com"

I've identified it as only affecting organic search traffic, direct and referral were largely unaffected. I do not mind giving you read only access. What email should I grant access too?

If don't have the analytics code set up on the blog pages, why would that affect my GWMT data?

Both GWMT and Analytics show a decline on the relaunch date. Would updating the title tags be the issue? Even without unique tags would it justify the huge drop?

I have a feeling it's a bunch of small things contributing to the drop in traffic and need help identifying the underlying cause of the decline. Thanks for your input.

Donna,

THE SITEMAP.... What great analysis! This could definitely be the problem. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

The company I'm currently working with created a separate sitemap for the blog than the main site but it does not look like they submitted it to WMT...

Would having two sitemaps but only submitting one to WMT cause the traffic to drop like this and not return?

Thomas,

Thank you for your time! I seriously appreciate it. I've taken a quick look at the resources you provided and will be digging deeper into them soon. While the current company I'm working with looks like they did everything right by my standards, I'm starting to become worried because of all the online articles stating that I shouldn't lose more than 40% of traffic and that I should only have been affected for 3-4 weeks.

The first image I've attached is the organic search traffic data from my GA account showing the huge drop in traffic over the last two months.

The second image I've attached is the WMT data showing the drop in overall impressions and clicks on October 18th.

The third image is where it gets weird. It shows that the average overall ranking position has actually decreased showing that I'm actually ranking higher but getting less impressions and less clicks.

I'm having a hard time identifying where the issue is coming from. I've kept a pretty good record of data but can't seem to pinpoint what exactly the issue is. Is there anything that you can think of that I should look into? I would also appreciate any analysis, insights, or analytic tools you can provide.

traffic_zpsevs8mdcb.jpg impressions_zps0s1igziy.jpg position_zpsh6ipsvpx.jpg

Hi Moz,

I recently migrated my website with the help of an SEO company using 301 redirects. The reason for the move was to change our CMS from .aspx to Drupal/Wordpress. The homepage (www.shiftins.com) and the blog (www.shiftins.com/blog) were the only two pages that kept the same url. Everything else was redirected. It's been about two months since the redirects were completed and traffic has dropped off about 90%. I'm starting to worry that something was not done properly and my traffic may never return.

The process for the redirects seem correct when I checked the work the SEO company did. All pages were duplicated, redirected to individual pages, then the old pages were de-indexed. Are there any insights the community can provide? Please help!

Hi Moz,

I recently migrated my website with the help of an SEO company using 301 redirects. The reason for the move was to change our CMS from .aspx to Drupal/Wordpress. The homepage (www.shiftins.com) and the blog (www.shiftins.com/blog) were the only two pages that kept the same url. Everything else was redirected. It's been about two months since the redirects were completed and traffic has dropped off about 90%. I'm starting to worry that something was not done properly and my traffic may never return.

The process for the redirects seem correct when I checked the work the SEO company did. All pages were duplicated, redirected to individual pages, then the old pages were de-indexed. Are there any insights the community can provide? Please help!