Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero
-
Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with...
I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help?
Any input greatly appreciated
-
Building on that answer, Google Webmaster Console should also be able to give you a list of URLs that are resulting in 404 errors. Those are going to excellent contenders for a 301.
-
You bet! Hopefully this helps when you start digging into things!
-
Marvellous help Mr PhD - you've cleared up some crucial basics for me - many thanks!
-
Nope you dont need access. You set the 301s up on the current server. When the current server gets a request for an old page, it then knows where to send the user to, using the 301.
If also, if you don't mind, please mark my response as a "Good answer" with Moz.
Cheers!
-
...so I don't need to access the previous website on its previous hosting to set up a 301?
-
301 the old URLs to the new URLs. Try to keep a one-to-one relationship on the old page to the new pages. The old bedroom page 301s to the new bedroom page, the old dining room page 301s to the new dining room page, etc. You would not want to redirect the old bathroom URLs to the new dining room URLs.
You need to pick if the site is www or non www. Lets say you pick non www as your default. Make sure if anyone types in a www URL on your site that you 301 that page to the non www counterpart. Just as above, one-to-one relationship. Make sure that any links on your site link to the proper nonwww URL. Any tools you use (moz etc) make sure they start with the non www version of the website.
Good post here by Cyrus on redirects here at Moz as well.
-
It's worse than that - I've looked after the site for the last 5 years, so it's my own fault
Last 2 questions (I promise) -
1. once I've established the old URLs, how do I re-direct to the new site?
2. How do I combine www and non-www (if that's what I need to do)
Really appreciate your input on this - classic case of an old graphic designer thinking he can SEO after a couple of Lynda courses
-
- If you want to find out what the general structure of the old site: Google Internet Archive and then enter your site URL. You will see snapshots and be able to pull it all together. Bing webmaster tools actually does a pretty good job of showing old site structure and that may help.
If you want to try and figure out what pages used to rank: You can also use various linking tools (Moz OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs) and Google and Bing webmaster tools to find how people are linking to you. This will not give you all of the old URLs on your site, but at least the most important ones. Those are the most likely that ranked. Google webmaster tools will show some average ranking data going back about 3 months so you may be able to recover it there.
You can also look through your old analytics data and that would tell you what URLs were getting the most organic traffic there and based on the content figure out what was doing well. While the old site is not live, do you have any way to access the old analytics data.
The www vs non www would result in needing 301s as well. Those are two different subdomains and so you would have 2 different pages according to Google.
- You need to talk to the developer to see if anything happened 2 months ago. Maybe they changed from www to non www and that would need a full 301 setup to direct Google from the old site to the new site.
This just sounds like a site migration gone bad and unless you can ask around for data from the previous provider, it will be tricky to figure out.
-
Gosh - that's a fine response!
I've actually moved the site from an Adobe Business Catalyst site (html) to WordPress.
1. The previous site is no longer live, so I don't know how I could get the URLs that were ranking to make sure they 301 redirect?
2. The drop off seems to have happened in the last 2 months although the site was re-built around March time?
...also, I've submitted the site to Google as "princessdesign.co.uk" rather than "www.princessdesign.co.uk" - could that have interfered? - I'm puzzled by the internet archive reference.
I'll check out the meta descriptions - top tip. Any help with these two points would be most helpful, as it would appear I have a lot of homework to do!
Thanks
Mark
-
Hello!
I looked in the internet archive and the most recent version they have of this site is from the end of 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20141222162951/http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/
The design and URL structure is different from what you have today. Did you recently relaunch the site?
On the old site this was one of the links to the bedroom section
http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
that URL 301 redirects to this page
http://princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
and that page shows a 404 error page.
So, if you did just do a redesign and overhaul of your URL structure on the site, you need to get all the URLs that were ranking and make sure they 301 redirect to the correct page.
You should also to look in your Google webmaster tools to make sure that there are no warnings about penalties or what not. I checked your robots.txt and meta robots and there was nothing there that would have blocked Google from crawling. The recent version of the site is image and JS heavy, I almost thought it was a flash site at first (gasp!). As the current site seems to have very little text on the page and is mostly images there is very little for the search engine to read and then know what to rank based on the text it reads. Similarly, only the home page has a meta description. While meta descriptions are not important for ranking per se, they are important once you rank, to help with click through. That is, once the page ranks, Google will show the title and description and the description can influence if the person clicks through to your site or not. With all the images, the new site is probably slower than the old one, and this can penalize you as well.
This is all based on some assumptions made quickly, so I could be totally wrong. Hope this helps to point you in the right direction!
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Big drop in organic traffic after moving the website-should we still do 301 redirects?
Hi,
Reporting & Analytics | | martin1970
We have a website that got redesigned with new urls in Jan 31, 2018. Since then our SEO traffic has gone down big time and to never recover. We did not do any 301 redirects back then (very stupid I know but I was not in charge then). So my question is would it be beneficial to 301 redirect old urls that were once ranked but now have all 404 errors or is it too late to do these 301 to gain any benefits? If a page that was once ranked and then have a 404 error, how long does google keep that 404 page in their database? I have heard information saying that although the page is a 404 it may still be indexed in their backend for some time and then it completely drops off all together. If so do you know how long time they would keep those 404 in their database? The old urls may have had good backlinks pointed to them because the organic traffic was good back then. So I wonder if doing 301 right now would help send some link juice over to the new urls? Or would this be a complete waste of time? Cheers Martin1 -
The difference between organic searches in Acquisition and organic searches in Default Channel Grouping
Hi guys, We have a question. In Google Analytics, there are 2 types of identifying organic searches: through Acquisition and through Default Channel Grouping. On our website, we have some differences between the number of organic sessions. Which one do you think is more relevant? Which one do you use? Many thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | RIDGID_Europe0 -
Any issues with Google impressions dropping in Webmaster Tools?
I'm seeing a drop in impressions across all my websites that are hosted at a certain location. Just wanted to make sure that it is not some reporting issue that others are seeing.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Analiytics question
Hello guys, We are currently getting in our website around 600 daily visitors.
Reporting & Analytics | | WayneRooney
We getting around the 50 quotes a day.
Can i know trough Analytics from where all the visitors that click the quote button coming from ? Thank you0 -
Question about setting up Google Webmaster on Network Solutions?
I'm trying to set myself up as a Webmaster on my company's site. We use Network Solutions. I am following Google's directions on how to do this. However, I am a bit wary. Here are the directions. Underlined is the part I am having trouble with: Log in to your account for howlatthemoon.com at www.networksolutions.com by clicking theManage Account icon. In the left navigation bar, open the nsWebAddress (Domains) menu by clicking the **+ **icon. Click Manage Domain Names. On the Domain Details page for the domain you're using, select the Designated DNS radio button (to the right of Change domain to point to) and click the Apply Changes button. If you've previously modified your advanced DNS settings, click Edit (to the right ofDomain currently points to). Under the Advanced DNS Manager heading, click Manage Advanced DNS Records. Under the Text (TXT Records) heading, click Add/Edit. In the Host field, enter @. Leave the TTL field set to the default value. In the Text field, copy and paste the following unique security token:
Reporting & Analytics | | howlusa
(security token removed for obvious reasons) Click Continue. Review your changes and click Save Changes. When you've done saving the TXT record, click the Verify button below on this page. There is already a host of @ (None). The text for it reads: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all I called Network Solutions and the guy I was speaking with told me to delete it and replace it with my Google Webmasters code. However, I think this is setting up our email. Do I just add the Webmasters in and have two hosts of @ (None)? Thanks!0 -
Our SEO is garbage. can someone answer a few questions for me?
I've seen our SEO drop to more or less the bottom of the barrel, and I don't have any answers yet as to why. SEOMoz is running it's crawl currently, and I have a few errors about duplicate titles and content, so I know I have some work cut out for me. But, why the sudden drop? The only change I made at the time was a change to our URL structure, but all links were 301'd to their new location. Does this still hurt SEO that terribly? Also, our robots.txt file is getting indexed and showing up as the first result at times. Very embarrassing. It's doing better than our other pages. 😞 I don't get what's happening here. Yrzu3,fkbYu
Reporting & Analytics | | stagl0 -
An initial set up question - linking to GA
when viewing campaign it indicates there is a problem linking to our GA account but the details entered are correct. Any ideas what the problem might be - nothing on the campaign settings page gives me a clue. There is a highlighted box saying disconnect from GA but nothing else. The only thing i can think of is that the GA account was set up by a third party and we have access to view it - could it be a permissions problem?
Reporting & Analytics | | GreatGifts4Kids0 -
Google Analytics internal Site Search - Destination pages dispaly Search results
Hi, Im having a bit of an issue with Google Analytics internal site search, I am able to currently track the search terms through my website internal search but when I click onto destination pages I just get the search result page. When clicking destination pages I would expect to get the pages on which the user ended up after the results page, instead I just get the results page which is pretty much useless ?submitsearchXXXXXX hope you can help, look forward to your response. Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | Tug-Agency1