I redesigned a clients website and there is a pretty massive drop in traffic - despite my efforts to significantly improve SEO.
-
Hi there,
I redesigned a clients website that was very old fashioned and was not responsive. I implemented 301 redirects, kept the content pretty similar, website linking structure very similar - the only things i changed was making the website responsive, improved title tags, added a bit more information, improved the footer and h1 tags etc..
however although clicks are fairly similar search impressions have dropped about 60% on average over the past week.
The old site had some keywords linking to pages with no new content so i removed those as seemed like black hat seo tricks and also there was a huge list of "locations we deliver to" on the homepage followed by around 500 citys/towns I removed this. Could this be the cause for the drop? as i assumed those would do more harm than good?
Fairly new with SEO as you can probably tell. Looking for advice on what may be the cause and what steps I should take now.
Thanks for reading!
-
@badgergravling Can you suggest, if adding a forum will give any extra benefit to my main website's popularity?
-
Thanks for your reply Dan.
It's an International site. Our target audience is from India, Middle East countries, and East Asia.
Google has indexed https version and looks good, but after all the on page optimization also, the traffic not going up, however, we are ranking for more keywords than ever.
I've attached the screenshot of traffic stats from Jan to June, if that will help pinpoint issues.
Thanks again
-
Hey Logan,
We did a redesign+migration from as.net to Wordpress. We launched in February 2017 & still struggling to get back where we were. Almost 80% traffic loss.
Any specific pointers that get missed during these kinds of migrations, is it normal to loose this much traffic?
Please help
-
Is it a small, local type business by any chance?
Despite what a lot of best practice will say regarding location pages - they still work for a lot of small, local busineses, particularly in uncompetitive niches. Generally, I'd say 500 cities/towns is massively overdoing it, and there are a lot less spammy ways of achieving something similar, but it may well have contributed to the hit...
If the clicks are the same, then actually it's fine. No one was visiting and buying via the impressions you've lost. However, I'd say it's worth looking at the location/local SEO optimisation again and redoing it in a less spammy way to ensure your client won't panic if they ever look at impressions in Google Search Console (Pretty unlikely for most clients)...
-
Hi Logan,
Thanks for the response! Haha. That is what i thought originally, however I read that a drop of around 5% is normal so 50%+ had my alarm bells ringing! (although the website only has a small amount of traffic)
There was a few other factors that worried me like the old site was .htm but I .301 redirected every page to the new ones with .html
I will try not to worry and hopefully things will improve within the next week or so.
Thanks again.
-
Hi,
Patience, young padawan, it's only been a week
It's basically impossible to redesign a website without some organic traffic loss. There's a lot for search engines to consider, everything they previously knew about your website is gone, they have to learn your new site architecture, URL structures, content, meta data, etc. etc.
It sounds like you covered all the most important bases and got rid of some old school tactics. Give it some time, you should start to see a rebound in a few weeks. The worst thing you can do is panic and try to fix a bunch of stuff that isn't actually broken.
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
-
How to find Spam Website?
Hi guys, I'm seo newbie and really want to find websites that hurt seo ranking to avoid get link. Which tools or trick can help me to find those site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | denakalami0 -
Spammy Website Framed My Site & Stole Rankings
Hi One of the pages of my website was starting to gather some real traction in Google rankings and hit 3500 visitors per day. This is the page: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/drinking-apple-cider-vinegar-benefits/ On 11th January search traffic to this page fell to virtually 0. The rest of the site rankings were unaffected. Yesterday I tried searching for some of the main keywords I was ranking for and instead of my search listing, this was appearing: Image: http://www.naturallivingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/weird-rankings.jpg It is in the exact position I was ranking in, but instead this evn . moe site has stolen my ranking. Upon opening the website, it is simply my original article page in an iframe. If you look at the source code of the offending website, you will see what I mean. Hopefully now you are getting a 403 forbidden error as my host blocked referrals from that site but they still hold my rankings. Has anyone ever seen this before? How was this done? And how can I get my ranking back? Thanks in advance, James
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JamesPenn0 -
Page keeps dropping
Hello All, I have a page (http://www.caravanguard.co.uk/touring-caravan-insurance/) we have seen it drop a bit over recent months and now we have been appearing low on page two (Google UK) for the term "Caravan Insurance". Now I do not expect to rank above some of the big players in our market and the aggregators, but we do feel we have good content and have tried to act as white as we can in terms of SEO, link building and alike, but we are still slipping. My main issue is this - one minute we have the link appearing in the serps and then the next it drops from the serps altogether. At this point i often resubmit for indexing in webmaster tools and a few minutes later its back.... is this just likley something I am seeing local to me due search becoming more personal (I have toggle hide private results too) or is there a cause to its sudden disappearance and reappearance? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Why Link Spamming Website Coming on First Page Google?
As we all already know about link spamming. As per Google Guidelines Link building, Exact Keywords Anchor Link Building is dead now but i am looking most of the website coming on first page in Google doing same exact keywords linking. I think directory, article, social bookmarking, press release and other link building activity is also dead now. Matt always saying content is more important but if we will not put any keywords link in content part then how website rank in first page in Google. Can anybody explain why is website coming on first page because when i am doing same activity for quality links with higher domain authority website then we are affected in Google update.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Changes to SEO with disavow?
Has the game changed a lot with the disavow tool I can see people still saying check out what our competitors are doing but with just going through a disavow myself how do you actually know what the correct link diversity is as 0 - 100% of the links could be disavowed. Also could a competitor not just buy a load of spammy links and disavow them to mask there real links. (I know in my backlinks on 150 are good and the rest is disavowed crap)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Best Website Security Service
Having been hacked twice and, it seems, still suffering from problems as a result (file changes and alterations, etc) I'm wondering if there is a good paid service that provides security for websites? I'm an online travel agent so our websites "up-time" and search engine position is vital but I'm spending more time trying sort out our websites' security than selling travel. It would be sensible to pay for a service that would ensure, as much as possible, that our site is secure and any optimisation we do is not cancelled out by hacking and security problems. If anyone could recommend a good company I would be very grateful. Colin
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NileCruises0 -
Got an SEO package, paid $400+ for it, basically got scammed.
Hi guys, I know this is stupid but I bought an SEO package for around $400. Received the report, and my... it was a complete load of spam. It was basically a blast to lots of sites with random articles and my anchor texts all over the place. Theres thousands of these links and the articles dont make sense, I'm not sure what i'm going to do! This is my main Ecommerce website and i'm worried, i've complained and I hope to get a refund however i'm worried hes going to just blast my site and get me penalized by Google. It is clearly blackhat. Is there anything I can do? I'm very worried. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Superinks0