Traffic and impressions down
-
I am confused on what is going on.
I recently converted my website to wordpress. I kept the same url structure to the best of my abilities (without the .html) and 301 all .html to / So whatever was www.domain.com/page.html to www.domain.com/page/
The old CMS was a proprietary cms done by the company who originally designed the website. It was poorly put together and was really buggy. I decided to move to wordpress due to many limitations particularly for SEO.
Now traffic is down about 10% and looks like the downward trend will continue, also, impressions are down by about 75%.
Any thoughts on what could be happening?
-
Also Mike, you may want to have a look a Ahrefs.com. I have just checked it and there are alot more backlinks showing up you need to look at. If you google for a coupon, you can get it half price, or just get a refund within 7 days. It can be useful for these sort of situations, even though Moz does alot more analytics etc.
-
No worries. This is another good article that I found is quite good:
http://moz.com/ugc/should-domain-authority-be-used-to-determine-which-backlinks-to-remove
-
Thanks Jonathan!
-
OK, I have had a quick look and I do see some potential problems:
Check that page. You will see this particular term (Holtorf Medical Group) seems overly used, thanks to a few sitewide sidebar links for example realitynibs.com
You should either get those sitewide links nofollowed, or removed,... or failing that dissavowed. There may be other examples in that link, but I believe that is a potential cause of your problems. I am seeing sitewide links be the cause of alot of problems lately.
Also if you go down the dissavow route, this might be worth reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel
Obviously, be careful not to remove any decent high quality links.
-
I've worked very hard for the content to be very high quality.
Before I was in charge of SEO a so called SEO agency did a lot of low quality link building. Looks like it finally caught up to us.
-
It is very hard without seeing the site. But check for low quality content \ duplicate content. Look at your link profiles for spammy links (over optimised anchor texts, low quality links etc).
You'll just need to do a bit of research into I am afraid. If you want to post your link we can see if something obvious sticks out.
-
Jonathan, thank you.
I looked at all possibilities, except that. Wow, such a big coincidence. Any thoughts on how to recover?
-
That's the date of the last big Google Panda update (22nd). I think you have your answer.
-
Yeah, I am with you on that. I doubt google updates rankings that fast.
However, I switched the site the night of august 22nd and on the 23rd I noticed a decline and keep seeing the traffic decline, traffic is actually down 25% (not 10%) from last month.
If it isn't caused by the migration then what is it?
-
I very much doubt Google will have updated your rankings that fast...
Do you have a date you made the change? It doesn't sound like the drop was because of your site move, if it dropped the very next day. Even if you had lots of 404's those listings would still have retained their place in google for a short while.
-
The thing is. Besides the url difference (.html to /) the content is identical, meta tags, headers, etc is the same as before the migration. I noticed the drop in traffic the very day after the wordpress version of the site went live. I am so bummed.
-
Yeh, there are lots of things really that can cause this. WordPress sites are slower but you can mitigate this by installing caching. Check all your redirects are working fine. WordPress will have a slightly different site structure with all the categories \ tags etc, so that may affect is slightly.
But, before you worry too much about that, it might be that you have been caught by one of the recent Google Updates. Was there a date when you particularly noticed the change? It could be that other sites benefited from the Google Update rather than you being penalised. Even a few serp places drop can affect traffic quite a bit.
Unfortunately, without seeing all the analytics data \ site data it is hard to pin it down to anything.
-
Oof. Well without more information it's hard to say; it could be any number of things. On-page optimization would be my first guess:
- keyword placement
- title tags
- alt tags
- etc
Not sure what to say, honestly.
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
-
Organic search traffic has dropped by 35% since 18 September, we don't know why.
Organic traffic to our website has dropped 35% since 18 September 2017 to date. From 1 January to 18 September 2017 organic traffic was up by just under 1% over all (Google up by 1.32%). Paid search traffic over the same time has remained steady. There is nothing we can think of that we've done that has caused the drop. We had an issue with Google page speed test failing when running a test but we resolved this issue on 20 November and in that time we've seen an even greater drop (44% in the last week). The drop is seen across the 3 main search engines, not just Google, which points toward something we've done, but as mentioned, we can't think of any significant change we made in September that would have such negative effects. There is little difference across devices. Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic? Any help gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
Retaining old brand traffic after a rebrand
Hi, How would you retain the organic search traffic for your old brand after a full rebrand? Website redesign, new company name, new domain name etc If we change from blahservices.com to fooservices.com and do all the things you would for a regular domain migration, will Google still return pages from the new brand fooservices.com when a user searches for old brand "blah services keyword"? We will be doing the following to try and not lose organic search traffic for our old brand: Keep PPC running on our old brand name keywords
Technical SEO | | SeenDigital.co.uk
Mention our old brand on the new website in the footer i.e. "Copyright blah services trading as foo services"
Publish a press release about the rebrand on our blog
Say something like "blah services has rebranded as foo services" in meta descriptions for a while
Put old and new brands in meta title for a while
Keep 301 redirects from old domain in place forever Is there anything else you would add to that? Thanks, K0 -
90% traffic loss. Pandalized?
Happened several times during this year. After launch as soon as we reach exactly 100K uniques Google kills 90% of the traffic. Then sudden recovery (pretty much without any action from us) after several weeks not connected to any algo updates/refresh. No warnings. No malware. WMT clean as a baby. Only old good whitehat SEO. Not even close to the edge of wrongdoing:) This time it happens again Aug. 22nd right after Panda 3.9.1. What is different now same exact date Bing traffic went down as well. http://bit.ly/eEu27I Need advice:)
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
35% Drop In Traffic Since March 23 2012
Hi, I am aware ofth e penguin and panda updates and have been monitoring my traffic for the last few months. I did notice that for some reason, from about 22nd / 23rd March we had a drop in traffic by about 50%, it stabilised in a few days but since then from april to present has been hovering around 35% drop in traffic. what perplexes me is hat I also monitored our rankings and that was fine, pretty much the same, yet traffic is down. I have noticed our longer tail keywords have lost traffic by as much as 60-900% I would really appreciate some input, do you think this could be down to panda pulling pages out. how can i find track pages indexesd for my site over time to see if this is where he problem is. I havea lso noticed that in webamster tools, a domain preferance is not set, it is set to default "do not set a preferred domain", would this not cause a dup content issue, what should it be set to, post panda? Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is really hurting our business. thanks you in advance
Technical SEO | | LiquidTech0 -
Organic traffic down after 301 internal linkstructure
Hi, i have a question. On a wordpress site i made a change redirecting (301) all traffic from /category/subject to /subject/ - I removed the /category/. Now i have a big drop in visitors from google. I waited for the traffic to return for some over one month now but with no luck. What can i do best. return to /category/ with 301 redirect or will this hurt me more. Thanks, Robin
Technical SEO | | link0040 -
How long does it take for traffic to bounce back from and accidental robots.txt disallow of root?
We accidentally uploaded a robots.txt disallow root for all agents last Tuesday and did not catch the error until yesterday.. so 6 days total of exposure. Organic traffic is down 20%. Google has since indexed the correct version of the robots.txt file. However, we're still seeing awful titles/descriptions in the SERPs and traffic is not coming back. GWT shows that not many pages were actually removed from the index but we're still seeing drastic rankings decreases. Anyone been through this? Any sort of timeline for a recovery? Much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bheard0 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1 -
Switching to another CMS with different permalink structure, how not to lose organic traffic and Google rankings? Urgent Please!
One of my customers is in online jewellery sales business and they are going to change their CMS; the problem is there is no co-relation between URL permalink structure of the current CMS and the new one. What should we do so that we don’t lose our current organic traffic (also Google rankings) coming from indexed URLs in Google due to permalink structure change ? Typical example: Current URL: http://www.abc.com/pirlanta-nedir,AR-3.html The new URL is going to look like this: http://www.abc.com/tek-tas-pirlanta-ar-4.html
Technical SEO | | merkal20050