URL-structure change - former long-tail traffic gone
-
Hey people,
I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user)Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP.
But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month.
Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords.
You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped.
So I'd like to know if you observed similar results.
Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago?
Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though.
All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise...
I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!
-
I'm not saying Adwords can't be causing this - I just haven't seen where it does. Other ad networks allow users to embed links in ways that disguise that their paid ads, and many affiliate site owners hide paid ads in a way that gives them the appearance of being non-paid.
And yes, I have heard from some people that Google can sometimes confuse paid and non-paid in their analytics system.
-
Let me get this clear: What do you mean by "disguised as regular links"? Because I am only talking about Adwords and I am not aware of a way to disguise them.
If you are not talking about Adwords. For my standards, I can prove that Adwords have an impact.
Or Google Analytics is getting the seperation between paid and non-paid mixed up. Ever heard of anything like this?
-
paid ads are not supposed to impact SEO at all. While I have not seen AdWords cause this, I have seen paid ads in other networks do so when those paid ads were disguised as regular links on sites displaying them.
-
Hey Alan,
thank you for your answer. I really appreciate it.
Best believe me, I'm just as curious, probably even a little more.
I've been looking into it today and the outcome was pretty surprising: You know how Google always maintains that Adwords doesn't affect organic ranking in any way, i.e. neither positively nor negatively.
Well, apparantly, the "signal somewhere" is exactly there with Adwords. The project I took over was before managed by someone who did it to the best of his knowledge. Sadly though, despite a quite good results, his product knowledge was pretty limited, so he advertised with Adwords using keywords that didn't match the product at all. So imagine we are selling Mercedes SL600 but he advertised for Citroen 2CV. Not exactly our targeted customer segment.
But what really suprises me is that these Adwords ads generated non-paid traffic onto our website for those keywords.
Or do I miss something here? Can Adwords be a signal for Google as to what the page is about?
-
dumperama, I'm curious - if all those keywords the site has nothing to do were found within the site, or perhaps were they in links pointing to the previous version pages? There's got to be some signal somewhere that said " this page is related to this topic". That's something I'd look further into. It's possible, if it was low-level links, that once the URL changes were made, you essentially helped Google get further confirmation on the true topical focus, and that in turn devalued the source indicators that drove those other phrases.
Ultimately Google refreshes their evaluations frequently - though not necessarily very often on a site that doesn't show regularly updated content or regularly changing other off-site factors.
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 do I exclude fake direct load traffic from networks in Google Analytics?
Starting on Friday 1/20, we noticed a huge, unnatural spike in Direct Load traffic. While researching where it was coming from, the big flags were huge spikes in countries that normally only have <5 sessions a month like Russia, Singapore, Brazil, etc., each sending 1400 a week, with >99% bounce rate and <0:00:05 average session duration. While looking into networks, we saw an influx in Networks that had never sent traffic before, each with >1300 sessions a week, 100% bounce rate, and 0:00:00 session duration. The list of these Networks are: astute hosting usa incorporated
Reporting & Analytics | | ServiceMichael
nephoscale inc.
network transit holdings llc
serverbeach
coreix ltd
2ezhost llp
nforce entertainment b.v.
mir telematiki ltd
servers australia pty ltd wholesale services provider for abuse
reliablehosting
dimenoc servicos de informatica ltda
c0715718213 I have seen a lot of guides of filtering out Referral traffic, but these are all coming in as Direct Load and are skewing our Direct Load results. Any idea how to filter or remove this traffic from Google Analytics?0 -
Parenthesis in URL?
For some reason, we have some URLs on our site with parentheses in them such as somesite.com/used-this(that)What will parenthesis do to the ranking of those pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | CFSSEO0 -
Improved keyword ranking but less traffic
Hello fellow mozzers! My collegue and I are a bit puzzled in regards to our recent website statistics. In november 2013, we upgraded the technological platform of our website to be fully HTML5 coded, and implemented the schema.org Products scheme to systematically tag all our products on the site. To prevent too much loss of visitors, we created a 301-redirect table from almost all our old URL's to the specific new ones, as we implemented a new URL structure as well. The first few months were bumpy as expected, making a huge drop in rankings before rising up again. Our keyword rankings are better then ever (60% of the keywords in top 3, average competition, 25% more on first SERP) but our number of visits dropped by about 10%. Our bounce rate went down from 20% to 14%, our returning visits are stable, but our new visitors stats dropped by 25% as well. This comparison was made between equal periods in the current year and last year, using organic data stats. (new technical platform vs. the old one) What could be the reason that our number of visits dropped 10% while our keyword ranking is better then ever? We don't have any manual penalties in GWT and can't understand why visits would drop so much while ranking improved. May it be so easy that there's just less search volume on our ranked content or does anyone have other ideas? Thank you all in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | EconostoNL0 -
Google Analytics Organic Search Keywords Suddenly Displaying FulL Urls
In my Google Analytics, the top keywords for Organic Search are suddenyl displaying full URLs. For example, now the third and fourth keywords are http://www.domain.com/highly-specific-URL. These have all started recently around the same day, July 12th. I've checked back, and we've made no internal changes to the site around that time that could affect this. Any thoughts on this? Thanks! P.S. It might be related to rich snippets, but I cannot tell at this point.
Reporting & Analytics | | 10SL0 -
URL ending with ?cpc=1
Hi, In the analytics data (SEO - Landing Sites) on a site I just started working with - 2 different url's show up (when I filter the results): /example**.asp** /example**.asp?cpc=1** The first recieves 2/3 of the visits (among these 2 pages) and the other recieves 1/3 of the visits (among these 2 pages). The second (/example.asp?cpc=1) is apparently getting the clicks from Adwords, since it isn't indexed by Google.. Can someone explain me: 1) why the cms is producing this kind of double landing page? is it possible to avoid it in any way? (it is not the only example on site - so it makes analyzing data more difficult). Thanks Christian
Reporting & Analytics | | sembseo0 -
Search Traffic Drops Before It Improves?
I'm working on a site with tons of great, useful content....the owners of the site implemented a new site layout and design (complete overhaul) and they were lacking basics such as meta descriptions, 301 redirects, and, shockingly, they had the same Title tag for every single page on a site with thousands of unique how-to articles. Unsurprisingly their traffic dropped by about 300%. They generate most of their traffic from people learning how to build stairs, how to install crown molding, and other related matters. Beginning last Thursday I've been performing basic on-site SEO, things like having unique titles for each page and similar tasks. The week from Thursday when I began until yesterday (Wednesday), Google traffic dropped -29.73% - 17,715 vs 25,210 I believe this is a normal part of the "Google Shuffle" -- does anyone have a Matt Cutts link or similar proof that this is a normal part of the process?
Reporting & Analytics | | wattssw0 -
Comparing % Change, Google Analytics
Hey Mozzers, Is there a simple way to compare the "% Change" in traffic when comparing two separate time periods in a single Google Analytics report? When comparing data from two separate time periods, an exported CSV doesn't include the % Change (booo!), and there's no option to sort by % Change within the GA report, essentially forcing you to scroll through all the results to pinpoint the major movers and shakers. I'm not averse to using spreadsheets to sort this data, but I'm thinking that I'd likely need a macro to make this work, something like this. However, none of the macros on that page are working (possibly because they were designed for a previous version of Analytics). All suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | dangaul0 -
Analytics Filter for URL's
Hi Fellow Mozzers I am setting my analytics and need to set some filters and need some help. I have a number of Local Sites i need to include and can't find how to do it. some of the the paths are local.imsm.com/new-york/ local.imsm.com/chicago/ local.imsm.com/long-beach/ local.imsm.com/atlanta/ each of the local URL's are /name/ any help would be great
Reporting & Analytics | | imsmlouis0