Traffic dropping after blog was added...
-
We have a major client that gets over a thousand organic visits per day. They also self manage an adwords campaign that generates a few thousand clicks a day. Lat summer they got a new website with a blog. The blog has a couple of teaser paragraphs on the home page with the new blog posts, in addition to lots of static text about the items sold on the site. What has happened is, our organic traffic has changed form the main keywords of what the site sells, to things talked about in the blog. Traffic hasn’t dropped dramatically, but we have lost all our big keywords, for example, a keyword that was generating 40 organic clicks per day a year ago we receive no traffic for now, and much more obscure keyword combinations from the blog are being picked up. Is it the addition of the blog that is causing this problem, or the blog teasers that are on the home page of the site? We like the traffic from the blog terms, but we would like our former main keyword traffic back as well, how can we accomplish this, and what do you think has occurred here? Thanks for your help.
-
Thanks for your replies. I do not know what they were ranking for their main keywords a year ago because I wasnt working on the account back then and dont have any webposition reports from that time. I do have analytics for back then and can see they were getting like 40 click thrus a day for each exact keyword and now there are basically none for those keywords. Interestingly, according to webposition, they are on the second page of google now for these really huge high traffic keywords, but the same keywords on webmasters tools show low impressions and a position of 380. The top keywords shown on webmasters tools are all much more obscure terms from the blog. Webmaster tools also shows 400 not founds and 70,000 pages restricted by robots text. I addressed these issues with our programmer in early January and he said the robots was as it should be and the not founds were taken care of but doesnt look like anythings changed. Basically the only keywords the site is getting click thrus thru search on are much more obscure things that are mentioned in different blog posts. For example, it would be like my site used to get traffic for "custom motorcycles" (just an example)but now if I have a blog post for brown leather motorcycle seat, we'll get a handful of click thrus for something like that but we have lost all the heavy hitting keywords.
No site map on WT but if you google site: it shows 32,000 pages. Thanks again. -
I vote up for keyword cannibalization. They should also check their Webmaster panel to see which pages get more link love than the others.
-
It's a little tough without looking at all the details, but here are my thoughts/suggestions.
Missing Old Pages - This may be happening because of a new design/CMS. I see this a lot when clients go for a new, WordPress site. It's a great idea, but they neglect to implement 301 redirects for all those old pages that had rankings, etc.
Check your 404 errors/Google Webmaster Crawl errors. You might find a bunch of pages that are being linked to, were updated with a new URL structure and now result in an error. You might find that setting up the 301s does the trick (give it a couple weeks once you're done).
Check for keyword cannibalization - See if the keywords you were targeting on those "main" pages are also being targeted on those blog posts. Might need to clean that up a little; ensure that each page has unique info/focus/titles, etc.
It is possible that the links to those posts is spreading your link juice a little too thinly, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion just yet. I only say it because a year is a long time, and you could have tons of posts that are drawing from that link juice.
-
I can't tell you what is wrong. But if you answer these questions you might figure it out.
we have lost all our big keywords, for example, a keyword that was generating 40 organic clicks per day a year ago we receive no traffic for now,
Did your rankings drop for these keywords?
Last summer they got a new website with a blog.
Did they change the page URLS of mess up the page optimization?
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
-
50% Visibility drop following June 2021 Google Update
Hello everyone,
Algorithm Updates | | yacpro13
We've observed a 50% drop in our Visibility score in the last week. This is our biggest drop ever, which coincides with June Google updates. We're an established ecommerce website located in Canada. This has obviously severely impacted sales. I'm frantically searching for information regarding fixes / implementations to recover asap, but if anybody could point us in the right direction, that would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!0 -
44 terms dropped out of the top 3 results on google this past week.
Can anyone take a look at the site and offer suggestions as to what I can do. My visibility went from 13% to 2% over the past two months. I had 800 organic terms prior to this now I am falling off a cliff. Have no idea what happened. I just switched over to HTTPS 3 weeks ago and it has helped a little.
Algorithm Updates | | Boodreaux1 -
Google indexing https sites by default now, where's the Moz blog about it!
Hello and good morning / happy Friday! Last night an article from of all places " Venture Beat " titled " Google Search starts indexing and letting users stream Android apps without matching web content " was sent to me, as I read this I got a bit giddy. Since we had just implemented a full sitewide https cert rather than a cart only ssl. I then quickly searched for other sources to see if this was indeed true, and the writing on the walls seems to indicate so. Google - Google Webmaster Blog! - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-prioritize-the-indexing-of-https-pages/147179/ http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-indexing-https-by-default,30781.html https://hacked.com/google-will-begin-indexing-httpsencrypted-pages-default/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-app-indexing-documentation-updated-21345.html I found it a bit ironic to read about this on mostly unsecured sites. I wanted to hear about the 8 keypoint rules that google will factor in when ranking / indexing https pages from now on, and see what you all felt about this. Google will now begin to index HTTPS equivalents of HTTP web pages, even when the former don’t have any links to them. However, Google will only index an HTTPS URL if it follows these conditions: It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies. It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt. It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page. It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag. It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs. The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL. The server has a valid TLS certificate. One rule that confuses me a bit is : **It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. ** Does this mean if you just moved over to https from http your site won't pick up the https boost? Since most sites in general have http redirects to https? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | Deacyde0 -
Can setting up a Domain Forward lead to sudden drop in Rankings?
Hi there, Our website www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk has been ranking on pages 1 and 2 of Google for the past 12 - 18 months for a number of our key search terms. There has been the odd fluctuation but nothing major. On Wednesday of this week (2 days ago), we purchased the domain www.porcelainsuperstore.com and without thinking I enabled Domain Forwarding on this domain to go to www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk
Algorithm Updates | | piazza
Today our rankings have shown quite dramatic drops, e.g Wood effect tiles position 1 to position 3 Metro tiles position 9 to position 12 Quartz tiles position 4 to position 9 Floor tiles position 14 to position 25 Can anyone advise on this? Do you think the domain forward could have created this sudden drop?
I have now disabled the domain forwarding but am worried that this might be irreversible in Googles eyes? I have now disabled the domain forward - I assume this is the right thing to do?
Any help much appreciated. Thanks Ben0 -
Website traffic dropped 50% after 14th November same day GWT reported a DNS error
HI there. On 14th November GWT reported a DNS error on my site I checked with my hosts but they said there was nothing wrong. I then went searching for answers and found it happened to lot of people on that specific day see http://moz.com/blog/was-there-a-november-14th-google-update. After that time my website traffic dropped by 50% over the period of a week and is still sitting on 50% of what it was. I then moved the site to VPS, had a few DNS errors - that were the cause of my hosts - so i moved back to shared hosting last weekend and now DNS issues are solved. However the original DNS issue is still unknown I dont know what went wrong and want to rectify issue. I dont sell ads and write original content 4 times a day. I have a miniscule bounce rate, my site speed is okay and i dont stuff keywords in my content although i was careless with my <alt tags="">so they could be considered keyword stuffing (and i have up to 10 images on one post). But i have been removing all the keywords in my images theres over 3000 posts so its taking time). My impressions have dropped from 10,000 a day to 2,500 and I have no idea why.</alt> My website has been building traffic consistently for the last 2 years. Only now has it crashed a bit. Have you any advice on what I can do to solve this problem or rather find the cause of the issue. Im not a pro seo person and do this blog in my free time so am not an expert on data analyzing etc.... thanks alot
Algorithm Updates | | mutant20080 -
Intermittent ranking drops.. up and down and once again..
So.. For the last several weeks (I noticed March 11th), we are having some weird ranking drops. Our keywords will drop overnight from their usual position between 2-6 to further than 200 and then be back to normal a couple days later. We use Sheerseo to track daily ranking. I track about 15 KW everyday and noticed it happening then. Is this part of the recent changes? I am just really puzzled that we are seeing drops and then going back to normal and then drops again. It is hard to know where you stand with such drastic differences day to day. Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | CassisGroup0 -
Decline in traffic but no change in rankings
I'm comparing our best search traffic month in 2011 (March) with our current traffic (April)and have seen significant declines in traffic, despite no change in our rankings or even improved rankings for the same terms. Trying to sort out an explanation. We have been a white-hat SEO site since our inception over 10 years ago. Our SEO consultant doesn't think we've been affected by any algo changes, at least not to any significant degree. My only explanation for this possibly anomaly is: decrease in the use of the KW terms in search over time (how to determine?) generalized increase in PPC instead of organic search driving traffic possibility that Adv Web Rankings is no longer accurately collecting SERP rankings Does anyone have any other thoughts or considerations that might explain the decline in traffic, despite maintenance or improvement in rankings? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | ahw0