Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
-
Howdy Mozzers
I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me!
***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing
Background
The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change.
Problem
Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline.
*They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous
Organic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays.
Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get.
Redirects
During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up:
Original:
http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume
Canonical issue
On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013.
Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example).
Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda)
According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However -
Sitemap
We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index?
That page is in the sitemap.
Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z
Change Frequency: Yearly
Priority: 0.5
*GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca
What we looked at so far
-
The redirects are all currently 301’s
-
GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch
-
We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be.
-
Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank.
-
We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials
-
We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1).
-
Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)
-
-
Thanks so much for all of your insight! It's been frustrating as an in house SEO to find the root cause to this. We've found additional issues since I posted the question, and we are currently addressing them.
Really couldn't be more impressed with the moz community. I'm shocked to get such excellent answers from all of you. It helps calm the team here, knowing that we can reach out to amazing people!
Mark
-
About two years ago I did a page-by-page redirect of Domain A to KeywordDomain B. Nothing changed on the site but the domain name and the logo. Nothing. NOTHING. Every page was redirected to an identical page with 301s that worked properly.
Rankings and traffic immediately tanked. I was really surprised because that domain had held the #1 position for the exact match keyword for ten straight years - although based upon an analylsis of link metrics it should have been #2 for that entire time. I had redirected other domains and never, ever had a problem.
Now it was #2. Crap! I blew a load of dough on that domain and now my income was damaged.
I didn't do anything. No linkbuilding, no new content, no nothing.
A few months later the rankings and traffic came back. My personal opinion - and lots of people might disagree - is that Domain A was getting thousands of domain queries, type-ins and social media actions every month. When we switched to KeywordDomain.com it was getting ZERO domain queries, etc. Slowly people began typing the new domain in their queries and when a few thousand a month were occurring that is when the rankings came back. Maybe coincidence, but that's what I want to believe.
-
It's very likely due to the domain switch but to give yourself something else to do to do besides what you've done so far (and if you haven't done this already) and give yourself some direction to take while you're waiting for your rankings to come back up, go ahead and isolate how the drops in traffic are occurring:
- Research what keywords mapped to which of your old landing pages and which of those keywords are now bringing in less traffic.
- Did you completely fall out of the results for some of your keywords or have you just dropped somewhat in the rankings for all of your keywords?
- Are you now only ranking for brand terms?
- What specifically has changed with your traffic
At this time, you may do well by coming up with a strong content strategy and working the PR and G+ channels to get that content out to new and existing audience members--it can only help.
-
Experiencing a drastic drop in traffic immediately after and often for several months after a redesign/replatform is extremely common. I have seen scenarios where traffic dropped as much as 75% for as long as 4-5 months before beginning to recover. There are so many issues involved in a re-platform and so many possibilities for why and where things may have gone a little astray that pin-pointing any one thing may just be impossible.
That being said, I feel your pain! As a fellow in-house SEO I am sure there is a lot of pressure on you from stakeholders to "fix the Website." We are going to be re-platforming within the coming months and one of my main jobs has been to educate everyone on the potential hit we will take.
If it's any consolation at all, I have seen companies power through that dip and come out way better on the other side. But I've never seen it happen instantly. You may want to discuss strategies like possibly increasing PPC or other paid marketing campaigns to get the company through until things start improving. Ideally, this is a discussion you have before the replatform takes place, but it sounds to me like to came on board after the move had already taken place.
Do what you can to find any potential technical SEO problems, but also encourage your colleagues not to panic and to develop some other campaigns that can bring in traffic until things start to improve.
That was more of a pep talk than anything concrete in terms of help. I know. But Sometimes it just helps to know that what you are experiencing is par for the course for any platform change or site migration.
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
-
Full title in url
Hi to all, what is the best url structure, to have all words in the url or to tweak url like Yoast suggest? If we remove some words from url , not focus keyword but stop words and other keywords to have shorter url will that impact search rankings? example.com/one-because-two-for-three-on-four - long url, moz crawl error, yoast red light example.com/one-two-three-four - moz ok, yoast ok Where one is a focus keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WalterHalicki0 -
How would you address these URLS
Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
Google Search Analytics How to Get Search Keywords for a Page?
How do I get the keywords coming into a page on the new Google Webmaster Tools Search Analytics? Used to be there in the old version. You would just view your most popular urls and when you expanded the urls you would see the terms driving the traffic. How do I see the most popular keyword queries for a given page in the new tool? Alternatively can I still use the old tool somehow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Canonical URL availability
Hi We have a website selling cellphones. They are available in different colors and with various data capacity, which slightly changes the URL. For instance: Black iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(black,16,000000000010204783).html White iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,16,000000000010204783).html White iphone, 24GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,24,000000000010204783).html Now, the canonical URL indicates a standard URL: But this URL is never physically available. Instead, a user gets 301 redirected to one of the above URLs. Is this a problem? Does a URL have to be "physically" available if it is indicated as canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner0 -
URL for offline purposes
Hi there, We are going to be promoting one of our products offline, however I do not want to use the original URL for this product page as it's long for the user to type in, so I thought it would be best practice in using a URL that would be short, easier for the consumer to remember. My plan: Replicate the product page and put it on this new short URL, however this would mean I have a duplicate content issue, would It be best practice to use a canonical on the new short URL pointing to the original URL? or use a 301? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Canonical URL Question
Hi Everyone I like to run this question by the community and get a second opinion on best practices for an issue that I ran into. I got two pages, Page A is the original page and Page B is the page with duplicate content. We already added** ="Page A**" />** to the duplicate content (Page B).** **Here is my question, since Page B is duplicate content and there is a link rel="canonical" added to it, would you put in the time to add meta tags and optimize the title of the page? Thanks in advance for all your help.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRTBA0 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0