Traffic has dropped off a cliff
-
I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why?
-
yes, thanks for the follow up. I have already done that and am awaiting results. thanks again
-
I just looked in Google for your site and it looks like it's indexed again. Hope everything is recovering quickly for you! I'd suggest running a campaign in SEOmoz for that site (if you haven't yet) to pick up any duplicate content issues and other suggestions that we have that can further help your site.
-
It looks like you may be telling Google to ignore your site via noindex nofollow. There are two possible places this could be set:
In the Yoast plugin you can tell it how you want the robots to behave: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta You want it to check both Index and Follow.
Similarly in Wordpress itself there is an option under Settings > Privacy. You want to check I want my blog to be visible to everyone.
-
wow, that's confusing! I was just assuming Yoast was the gatekeeper of the robots, but that's not the case. Your right, in my privacy settings it was set to block! Thanks a lot!
-
The redirects are necessary for pages that are indexed in the search engines (so people coming from a search result can get to the right page) and for pages that are linked, bookmarked, etc. You generally want to make sure that most pages you change get a redirect.
-
I am getting ready to add WordPress too and change some url's. My understanding is that redirects are only necessary if you have links on those pages....is that correct?
-
Take a look under settings (not via Yoast, but just regular WP settings) and privacy and make sure that your blog is not set to private.
Also, if you've paid someone a bunch of money to redesign your site, they should really have taken better care than to leave the noindex,nofollow on afterwards. You might want to drop them a note saying they did you a major disservice.
-
thanks, yes, i see it on Yoast, but it is set to Allow
-
thanks for the reply
are google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
yes, i have a warning in my webmaster account that states robots are being blocked by this code: User-agent: *
Disallow: /but i have no idea how to change that in wordpress
-
Ahh, I found a robots noindex,nofollow on your home page and at least one internal. That would do it!
There should be a setting in Wordpress that asks if you want your blog to be private/ not indexed by the search engines. Did that setting stay checked after you went live by chance?
-
If you're able to give us a little more information that would help.
Has the organic traffic dropped from all of the search engines, or just one?
Has it dropped for all of your pages or just some of your pages?
Has it dropped for all of your keywords or just some of your keywords?
Have you verified the site in Google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
When you redesigned, did you put in redirects from the old pages to the new pages (if your URL structure changed)?
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
-
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Huge Spike in Organic/Direct traffic from Mexico
So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP0 -
Pages are being dropped from index after a few days - AngularJS site serving "_escaped_fragment_"
My URL is: https://plentific.com/ Hi guys, About us: We are running an AngularJS SPA for property search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emre.kazan
Being an SPA and an entirely JavaScript application has proven to be an SEO nightmare, as you can imagine.
We are currently implementing the approach and serving an "escaped_fragment" version using PhantomJS.
Unfortunately, pre-rendering of the pages takes some time and even worse, on separate occasions the pre-rendering fails and the page appears to be empty. The problem: When I manually submit pages to Google, using the Fetch as Google tool, they get indexed and actually rank quite well for a few days and after that they just get dropped from the index.
Not getting lower in the rankings but totally dropped.
Even the Google cache returns a 404. The question: 1.) Could this be because of the whole serving an "escaped_fragment" version to the bots? (have in mind it is identical to the user visible one)? or 2.) Could this be because we are using an API to get our results leads to be considered "duplicate content" and that's why? And shouldn't this just result in lowering the SERP position instead of a drop? and 3.) Could this be a technical problem with us serving the content, or just Google does not trust sites served this way? Thank you very much! Pavel Velinov
SEO at Plentific.com1 -
Organic search traffic dropped 40% - what am I missing?
Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Drop in number of pages in Bing index
I regularly check our index inclusion and this morning saw that we had dropped from having approx 6,000 pages in Bing's index to less than 100. We still have 13,000 in Bing's image index, and I've seen no similar drop in the number of pages in either Google or Yahoo. I've checked with our dev team and there have been no significant changes to the sitemap or robots file. Has anybody seen anything like this before, or could give any insight into why it might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GBC0 -
Traffic drop off and page isn't indexed
In the last couple weeks my impressiona and clicks have dropped off to about half what it used to be. I am wondering if Google is punishing me for something... I also added two new pages to my site in the first week of June and they still aren't indexed. In the past it seemed like new pages would be indexed in a couple days. Is there any way to tell if Google is unhappy with my site? WMT shows 3 server errors, 3 Access denied, and 122 not found errors. Could those not found pages be killing me? Thanks for any advise, Greg www.AntiqueBanknotes.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Banknotes0 -
What's going on with my organic traffic from Google?
I am working on eCommerce website Vista Stores. My website's traffic is going down due to certain reason. I have done R & D and have assumption with auto generated content which I have added on few product pages. You can find out attachment to know more about current situation of traffic. 6789134845_d1a1578960_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
My site dropped in serp and backlinks ranked higher than it.
appliance-repair-ny.com I recently got some new good page rank backlinks (4-5) to my site. After a nice increase in rankings i left it for a couple of day (holiday) when i came back i found out that my rankings dropped dramatically for many different keywords when in some cases the backlinks are listed higher than me for the keyword. Any suggestions? should i keep on building links in the same paste, or slow down a little? UPDATE: I now noticed that the seomoz app has a warning that my homepage is missing title tag and meta tag. I'm using wordpress and headspace plugin. I recently updated wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atohad0