Traffic drop 98% in two days
-
I changed my theme on April 12th and within 24 hours my traffic plummeted 98%. I have also seen a huge difference in my keyword ranking. A few things have been tweaked, but with no results.
I need to get to the bottom of this fairly quickly. Do you have any recommendations of a trustworthy someone I could hire to dig deeper and find out what the %#^!$@ is going on? I didn't see that SEOmoz does the "hire and let us check it" thing.
Of course, if anyone has any free suggestions...I'm open to those as well.
Thanks
Heather
-
Yes, that sounds really plausible. Thanks for explaining that to me! I'm passing your comment on to my programmer for him to take a look.
I have a few "tech smart" people I know, I'll ask them to take a look as well - Wisdom in many counselors!
Thanks so much!
-
I'm willing to bet that the reason you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic from simply changing a theme is that the Google Analytics tracking code was not properly installed on the new theme. I know you already mentioned that you checked with your programmer and didn't find any problems with the tracking code itself, but I can see that the GA account numbers are two different accounts. I checked the source code of a page using the current theme as well as a cached version from the old theme and the Google Analytics tracking account numbers are different.
This is the page in question - http://www.incredibleinfant.com/safety/pacifier-use/
**Current theme - ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-28262936-1']);
**Cached theme - ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-32310484-1']); (Google cache from April 5th, 2013)
So if you are looking at the Google Analytics data for the 323 account, then that's why you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic once the new theme was installed. The actual data should be captured in the 282 profile, which you hopefully have access to.
And it's not surprising that you've noticed some rankings drop since that often happens when doing a site overhaul if the site architecture, internal linking structure, on-site SEO are not kept exactly the same. This decrease in rankings is likely only temporary as the search engines will recrawl and reindex the new versions of the pages.
Hope that helps!
-
Matt, the old theme was custom. I'm just going to remove the squeeze page entirely and see what happens. That way the homepage will be the blog roll. I've also added the meta description for the blog page. Thanks.
-
Those are great suggestions Matt! Thank you! I will send those to my programmer and see if I can add a blog link on the squeeze page and see if that helps also.
Perhaps it's the combination of these other issues AND the squeeze page that tipped the scale...
-
I will go through the plugins idea, Moosa and check that. Good idea. thanks
-
That's true there isn't Federico. The blog is being relaunched. Since I'm not currently adding new posts, the homepage is a squeeze page.
I had it set it up that way for about 2 months before this dip happened, so I'm doubting that's the issue. It was gaining in traffic actually.
-
I have a couple theories but I'm having trouble finding a cached old page. What theme DID you have?
I'm going to posit a few theories and maybe some direction for you to check out.
First, there is definitely a problem here somewhere.
On this link: http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/page/2/
I see: Sunscreen, Muppets, Bad Parents, New Foods, Breastfeed, Earn money at home,
On this link: http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/page/3/
I see the same exact posts.
Same on page 4, page 5.
Also, according to your archives, you have one May post - the Sunscreen post. But
http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/
is showing Muppets most recently. It's not picking up your posts or updating correctly
Also, I see 43 validation errors and some warnings. Usually these aren't a big deal, a bit of coding oops here & there. Yours are not what I normally see.
Some of the worst errors here may be contributing to problems. I'm not sure how the new theme compares to the old but this one looks like it has some coding issues - one of which may be causing Google to not like your site as much. (Imagine if you turned all your H3s into H2s at once. Google would probably not like that. Same if you went the other way.
The fact that the homepage doesn't link to the blog is probably "stopping" any juice from flowing through. You have over 6000 links pointed at your homepage and about 30 pointed at the blog. A tiny link on the squeeze page from the home to the blog may make all the difference.
The actual blog link (http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/) doesn't have a meta description at all. This really isn't good and it should have one. You are using Yoast so this should be a simple fix. If you used to have one (ie. it was built into the theme) this could hurt. I know description isn't an SEO "factor" but not having one at all likely is, especially if the old one was related to your content.
I think your pagination issues and some of your validation errors are likely the issue, as is the theme change - I'm sure it changed either your headers, important bits of code, etc. and lacking the link from homepage - yeah, that would not help.
Hope the direction helps!
-
I really don’t think that the problem is with indexation as when i search for post title i still can see the post appearing in the search results...The only different thing is when I use this simple search “site:www.incredibleinfant.com” I see categories are appearing in the search results instead of the post titles... which is kind of different then usual.
I can be wrong but is there any plug-in that you was using in the older theme and actually not using in the current theme? Just wondering!
P.S: Idea by Fede also makes lot of sense to me!
-
Hi Heather,
There's no link in the homepage to your Blog...?
First thing you should do is remove that page and have the blog as the index page.
Then you can see what happens.
-
I've had a programmer check the code, and so far they haven't found any issues with the analytics implementation or noidexing. Not sure about the malware.
I've also taken your suggestion and contacted Marie Haynes for a consultation estimation. Thanks!
-
Sorry, I should have included the URL...it's late and my brain isn't functioning...
the website URL is http://www.incredibleinfant.com - but that is a squeeze page while I do a re-launch.
to see the back door, go to http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog.
This squeeze home page was in place for months using the old design and Google didn't seem to have a problem indexing my articles and bringing me traffic.
Thanks
-
That is a traffic drop so steep and fast that it probably extends beyond Google. It could be...
bad analytics implementation
malware
unintentional noindex
If this was my site I would hope that I could hire Marie Haynes to look at it.
-
Post or PM the URL in question. So that me and others can provide some thoughts.
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
-
Why are two different pages showing for the same keyword in every alternative day?
Hello Everyone, I was really confused with one of my clients search results for a single keyword. One day the home page shows up for the keyword and the other day pricing page shows in search results. I made sure that there is no keyword cannibalization and also more backlinks are pointed towards home page. But still the pricing page shows up for every alternate day. I even checked Google analytics and the most visited page is home page and not the pricing page. Also, when the pricing page shows up it will be there on 2nd page of Google search results and when the home page shows up it is going to the 4th page of search results. Please help me in figuring out this issue. Thanks
Technical SEO | | sandeep.clickdesk0 -
Site went down and traffic hasn't recovered
Very curious situation. We have a network of sites. Sunday night one (only one) of our sites goes down, and since then we've seen a loss in traffic across all our sites!! Not only have we seen a loss of traffic, we also saw a loss of indexed pages. A complete drop off from 1.8 million to 1.3 million pages indexed. Does anyone know why one site outtage would affect the rest of them? And the indexed pages? Very confused. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | TMI.com0 -
Steady, but continous Google traffic drop. Help?
I am facing a steady, but deteriorating Google traffic drop and i am struggling to find the real reasons. The site is in the video entertainment niche. Here is some data regarding the site in general: Site redesign happened around June We are not doing a lot of off-site and link building in 2013, besides social activities and content distribution to partner sites (top links from OSE are gained long time ago) GWT crawls errors are clean (besides 404s) No manual actions from Google or penalty notifications Serious fluctuations in indexed content in June, but no real effect on traffic Removal of old content during August Top keywords are dropping (may be caused by category pages removal and flattening site structure) Robots file disallows only search-generated pages No sitemap errors or warnings 2K of duplicate meta-titles and descs Thank you and appreciate your help. wyOyoA9
Technical SEO | | dimicos1 -
Google Impressions Drop Due to Expired SSL
Recently I noticed a huge drop in our clients Google Impressions via GWMT from 900 impressions to 70 overnight on October 30, 2012 and has remained this way for the entire month of November 2012. The SSL Cert had expired in mid October due to the notification message for renewal going to the SPAM folder and being missed. Is it possible for an SSL expiry to be related to this massive drop in daily impressions which in-turn has also effected traffic? I also can't see any evidence of duplicate pages (ie. https and http) being indexed but to be honest I'm not the one doing the SEO therefore haven't been tracking this. Thanks for your help! Chris
Technical SEO | | MeMediaSEO0 -
Decrease in Organic Traffic
We were getting good amount of traffic but suddenly we saw a major drop in traffic we were unable to find the reason, recently our website was attacked by malware we cleaned & applied to Google since then we see our organic traffic Ups & Downs What is the grace period for the Sites that are affected by Malware for Google to get back our traffic back & increase the organic things our website www.mdhil.com is healthcare information Based website where the content is created by our experts after the Malware attack there was a major drop & now its up & downs Is there any chances if the website content comes under low quality content is yes how to find the same
Technical SEO | | mDhilSEO0 -
Why Would PageRank Drop From 4 to NA?
Yesterday my homepage had a PageRank of 4 according to the Google toolbar (which I know isn't accurate, but bare with me) and the majority of my other pages were PR2. Today every page on my site is PR N/A, or PR -1. I also used a couple of free page rank checkers to make sure it wasn't just my browser. The only link I have ever purchased is on botw.org. I submitted my site to 6 free directories about two weeks ago, but only to the highly recommended ones, and with different anchor text at each. I have no messages in my Google Webmaster Tools account, nor do I have any significant crawl errors. My SERPs and resulting traffic have not (yet) been affected. Any ideas what's going on? I did start a Google AdWords campaign about 10 days ago that ran for 3 days and then got suspended due to the nature of my website. Could that be it?
Technical SEO | | PatrickGriffith0 -
Mobile site - allow robot traffic
Hi, If a user comes to our site from a mobile device, we redirect to our mobile site. That is www.mysite/mypage redirects to m.mysite/mypage. Right now we are blocking robots from crawling our m. site. Previously there were concerns the m. site could rank for normal browser searches. To make sure this isn't a problem we are planning on rel canonical our m. site pages and reference the www pages (mobile is just a different version of our www site). From my understanding having a mobile version of a page is a ranking factor for mobile searches so allowing robots is a good thing. Before doing so, I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions/feedback (looking for potential pitfalls, issues etc)
Technical SEO | | NicB10