Image ranking plummet help
-
Hi Moz Community,
I need help understanding why my site is dropping rankings and traffic significantly. We were hit the hardest with doing a image query filter ~6/2-6/3 (image attached).
We also had a site migration on this exact date, but didn't change URL structure or domain names, just switched hosting sites. I'm assuming this plummet is from the migration, but can't figure out why. I may also not be understanding this filter clearly so let me know.
Shoot any questions my way that could help your understanding of the problem be more clear.
Thanks,
-Reed -
Haha yeah I tend to get OCD on a lot of things. Awesome, thanks for taking the time to get back to me on this. I have learned to love the Moz community these days.
And that's a good answer, that's what I was hoping, but I guess anytime I see a traffic dip I immediately panic rather than take into mind what you just said.
Thanks again,
-Reed
-
Nice work moving over to the "hyphen" as opposed to the "underscore", being that the big G doesn't recognize underscores as a space.
I also agree with cleaning up the URL's to not have the .jsp extension. That could just be my OCD kicking in lol
If you are able to create a script to do all that heavy lifting, certainly the best approach.
To answer your question: IMO I would think the combination of all the changes the site went through has cause Google's algo to be in shock when it crawls your site. Give it time, continue cleaning it up and I think you will recover just fine. If anything, I think you will be better than you were before the move as a result of your house cleaning.
-
Hey Ryan, I actually have another question if you wouldn't mind helping out.
Before our migration, our old team was creating all URLS with underscores as separators and ending in .jsp. I changed this to not have .jsp and to only use "-" as word separators in URLs.
However, we have a lot of backlinks with content linking to those .jsp URLs (and our old blog posts all link to those pages), which are 404 product pages. (I can redirect, but there are thousands of them). I could probably develop a script to automatically rewrite too.
My question: could this be a contributing factor to our organic downfall too?
-
The struggle is REAL ha haa I feel your pain brother. Get some good quality blog articles out and share them on your social platforms. That may help push the new data and get it circulating.Wishing all the best!
-
Thanks for helping out Bryan and Donford, it's been about a month and a half since migration so I'll definitely wait it out another month, implement some good marketing/content and see what it looks like after that.
Ahh, the waiting game of organic traffic.
-
Yeah, if a new IP was assigned to the site that is more than likely the cause of the dip. It should recover though, just needs time to propagate. Certainly wish you all the best with this! Keep us posted
-
Hi ICEReed,
If you received a new IP, than I am fairly certain that is the issue. DNS has to propagate across the net before traffic returns to normal. I have had a few experiences with this, and have seen it take up to 3 months before traffic was returned to normal.
-
Thanks for responding Bryan,
I have referenced the tips in the website migration guide, but it's never a bad move to go over them one more time.
A new ip address was assigned to the site when we migrated.
I initially had a lot of indexing issues that are now fixed, but were a problem at the start of the migration. For instance, our sitemap.xml just vanished as did our robots.txt file. They are back up and running, but the dev team didn't migrate them over.
-
Hey Reed!
We experienced a similar dip for a site when migrating to a new server back in September 2013. Did you reference the tips listed in the post from Moz? Website Migration Guide
Its unfortunate that you made a few tweaks at the same time, which makes this more difficult to pin down.
When you migrated, did you carry over the original ip address or was a new one assigned to the site?
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
-
My website has been declining in rankings!
Hello everyone, I have been doing the SEO on the following site: www.painters-decorators-london.co.uk for the past few years and the rankings are slowly declining since last year. (not the recent Google update). I can't seem to figure out what exactly is causing this to happen The page authority and domain authority is higher than my competitors. The on page SEO I believe is done appropriately but I'm not sure whats causing this decline. How can I find out exactly using the MOZ Pro account that I have. I don't think I'm totally aware of the important metrics that one can use on this site to determine the problem. Please advise!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ready2Paint0 -
Help with GA Filters - IP Addresses
I'm having a hard time filtering out both of the IP addresses at our office. One is easy with regular expressions, but the other one does not seem to be working. Here are the two IP addresses: 2606:a000:4e2b:d500:61d9:9d4e:c539:ea86
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing
174.99.90.148 I set up these two custom filters and neither worked for the longer IP address. 2606:a000:4e2b:d500:61d9:9d4e:c539:ea86|174.99.90.148
2606:a000:4e2b:d500:61d9:9d4e:c539:ea86|174.99.90.148 Would you please help steer me in the right direction? Thanks as always MOZ friends!0 -
Need help understanding what happened to our organic search.
I help run an ecommerce business that mainly runs on Google organic search (yes, I realize this is not a good place to be). Last April, we saw around 25-30% of our organic search cut. I’m pretty sure it was due to the mobile update but we had some changes in the past month or two before that. I’m looking for someone to review my analytics account and see what happened. Possibly this is called an audit? Also, we’re looking to ask some questions about long term strategy as we are thinking about a redesign and switching to a new platform. Maybe more content? Maybe more social?
Reporting & Analytics | | kirbyf0 -
Rank Tracker - above 50
Hi, I have a blog and would like to know where it ranks for certain keywords. Unfortunately however, it's well above the top 50, is there any way of getting its exact position or will Moz only show position 50 and above. Thank you in advance. JG.
Reporting & Analytics | | elite_marketing0 -
Have i got a manual action on rankings?
Hi guys, so recently Google released the 'manual actions' tab under 'search traffic' in Google webmaster tools. Recently hit by panda i checked this and got: " Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole." However was this not the message before saying it was not a complete manual ban, just affecting a few bad links? I was hit badly in the rankings but still have some good terms and traffic is not that bad still from organic non-brand. I have fixed many of the bad links (horrible articles submissions that went out of control in 2009) - do i do a reconsideratikn request? i have disavowed the bad links that are left 3 weeks ago? so do i wait to see if disavow works or do a reconsideration request?I was sure this was like the message sent out before which meant it wasn't that bad for your site, just a few links ignored? Any advice much appreciated, thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | pauledwards0 -
Can't figure this ranking out..
Hi, This is puzzling me. I've been in the second/third position for a week or so for my best keyword. That is for Google US unpersonalized, which is the one that brings more traffic, as far as I understand. It can't get MUCH better. Well, I can be first, but second and third position is really awesome in my case (highly competitive keyword according to SEOMOZ PRO). Then, why on earth my traffic for that keyword was 8 times better a year ago?? I mean, a year ago I received an average of 800 visits per day and now I can barely reach 90 visits per day being in the second / third place. Visits can't increase from 90 to 800 just for increasing one spot. I've never seen in my stats such drop in my rankings. I thought that due to google updates my site was sent below the 20th position or something. But my I was shocked today when I saw that I still have the second/third position Am I crazy or this looks wrong? The page title and description that shows in google hasn't changed, so people looking for that keyword are seeing the same as one year ago. It is not a seasonal or time sensitive keyword. My best guess is that people are now always logged in and results are personalized. Don't know much about personalized results but I don't think you can optimize much for those. If that's the case, then how on earth can we optimize a page if everybody is using personalized results? Is there a way to improve your rankings in those cases? Thanks, Enrique
Reporting & Analytics | | enriquef0 -
Tool to check pervious rankings for a keyword ?
I am looking a tool/site to check ranking history of specifc keyword . Is this possible ? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | bfletc40 -
Will Google start trimming 'stale' sites rank?
With the recent focus on Google to reduce rank of farms and low value sites, I am interested to get SEO view on if you think Google will start devaluing stale sites. I do find it a bit frustrating that in the top 5 for my main key phrase, there is one site that has NO content just an error and another blog that has not updated content in 2 years. How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5? How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd. I am interested so see others experiences and thoughts on 'user experience' clean ups by Google and why these types of sites get missed?
Reporting & Analytics | | oznappies0