Losing Organic Traffic After A Redesign?
-
Hi,
I wonder if anyone can help me. After a recent site relaunch caused a substantial loss of organic website traffic.
http://www.health4mom.org/ the site went live 2 months ago(using the same url's as the previous one) unfortunately the organic traffic have dropped (-65%).
I would appreciate if anyone can let me know why we lost organic traffic.
Many thanks in advance.
Antonio
-
thanks for the info, I was also interested in this matter
-
Looks like you have some redirect issues to clean up. When constructing a new site, often you will find better ways of doing things, and items (such as URLs) will change. Since you have so many temporary redirects, see if your CMS has a 404 error handler installed. If so, these plugins will redirect 404 pages to the home page automatically.
Have you resubmitted everything via webmaster tools? (Google and Bing) Fetched all the pages in GWT? Submitted an accurate sitemap of the new site? In addition to the redirect errors, it feels like the search engines do not have an accurate roadmap and description of the new site. Try doing a site:www.YOURSITEHERE.com in google and clicking through the links to see what is actually out there indexed, and where its going.
After you fix the above, it will take time for them to reindex and re-rank your pages.
-
I scanned your site and noticed some problems right away:
(1) You're temporary redirecting (302) ~150 pages. Those should be permanently redirected (301) otherwise you'll lose any built-up SEO equity.
(2) You have some redirect loops going on. For example, http://www.health4mom.org/consider-group-prenatal-care and http://www.health4mom.org/consider_group_prenatal_care, http://www.health4mom.org/how-to-overcome-infertility and http://www.health4mom.org/how_to_overcome_infertility.
(3) You have a bunch of pages redirected to the home page. Not sure if that was intentional or not. e.g. http://www.health4mom.org/testing_your_babys_hearing. If not, you're redirecting the SEO equity from those pages to the home page and diminishing their ranking ability.
(4) You shouldn't be indexing category and tag pages unless they've been customized for uniqueness.
(5) Just about every file on the site resides in the root directory. You're not consolidating your efforts (and SEO equity) onto some key "money" pages.
Perhaps the combination of these items is what's contributing to your traffic loss. I'm wondering if you switched URLs away from using underscores and to using hyphens with this relaunch.
-
Are you sure that the URL's are the same, even small changes to URLs can effect your site. Look at your Google Analytics to see if there is a change at the page name level and when it occurred. This could also be a coincidence but doubtful) check your GWT to make sure that you have not been penalized at all. Lastly, while your URL may not have changed, did the page layout and/or information on each page remain the same or was it 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
-
Organic Traffic Drop of 90% After Domain Migration
We moved our domain is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com on April 4th. It was migrated to https://www.metro-manhattan.com Google Search Console continues to show about 420of URLs indexed for the old "NYC" domain. This number has not dropped on Search Console. Don't understand why Google has not de-indexed the old site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
For the new "Metro" domain only 114 pages are being shown as valid. Our search volume has dropped from about 85 visits a day to 12 per day. 390 URLs appear as "crawled- currently not indexed". Please note that the migrated content is identical. Nothing at all changed. All re-directs were implemented properly. Also, at the time of the migration we filed a disavow for about 200 spammy links. This disavow file was entered for the old domain and the new one as well. Any ideas as to how to trouble shoot this would be much appreciated!!! This has not been very good for business.0 -
I think Google Analytics is mis-reporting organic landing pages.
I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this: /cart.php /quote /checkout.php /finishorder.php /login.php In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google. These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page? How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
How to measure traffic for a keyword
Sitting in Country A I want to see how much traffic a particular keyword receives in Country B. Whats the best way to do it? Also, will the search results differ if I am analyzing the above sitting in Country A viz-a-viz Country B. In other words, will the IP of the country I am making the search from play a role in the results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KS__0 -
Wordpress to HubSpot CMS - I had major crawl issues post launch and now traffic is down 400%
Hi there good looking person! Our traffic went from 12k visitors in july to 3k visitors in july. << www.thedsmgroup.com >>When we moved our site from wordpress to the hubspot COS (their CMS system), I didnt submit a new sitemap to google webmaster tools. I didn't know that I had to... and to be honest, I've never submitted or re-submitted a sitemap to GWT. I have always built clean sites with fresh content and good internal linking and never worried about it. Yoast kind of took care of the rest, as all of my sites and our clients' sites were always on wordpress. Well, lesson learned. I got this message on June 27th in GWT_http://www.thedsmgroup.com/: Increase in not found errors__Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. Investigating these errors and fixing them where appropriate ensures that Google can successfully crawl your site's pages._One month after our site launched we had 1,000 404s on our website. Ouch. Google thought we had a 1,200 page website with only 200 good pages and 1,000 error pages. Not very trust worthy... We never had a 404 ever before this, as we added a plugin to wordpress that would 301 any 404 to the homepage, so we never had a broken link on our site, which is not ideal for UX, but as far as google was concerned, our site was always clean. Obviously I have submitted a new sitemap to GWT a few weeks ago, and we are moving in the right direction... **but have I taken care of everything I need to? I'm not sure. Our traffic is still around 100 visitors per day, not 400 per day as it was before we launched the new site.**Thoughts?I'm not totally freaking out or anything, but a month ago we ranked #1 and #2 for "marketing agency nj", now we aren't in the top 100. I've never had a problem like this. _I added a few screen grabs from Google Webmaster Tools that should be helpful.__Bottom line, have I done everything I need to or do I need to do something with all of these "not found" error details that I have in GWT?_None of these "not found" pages have any value and I'm not sure how Google even found them... For example: http://www.thedsmgroup.com/supersize-page-test/screen-shot-2012-11-06-at-2-33-22-pmHelp! -JasonuhLLtou&h4QmGCW#0 uhLLtou&h4QmGCW#1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlene-Wingfield0 -
If you remove a 301-re-direct, will there be a corresponding drop in traffic?
We built a better version of a search results page and re-directed from the old search results page to the landing page, and are seeing a huge uptick in traffic. Wondering if we remove the re-direct and 404 the original search results page if we'll see a drop in traffic. I ran the search results page through open site explorer and Google Webmaster tools, and there aren't many links, but the search results page used to see quite a bit of of traffic over the past couple of years.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
My traffic dropped over 60% - was I penalized?
Hi all, We launched a major update of our site in the middle of June. We have lots of pages and were indexed very quickly, and started ranking well for long tail terms. Last week, our organic traffic suddenly dropped over 60% as our pages started ranking much lower. One issue we discovered was that our site was responding to all subdomains, not just www, and Google did seem to be crawling two alternate subdomains -- Webmaster Tools shows crawl activity, but no pages indexed on these. We fixed that problem a couple days ago (all subdomains 301 to the www). Is that something that would have caused a sudden drop like we saw? This would have been an issue since the relaunch, though one of the subdomains only started getting crawled (~1,000 pages/day) in August. We have investigated a few other things that may have been a factor: We sent out a press release via iReach a few weeks ago which makes up the majority of our recent backlinks. Our site occasionally returns a 502 no gateway error when under heavy load, Google sees this 3-10 times at day. GA shows a page load spike the day before the drop, but we had worse spikes in the past that did not seem to have an impact. Did we just get lucky with a "honeymoon" phase with Google? This is the site: http://goo.gl/3DCbl Indexing continues -- we now have over 500k pages indexed and Google is crawling faster than ever, about 30,000 pages per day. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tact0 -
With Panda, which is more important, traffic or quantity?
If you were to prioritize how to fix a site, would you focus on traffic or quantity of urls? So for example, if 10% of a site had thin content, but accounted for 50% of the traffic and 50% of the site had a different type of thin content but only accounted for 5% of organic traffic, which would you work on first? I realize both need to be fixed, but am unsure of which to tackle first (this is an extremely large site). Also, I am wondering if the simply the presence of thin content on a domain can affect a site even if it isn't receiving any traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Ranking & Traffic drops in last month
Over the last month, our rankings have been in a slow slide - that is until this week, when they absolutely crashed. Here are some example phrases: Phrase 11-Mar 5-Mar bug shields 24 9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShawnHerrick
floor mats 25 14
nerf bars 23 12
running boards 61 14
snow plows 25 18 For the life of me, I can't see what would have caused such drastic changes. Our site is almost completely unique content. Some things, like Warranty & Install instructions, are from the manufacturer to protect us from liabilities. We come up with our own feature text, and we have custom written articles, blog posts, research guides, etc. We also appear to be the only one of our competitors being affected in this fashion. Any thoughts would be helpful. Domain is realtruck.com.0