Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero
-
Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with...
I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help?
Any input greatly appreciated
-
Building on that answer, Google Webmaster Console should also be able to give you a list of URLs that are resulting in 404 errors. Those are going to excellent contenders for a 301.
-
You bet! Hopefully this helps when you start digging into things!
-
Marvellous help Mr PhD - you've cleared up some crucial basics for me - many thanks!
-
Nope you dont need access. You set the 301s up on the current server. When the current server gets a request for an old page, it then knows where to send the user to, using the 301.
If also, if you don't mind, please mark my response as a "Good answer" with Moz.
Cheers!
-
...so I don't need to access the previous website on its previous hosting to set up a 301?
-
301 the old URLs to the new URLs. Try to keep a one-to-one relationship on the old page to the new pages. The old bedroom page 301s to the new bedroom page, the old dining room page 301s to the new dining room page, etc. You would not want to redirect the old bathroom URLs to the new dining room URLs.
You need to pick if the site is www or non www. Lets say you pick non www as your default. Make sure if anyone types in a www URL on your site that you 301 that page to the non www counterpart. Just as above, one-to-one relationship. Make sure that any links on your site link to the proper nonwww URL. Any tools you use (moz etc) make sure they start with the non www version of the website.
Good post here by Cyrus on redirects here at Moz as well.
-
It's worse than that - I've looked after the site for the last 5 years, so it's my own fault
Last 2 questions (I promise) -
1. once I've established the old URLs, how do I re-direct to the new site?
2. How do I combine www and non-www (if that's what I need to do)
Really appreciate your input on this - classic case of an old graphic designer thinking he can SEO after a couple of Lynda courses
-
- If you want to find out what the general structure of the old site: Google Internet Archive and then enter your site URL. You will see snapshots and be able to pull it all together. Bing webmaster tools actually does a pretty good job of showing old site structure and that may help.
If you want to try and figure out what pages used to rank: You can also use various linking tools (Moz OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs) and Google and Bing webmaster tools to find how people are linking to you. This will not give you all of the old URLs on your site, but at least the most important ones. Those are the most likely that ranked. Google webmaster tools will show some average ranking data going back about 3 months so you may be able to recover it there.
You can also look through your old analytics data and that would tell you what URLs were getting the most organic traffic there and based on the content figure out what was doing well. While the old site is not live, do you have any way to access the old analytics data.
The www vs non www would result in needing 301s as well. Those are two different subdomains and so you would have 2 different pages according to Google.
- You need to talk to the developer to see if anything happened 2 months ago. Maybe they changed from www to non www and that would need a full 301 setup to direct Google from the old site to the new site.
This just sounds like a site migration gone bad and unless you can ask around for data from the previous provider, it will be tricky to figure out.
-
Gosh - that's a fine response!
I've actually moved the site from an Adobe Business Catalyst site (html) to WordPress.
1. The previous site is no longer live, so I don't know how I could get the URLs that were ranking to make sure they 301 redirect?
2. The drop off seems to have happened in the last 2 months although the site was re-built around March time?
...also, I've submitted the site to Google as "princessdesign.co.uk" rather than "www.princessdesign.co.uk" - could that have interfered? - I'm puzzled by the internet archive reference.
I'll check out the meta descriptions - top tip. Any help with these two points would be most helpful, as it would appear I have a lot of homework to do!
Thanks
Mark
-
Hello!
I looked in the internet archive and the most recent version they have of this site is from the end of 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20141222162951/http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/
The design and URL structure is different from what you have today. Did you recently relaunch the site?
On the old site this was one of the links to the bedroom section
http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
that URL 301 redirects to this page
http://princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
and that page shows a 404 error page.
So, if you did just do a redesign and overhaul of your URL structure on the site, you need to get all the URLs that were ranking and make sure they 301 redirect to the correct page.
You should also to look in your Google webmaster tools to make sure that there are no warnings about penalties or what not. I checked your robots.txt and meta robots and there was nothing there that would have blocked Google from crawling. The recent version of the site is image and JS heavy, I almost thought it was a flash site at first (gasp!). As the current site seems to have very little text on the page and is mostly images there is very little for the search engine to read and then know what to rank based on the text it reads. Similarly, only the home page has a meta description. While meta descriptions are not important for ranking per se, they are important once you rank, to help with click through. That is, once the page ranks, Google will show the title and description and the description can influence if the person clicks through to your site or not. With all the images, the new site is probably slower than the old one, and this can penalize you as well.
This is all based on some assumptions made quickly, so I could be totally wrong. Hope this helps to point you in the right direction!
Good luck!
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
-
I'm a beginner with Google Analytics, what is a good place to start?
I'm a beginner with Google Analytics, what is a good place to start? Would love to know some simple ways to set up Google Analytics to keep SEO in check. What are some of your suggestions? How would you go about using GA to do this? and what are the alternatives? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Eric_S
Eric0 -
Scary Traffic Drop — Slower at First, Now Much Sharper
Hi. My website, dailytekk.com, has been steadily losing viewers since April. In recent weeks, though, the drop has been much more significant — scarily so. Almost all our traffic comes from Google, organically. In the last 30 days I've lost 135k page views. I'm not sure if we just have content that is getting old, if Google changed something in the algorithm, if we are being penalized, if AMP pages are having a negative effect, etc. I would love to find a great consultant to help us figure this out and get back on the right track. We seem to be losing traffic despite our best efforts at this point. Thanks, Chris
Reporting & Analytics | | dailytekk0 -
Big variation in the number of search results. (person's name)
Hi, I have been noticing a really dramatic variation in the number of results Google is returning for the name "Carolyn Hadlock." Most of the time it seems to be around 2000. But then it will jump up to over 10,000. Does anyone know why there would be such a big jump? And then why it would go back? If tested both logged into Google and then not - as well as having others log is as themselves. That does not seem to be it. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | yandl0 -
Our Firefox organic traffic seems to have been re-allocated to direct - anyone know why?!
In Google Analytic, the majority of organic traffic via Firefox browsers to one of our websites suddenly dropped off, and an immediate lift in direct traffic via Firefox browsers appeared. This trend has continued ever since. I've searched to find Firefox releases that might have affected it (eg. security/cookie settings), but haven't been able to find anything, or talk of this happening to other people, and the anomaly doesn't appear in our other website analytics either...anyone have any ideas?! The attached GA graphs show Firefox browser versions 21.0 and 22.0, but it's the same story across all versions. (You can also see that I'd also filtered out traffic via IOS 6 and Android 4 operating systems to remove any effect from these known issues). Thanks for any help that you can offer! kPRnrcd.png dy0Bjg7.png
Reporting & Analytics | | HubMDP1 -
How to see organic traffic only?
Im having trouble separating our organic traffic vs our PPC. When I go into Analytics>Traffic>Sources>Search>Organic, its giving me numbers that are not accurate. I believe whats happening is that its not able to distinguish our bing organic/ppc. Is using Webmaster tools Search Queries a more accurate way to determine organic search volume?
Reporting & Analytics | | DemiGR0 -
Google analytics question
Ok so in my traffic sources break down I have 3 sections: direct, organic, and referral. My question is under the referral tab I have recently noticed a new traffic source, my own website.... How is this possible? My top referring site is my own website.... Is this considered direct traffic or how is this being traced?
Reporting & Analytics | | jameswalkerson0 -
Easiest way to get out of Google local results?
Odd one this, but what's the easiest way to remove a website from the Google local listings? Would removing all the Google map listings do the job? A client of ours is suffering massively since the Google update in the middle of last month. Previously they would appear no1 or no2 in the local results and normally 1 or 2 in the organic results. However, since the middle of last month any time they rank on the first page for a local result, their organic result has dropped massively to at least page 4. If I set my location as something different in google, say 100 miles away, they then rank well for the organic listings (obviously not appearing for local searches). When I change it back to my current location the organic listing is gone and they are back to ranking for the local. Since the middle of July the traffic from search engines has dropped about 65%. All the organic rankings remain as strong as ever just not in the areas where they want to get customers from!! The idea is to remove the local listing and get the organics reranking as the ctr on those is much much higher. On a side note, anyone else notice very poor ctr on google local listings? Maybe users feel they are adverts thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ccgale0 -
Track Individual Organic Orders In Google Analytics
I was wondering if there is a way to track information about the individual order in google analytics. Currently I can see all of the organic traffic, rev, transactions, etc, but I would like to be able to know what those individual order numbers are, as well as be able to place test orders to see if organic tracking is correctly working. Does anyone know of a good blog walkthrough for this, or have any suggestions? Thanks (again individual organic order data not all data from a specific search engine or keyword).
Reporting & Analytics | | Gordian0