Traffic and impressions down
-
I am confused on what is going on.
I recently converted my website to wordpress. I kept the same url structure to the best of my abilities (without the .html) and 301 all .html to / So whatever was www.domain.com/page.html to www.domain.com/page/
The old CMS was a proprietary cms done by the company who originally designed the website. It was poorly put together and was really buggy. I decided to move to wordpress due to many limitations particularly for SEO.
Now traffic is down about 10% and looks like the downward trend will continue, also, impressions are down by about 75%.
Any thoughts on what could be happening?
-
Also Mike, you may want to have a look a Ahrefs.com. I have just checked it and there are alot more backlinks showing up you need to look at. If you google for a coupon, you can get it half price, or just get a refund within 7 days. It can be useful for these sort of situations, even though Moz does alot more analytics etc.
-
No worries. This is another good article that I found is quite good:
http://moz.com/ugc/should-domain-authority-be-used-to-determine-which-backlinks-to-remove
-
Thanks Jonathan!
-
OK, I have had a quick look and I do see some potential problems:
Check that page. You will see this particular term (Holtorf Medical Group) seems overly used, thanks to a few sitewide sidebar links for example realitynibs.com
You should either get those sitewide links nofollowed, or removed,... or failing that dissavowed. There may be other examples in that link, but I believe that is a potential cause of your problems. I am seeing sitewide links be the cause of alot of problems lately.
Also if you go down the dissavow route, this might be worth reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel
Obviously, be careful not to remove any decent high quality links.
-
I've worked very hard for the content to be very high quality.
Before I was in charge of SEO a so called SEO agency did a lot of low quality link building. Looks like it finally caught up to us.
-
It is very hard without seeing the site. But check for low quality content \ duplicate content. Look at your link profiles for spammy links (over optimised anchor texts, low quality links etc).
You'll just need to do a bit of research into I am afraid. If you want to post your link we can see if something obvious sticks out.
-
Jonathan, thank you.
I looked at all possibilities, except that. Wow, such a big coincidence. Any thoughts on how to recover?
-
That's the date of the last big Google Panda update (22nd). I think you have your answer.
-
Yeah, I am with you on that. I doubt google updates rankings that fast.
However, I switched the site the night of august 22nd and on the 23rd I noticed a decline and keep seeing the traffic decline, traffic is actually down 25% (not 10%) from last month.
If it isn't caused by the migration then what is it?
-
I very much doubt Google will have updated your rankings that fast...
Do you have a date you made the change? It doesn't sound like the drop was because of your site move, if it dropped the very next day. Even if you had lots of 404's those listings would still have retained their place in google for a short while.
-
The thing is. Besides the url difference (.html to /) the content is identical, meta tags, headers, etc is the same as before the migration. I noticed the drop in traffic the very day after the wordpress version of the site went live. I am so bummed.
-
Yeh, there are lots of things really that can cause this. WordPress sites are slower but you can mitigate this by installing caching. Check all your redirects are working fine. WordPress will have a slightly different site structure with all the categories \ tags etc, so that may affect is slightly.
But, before you worry too much about that, it might be that you have been caught by one of the recent Google Updates. Was there a date when you particularly noticed the change? It could be that other sites benefited from the Google Update rather than you being penalised. Even a few serp places drop can affect traffic quite a bit.
Unfortunately, without seeing all the analytics data \ site data it is hard to pin it down to anything.
-
Oof. Well without more information it's hard to say; it could be any number of things. On-page optimization would be my first guess:
- keyword placement
- title tags
- alt tags
- etc
Not sure what to say, honestly.
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 search traffic has dropped by 35% since 18 September, we don't know why.
Organic traffic to our website has dropped 35% since 18 September 2017 to date. From 1 January to 18 September 2017 organic traffic was up by just under 1% over all (Google up by 1.32%). Paid search traffic over the same time has remained steady. There is nothing we can think of that we've done that has caused the drop. We had an issue with Google page speed test failing when running a test but we resolved this issue on 20 November and in that time we've seen an even greater drop (44% in the last week). The drop is seen across the 3 main search engines, not just Google, which points toward something we've done, but as mentioned, we can't think of any significant change we made in September that would have such negative effects. There is little difference across devices. Is anyone aware of a significant event in September in the search engine world that may have influenced our organic traffic? Any help gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | imaterus0 -
URL structure change for pages without traffic: 301 redirect or not ?
Hi, I am just starting with MOZ PRO and trying to handle the high priority issues, starting with pages with 4XX Client Error. I am wondering what we should do with pages with no traffic and no external links. For instance: So time ago we change the URL structure of our blog to a flatter one, and so eg we moved a page: from: domain-name/dla-rodzicow/poradniki/poradniki-po-markach/vilac/vilac-zabawki-z-dusza to: domain-name/dla-rodzicow/poradniki/marka-vilac/vilac-zabawki-z-dusza/ Still not very flat but this is not the point. MOZ PRO shows we are having internal links to the old url. According to MOZ PRO, we don't have external links. According to Analytics we have no traffic on the old page. So now we changed the internal link, and I am wondering whether we should 301 redirect the old page to the new one, or whether a sitemap update is enough for this kind of pages ? Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | isabelledylag0 -
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
Technical SEO | | Gotmoxie0 -
Traffic stats disaster
Hi, We have recently moved a few old websites to an existing one and redesigned the existing website too. The visits in Analytics have fallen though the roof in the last few days. I would expect the traffic to have gone up because visitors from the old websites should now be on the redesigned one. Not sure what the problem is entirely. GA code is on the site but not before the closing head where I asked for it to be put. It's just before closing body tag. Does it make a difference? (It's a CMS site). GA code must be working because visits are being recorded (tens rather than the expected hundreds). Redirects have not been done properly - not sure what IT have done there. Would the lack of proper redirects be the sole reason for the drop? I am still hassling for 301's to be sorted. Thanks all
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
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 -
Keyword rankings improve but traffic doesn't
I am working on a couple of SEO projects and have noticed over the past couple of months that the keywords rankings have improved immensely with most of them amongst top 10 on google, but still the traffic on the website doesn't improve much. Can somebody explain me the possible reasons behind this, and what can I do to attract more traffic?
Technical SEO | | KS__0 -
Are article sites a good way to generate traffic and links
I read a lot that article sites are a great way to generate links and traffic but i would like to hear from people on here to see about their experience with article sites. I have tried article sites and i have to be honest that most of them are no follow links and have also not generate any traffic. I have written over 30 articles for free article sites with no traffic coming from them and this has been done over a eight month period can anyone recommend any good article sites that can produce traffic and also ones that produce do follow If you feel i am wasting my time putting articles on free sites then please do tell me
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Will Google Continue to Index the Page with NoIndex Tag Upon Google +1 Button Impression or Click?
The FAQs for Google +1 button suggests as follows: "+1 is a public action, so you should add the button only to public, crawlable pages on your site. Once you add the button, Google may crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click." If my page has NoIndex tag, while at the same time inserted with Google +1 button on the page, will Google recognise the NoIndex Tag on the page (and will not index the page) despite the +1 button's impression or clicks send signals to Google spiders?
Technical SEO | | globalsources.com0