Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
-
Hi Mozers,
I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward.
To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month.
The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then:
CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks
CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks
PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks
Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward?
Any advice is much appreciated,
Thank you!!!
-
You might also ask Volusion if they have changed your site to a new server recently. I assume you are on a shared or semi-dedicated server with them. Sometimes, as you well know, if one of the other sites on that server loses reputation, it can effect you too.
Volusion has also had some down-time recently. That may be a factor too.
You are right about shocking the engines. It happens, but then usually things bounce back. It sounds to me like you are really doing all the right things. Be patient, I think you're going to be fine. Your link profile at Ahrefs.com looks really good. It sounds like you have good instincts.
Let me know what happens!
-
Again, thank you for your feedback!
I may have changed a few of the product codes which should create a 404, but i had a catch all redirect so now they are soft 404. I only have 29 total, or 20 more than when i started. I will make sure to fix, even if this is not the cause.
With 1200 pages, and 600 products I am confident that +20 soft 404's is causing 25% week over week traffic, hurting me from 2K a week to 1K a week.
See screenshot from webmaster tools
I am so puzzled by this.
I think that I have just shocked the engines. I have done it before, hurt for 6 weeks, then back to normal, hopefully better (fingers crossed).
-
Hi Chris,
Hah! What a coincidence. Okay, so I do have a specific siggestion pertaining to Volusion. Yes, you are correct in that when you are first setting up your store, if you write SEO friendly URLs (I believe they pull it from the "Product Name Short" field), Volusion automatically takes care of the redirect in that situation. However, if you then decide to change one of those, I believe you need to manually set up a redirect in the 301 redirects database section of the back end. This may even be true if you had default URLs, launched your store, got crawled and indexed and then updated to a SEO-friendly URL. (You may want to check with Volusion on that - but sometimes their tech support is hit or miss).
You may have already done this too, so again, if so, I apologize
Also, have you checked to see if Google might still be indexing the old URLs in addition to the new ones? If so, when you click on the old one, are you getting a 404, does it stay the same, or does it redirect? If it redirects, what is the canonical tag? When I was last on Volusion they hadn't implemented a good way to manage canonical tags either. Because of their template, the canonicals were all http://www.MY-STORE.com , which wasn't good. They may have improved that since I managed one of their stores, not sure.
Also, are the stats in your original question purely out of SEOMoz, or are they from Google Analytics? I find SEOMoz can occasionally fluctuate wildly if I change targeted keywords in a campaign.
Just some thoughts to hopefully help!
Dana
-
Great question! Sorry i forgot to mention, I have been on volusion for a while, so all 301R is managed automatically.
When i switched to volusion originally (9 months ago?) the 301R was mismanaged, lost a lot of traffic, but after about 4 months it was back to normal.
Knowing that all links are redirected in my recent change, do you have any suggestions/thoughts on what to do to regain my traffic?
-
Hi Chris,
You didn't mention 301-redirects in your post. Did you set up 301-redirects for all of the URLs that you changed? If not, that explains the drop. If you did set them up, have you checked them all to make sure they are redirecting properly?
What about canonical tags? Did you update your canonical tags to reflect the new URLs?
In 2008 I worked for a company that migrated from self-hosting to Volusion and all of their URLs change. I was not doing SEO for them (yet), and they mismanaged their 301-redirects and lost about half of their traffic. It took a long time to recover. The good news is once they fixed the 301s the site traffic came back iwthin about 6 weeks (but I know 6 weeks can seem like an eternity).
Hope these questions aren't too basic and hope this helps somewhat.
Dana
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
-
Can Segment capture organic traffic? If so is it more reliable than Google Analytics?
Hi mozzers, We just learned that our standard GA hasn't been as reliable as we hoped so and we are trying to find other ways to track organic sessions. Which solution would you consider? Is Segment one of them? If so, is it more reliable than Google Analytics? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ty19861 -
Google is reporting a server error, but there's no server error.
Google is erroneously reporting a server error and I just can't figure out the source of the issue. My links work, and GoDaddy ensures me there is no server error. This issue arose when I moved from HTTP to HTTPS and CPanel hosting, but I've got no idea how to fix it. I thought maybe I have duplicate content, but it does not appear that way. Any suggestions? I'm at a loss. www.thedishmaster.com
Reporting & Analytics | | TheDishmaster0 -
20% Dip in Traffic. What could be happening?
Hello Dear Community Yesterday I had a sudden drop in visits - screenshot attached. It shows how yesterday Friday 17/10 has had a dip in visits vs Friday 10/10 (1 week ago). I have an authority blog in Italy with over 90k monthly visits. I do now black-hat SEO stuff, and my content is rich. Organic traffic grew 85% y-o-y and I was actually on a nice, slow growth trend, but now, 20% dip. The things I did before all this happened, and which could have had an impact (but I'm not sure about) are: Configured Max CDN and W3 Total Cache (before I was just using SiteGround's Super Cacher plugin and that's it). So now my site is faster by a lot although I'm having issues like I mention in point 2. I had to clear the cache at least a hundred times as I was configuring Optin Monster for lead generation I changed my Google Analytics code from the old version to the new version (universal) Besides this I check my best keywords in RankTracker and it looks like nothing happened to my rankings. Yet a few of my most popular posts which gets roughly the same amount of visits everyday for the past few months, had a dip of 30% more or less. I also added a screenshot of my Webmaster tool dashboard. Everything is ok and there are no messages. Also yesterday was not a national holiday in my country (Italy) so everything should have been normal. Please share with me your thoughts about this. What else should I check to get an idea? What do you think it could be? Thank you! Andrea 2vII81q yXn6zBD
Reporting & Analytics | | Andrew_IT0 -
Separating branded from non branded org. traffic volume
What is the easiest way of separating branded from non branded org. traffic volume? I've created great rankings for a client, and at the same time their brand searches seem to have dropped a lot. How do I present this in the best way since GA only shows little org. keyword info. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Majsan0 -
Google Direct Traffic Reporting for Mobile on Analytics
We noticed a significant drop in our direct traffic in Google Analytics for mobile on July 30th but all our other traffic remains the same. What is the possible cause of this?
Reporting & Analytics | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Why Webmasters Tools verification meta tags change??
Why do these keep changing for sites that I have verfied over and over and over and over? About a month goes by and the meta code has changed and the site is unverified again. Seems like a trick to force you into logging into Webmaster Tools all the time. What gives???
Reporting & Analytics | | 2CDevGroup0 -
No Link Data Available for this URL appears often. Are my sites too small to show up?
I am on the trial until Mar 5, 2012. I seldom get the info I want. Is it because my sites are too narrow a niche? I don't seem to be getting the data I'd like from your service. I'm trying to like it, but when I keep getting messages like this, it makes it hard to justify: "No Link Data Available for this URL appears often" Sample sites that I am unable to get data. I especially would like to know how many backlinks exist for each site. I paid someone to help me with them and I'd like to verify their work.: http://costaricadentistreview.com/ http://costaricadentistreviews.com/ http://costaricadentalimplants.org Any suggestions? Thanx Kurt Gross
Reporting & Analytics | | kurtray0 -
What's the best way to track moble traffic / sales from a subdomain in Google Analytics?
Hello, I've been trying to figure out the best way to track traffic and sales for a subdomain mobile site and would appreciate any feedback or guidance. I've set up an advanced segment but have found that I'm not able to source traffic since the segments get disabled when trying to view top content pages. I've also setup an additional sub-profile under the main domain profile in google analytics and have set up an advanced filter using the following guildelines http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSite.html In the Profile Settings page, click the Add Filter link. Choose Add New Filter and provide the filter a name. Choose Custom Filter and select Advanced on the Filter type settings. Under Advanced settings: FieldA should be set to Hostname FieldB should be set to Request URI Set the values for both Field A and Field B to (.*), which is an expression that captures all characters. Set the Output To --> Constructor option to Request URI and provide $A1$B1 as the value for that choice. I'm unsure if I've set up the profile / filter correctly, the traffic stats are different than the segment. The mobile profile is also tracking all ecommerce transactions instead of just mobile. Here's the code I have in place. we're using the Traditional code Thanks, Jamie
Reporting & Analytics | | marketing_zoovy.com0