Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
New Website Launch - Traffic Way Down
-
We launched a new website in June. Traffic plummeted after the launch, we crept back up for a couple of months, but now we are flat, nowhere near our pre-launch traffic or previous year's traffic.
For the past 6 months our analytics have been worrying us - Overall traffic and new visitor traffic is down over 10%, bounce rate is up almost 35% since site launched, keywords aren't ranking where they used to, and of course, web sales are down.
Is this supposed to happen when a new site is launched, and how long does a new this transition last?
We have done all the technical audits, adding relevant content, we're at a loss. Any suggestions where to look next to improve traffic to pre-launch numbers?
-
Hi.
Marie is right in what she says regarding there being many possible reasons but my main guess is that you have either been hit by Panda or that your old site had better content.
Firstly I would say that if you have had a technical site audit carried out that it was either a poor quality one or that you haven't actioned the recommendations.
There are two full versions of your site on different domains:-
http://www.waytekwire.com
http://order.waytekwire.comThese domains mirror each other exactly and both home pages are claiming to be the canonical version.
The content is extremely thin and your site is pretty much an example of what the original penguin update was released to combat. This product for example has no description and no worthy content on the page - http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
This product is not alone on your site, most of your products have no descriptions.Also your site is suffering from a common ecommerce issue of your products being viewable with or without a trailing slash and there is no canonical tag in the source to say which is the canonical version. i/e:-
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-Show the same content. in fact the same content is shown on all of these urls :-
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://www.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-
http://waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-
http://order.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-/
http://order.waytekwire.com/item/48006/LED-CLEARANCE-MARKER-1-5-As Marie says, there could many possible reason for your ranking drop, my guess is that it is a combination of multiple reasons. Until you get the very basics sorted you are going to struggle in cracking this issue.
My best advice would be to pay for a really good site audit and follow through every recommendation. Failing that, sort out your site canonicalisation issues and give every single product a good description.
Really sorry for the bad news but hopefully it helps point you in the right direction.
All the best.
Ade. -
Sorry to hear about your traffic drop. Unfortunately I think this type of question is too broad for you to get an answer in a forum. There are so many possible reasons for the traffic to drop. Here are a few:
-The initial traffic boost could have been from the "honeymoon affect".
-Do you have content that is taken from other sites or otherwise duplicated? If so, then Panda could have affected you. Have a look at your organic traffic and see if it drops on a known Panda update day.
-If you built links with too much anchor text and from easy to get sources then Penguin could have affected you.
-You could have issues with your server
-You could have malware
-You could have competitors with better SEO.
-
Thank you for responding...
Yes, we did 301 redirects.
Yes, we did change the content
And yes, we switched platforms
-
Hi John,
First question is did you 301 redirect all of the old pages over to the new pages?
Did you change just the design or all of the content as well?
Did you switch platforms. i/e from one type of CMS to another.
Can you post the link to your site?
Cheers.
Ade.
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
-
New Subdomain & Best Way To Index
We have an ecommerce site, we'll say at https://example.com. We have created a series of brand new landing pages, mainly for PPC and Social at https://sub.example.com, but would also like for these to get indexed. These are built on Unbounce so there is an easy option to simply uncheck the box that says "block page from search engines", however I am trying to speed up this process but also do this the best/correct way. I've read a lot about how we should build landing pages as a sub-directory, but one of the main issues we are dealing with is long page load time on https://example.com, so I wanted a kind of fresh start. I was thinking a potential solution to index these quickly/correctly was to make a redirect such as https://example.com/forward-1 -> https:sub.example.com/forward-1 then submit https://example.com/forward-1 to Search Console but I am not sure if that will even work. Another possible solution was to put some of the subdomain links accessed on the root domain say right on the pages or in the navigation. Also, will I definitely be hurt by 'starting over' with a new website? Even though my MozBar on my subdomain https://sub.example.com has the same domain authority (DA) as the root domain https://example.com? Recommendations and steps to be taken are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Markbwc0 -
SEO on dynamic website
Hi. I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO. They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created. I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex? Thanks S
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bedynamic0 -
If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance?
Hi, If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Why is my Bing traffic dropping?
In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Spike then Drop in Direct Traffic?
We've been doing some SEO work over the last few weeks and earlier this week we saw a large spike in traffic. Yay we all thought, but then yesterday the traffic levels returned to pre-celebratory levels. I've been doing some digging to try and find out what was different Monday and Tuesday this week. Mondays are usually big traffic days for us anyway, but this week was by far the biggest, and Tuesday was even higher still, our best day ever. After some poking, I found that the direct traffic followed the same pattern as our overall traffic levels (image attached). The first spike coincides with an email we sent out that day, but the later spike we just don't know where it came from? I understand loosely that direct isn't easily traceable, but can anyone help us understand more about this second spike? Thanks! ayqL2wi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Best way to remove full demo (staging server) website from Google index
I've recently taken over an in-house role at a property auction company, they have a main site on the top-level domain (TLD) and 400+ agency sub domains! company.com agency1.company.com agency2.company.com... I recently found that the web development team have a demo domain per site, which is found on a subdomain of the original domain - mirroring the site. The problem is that they have all been found and indexed by Google: demo.company.com demo.agency1.company.com demo.agency2.company.com... Obviously this is a problem as it is duplicate content and so on, so my question is... what is the best way to remove the demo domain / sub domains from Google's index? We are taking action to add a noindex tag into the header (of all pages) on the individual domains but this isn't going to get it removed any time soon! Or is it? I was also going to add a robots.txt file into the root of each domain, just as a precaution! Within this file I had intended to disallow all. The final course of action (which I'm holding off in the hope someone comes up with a better solution) is to add each demo domain / sub domain into Google Webmaster and remove the URLs individually. Or would it be better to go down the canonical route?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
New Site: Use Aged Domain Name or Buy New Domain Name?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterwhitewebdesign
I have the opportunity to build a new website and use a domain name that is older than 5 years or buy a new domain name. The aged domain name is a .net and includes a keyword.
The new domain would include the same keyword as well as the U.S. state abbreviation. Which one would you use and why? Thanks for your help!0 -
Any way to find which domains are 301 redirected to competitors' websites?
By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djingel10