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
-
Why has my website been removed from Bing?
I have a website that has recently been removed from Bing's index, but can't figure out why. The website isn't new, and it is indexed just fine on Google. These are the steps I've tried: The website is verified in Bing Webmaster Tools and successfully submitted the sitemap. I tested the URL to ensure that Bingbot is allowed to crawl the site I submitted URLs to Bing via the URL Submission tool There isn't a "noindex" on the site preventing it from being indexed When I do a URL Inspection, an error message comes up saying "The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing us from serving it to our users. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines." I contacted Bing to ask whether the website was removed in error, but received a reply that the website doesn't comply with Bing's quality guidelines, but they wouldn't go into detail as to which guidelines the website isn't meeting. The website URL is https://www.pardeehospital.org. Can anyone offer any advice or insight as to why Bing won't index our site? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lindsey.steinkamp0 -
How to Target Country Specific Website Traffic?
I have a website with .com domain but I need to generate traffic from UK? I have already set my GEO Targeting location as UK in Google Webmasters & set country location as UK in Google Analytics as well but still, i get traffic only from India. I have also set Geo-targeting code at the backend of the website. But nothing seems works. Can anyone help me how can is do this? I am unable to understand what else can be done.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoninj0 -
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 -
Moving half my website to a new website: 301?
Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Drop in traffic after redesign
Is it common for a site to see slight traffic drops after a site redesign (containing cleaner code, more usability and basically just being more helpful for the end user)? A new site of ours went live last Wednesday and has experienced a drop in traffic. If you have seen this in your own site, how did you recover? And how long did the recovery take?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Redirecting Canonical 301s and Magento Website
I have an issue with a client's website where it has 3700+ pages, but roughly half of them are duplicates. Thankfully, the only difference between the original and the duplictes is the "?print" at the end of each URL (I suppose this is Magento's way of making a printable page version of the same page. I don't know, I didn't build it.) My questions is, how can I get all the pages like this http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html?print to redirect to pages like this... http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html Also, do they NEED to be Canonical, or will a 301 redirect be sufficient. Also, after having done this, if anybody knows, is there a way I can turn that feature off in Magento, because we're expanding our product line, and I don't want to have to keep chasing after these "?print" pages after the fact.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClifThompson0