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.
Fixing a website redirect situation that resulted in drop in traffic
-
Hi,
I'm trying to help someone fix the following situation: they had a website, www.domain.com, that was generating a steady amount of traffic for three years. They then redesigned the website a couple of months ago, and the website developer redirected the site to domain.com but did not set up analytics on domain.com. We noticed that there was a drop in traffic to www.domain.com but have no idea if domain.com is generating any traffic since analytics wasn't installed.
To fix this situation, I was going to find out from the developer if there was a good reason to redirect the site. What would have prompted the developer to do this if www.domain.com had been used already for three years? Then, unless there was a good reason, I would change the redirect back to what it was before - domain.com redirecting to www.domain.com. Presumably this would allow us to regain the traffic to the site www.domain.com that was lost when the redirect was put in place.
Does this sound like a reasonable course of action? Is there anything that I'm missing, or anything else that I should do in this situation?
Thanks in advance!
Carolina
-
Hey Carolina,
Jarno has nailed it.
Just on a side note, if you want to see the traffic for http://domain.com your web developer should be able to supply you with the server logs which will tell you similar stats to regular analytics.
This is achievable because log files record requests to a server. Google Analytics record requests for pages with the Analytics code installed.
Hope you can sort it
Iain - Reload Media
-
Thanks for the suggestion about using www.compete.com! I'll check it out.
-
Thank you, Jarno! This is what I suspected; I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track and not overlooking anything.
-
Carolina,
I'm with Jarno. As for traffic to domain.com for the past 3 months, you might take a look at www.compete.com - while not perfect, it may give you an idea if the non-www domain was receiving traffic.
-
Carolina,
that sounds like a normal way to go, yes. If you used www.domain.com before i would definitely use it again. No only is it known by people perhaps but also for all the link juice (links pointing to your website) that were build to www.domain.com instead of domain.com. And i would urge them to install analytics on it as soon as possible.
Since it is new design site (no new content?) and the site has been redirected to another subdomain (www. is also a subdomain..) Google could possibly see this as a new website which in turn could mean that it could rank more difficult over time. This is not per se the case but it could happen.
I would urge the developer to undo the redirect immediately, and let him install analytics.If you do this you should be in the right direction again.
kind regards
Jarno
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
-
302 redirects in Magento, trying to fix
Hi all, I'm assigned a site in Magento. After the first craw, we found almost 15k 302 redirects. A sample URL ends with this /stores/store/switch/?SID=qdq9mf1u6afgodo1vtvk0ucdpb&___from_store=default&___store=german&uenc=aHR0cHM6Ly9qdWljeWZsdXRlcy5jb20vP19fX3N0b3JlPWdlcm1hbg%2C%2C And they are currently 302 redirecting to the homepage as well as other main pages and also product pages it seems. Some of these point to account pages where customers log in. Probably best for me to de-index those so no issues there. But I'm worried about the 302 redirects to public pages. The extension we have installed is SEO Suite Ultimate by MageWorx. Does anyone here have experience here specifically and how did you fix it? Thanks, JC
Technical SEO | | LASClients0 -
Adding https version of website: how best to redirect
If I have 4 versions of my site http://www
Technical SEO | | bhsiao
http://
https://www
https:// What is the best way to redirect without losing seo positions? i have been mainly using http://www but have recently added my ssl so https works also. I heard at Moz Con that I should get the https working. All of my marketing and ads are going to http://www 301 redirect 3 of them? Which 3? If https is becoming important, should that be my main url? will it hurt my seo to switch? Thank you so much in advance!0 -
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
How to track my actual traffic source using Google Analytics which are now showing as referral traffic?
Hi Mozzers, I went through many Q&As in the community this morning. I found a solution where I could just remove the referral site in analytics>admin>property>tracking info>referral exclusion list. So I removed paypal.com which was the main referral traffic. I thought the problem is solved. Later today I got another order, now the referral traffic is from eway.com, now what? Yes I know I will add this to the exclusion list but there will be many more referral sites. My main concern is I am not able to track the actual traffic source. How do I do that? 1. Do I need to use google url tracking for all my pages?
Technical SEO | | DebashishB
2. Do I need to add tracking code in each page of the site?
3. Is there a way to track the actual source of this traffic, now that the transaction is already made but reflects as referral traffic in Google Analytics? jZjTN0 -
How do I fix the h1 tag?
No More Than One H1 Tag Easy fix <dl> <dt>Number of H1s</dt> <dd>2</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>Best practices for both SEO and accessibility require only a single H1 tag. The H1 is meant to be the page's headline, and thus, multiple H1s are confusing. Consider employing H2, H3 or CSS styles to achieve the same results with text visualization.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove multiple instances of the H1 tag, so that only one exists on the page.</dd> <dd>I get this error yet it does not tell me how to fix it. I'm not even sure what the H1 tag is?
Technical SEO | | 678648631264
</dd> </dl>0 -
Double 301 redirect
Hi together, due to some technical reasons I have redirect (301) an existing link two times. Example: www.mydomain.com/root/site.html > 301 > www.mydomain.com/site.html > 301 www.mydomain.com/site_new.html Is there anybody how has got some experience like doing a double redirect? What about link juice? Best regards Steffen
Technical SEO | | steffen_0 -
How to find a specific link on my website (currently causing redirects)
Hi everyone, I've used crawlers like Xenu to find broken links before, and I love these tools. What I can't figure out is how to find specific pieces of code within my site. For example, Webmaster Tools tells me there are still links to old pages somewhere on my website but I just can't find them. Do you know of a crawler that can search for a specific link within the html? Thanks in advance, Josh
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0