Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
-
Howdy Mozzers
I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me!
***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing
Background
The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change.
Problem
Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline.
*They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous
Organic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays.
Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get.
Redirects
During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up:
Original:
http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume
--301--
http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume
Canonical issue
On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013.
Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example).
Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda)
According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However -
Sitemap
We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index?
That page is in the sitemap.
Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z
Change Frequency: Yearly
Priority: 0.5
*GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca
What we looked at so far
-
The redirects are all currently 301’s
-
GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch
-
We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be.
-
Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank.
-
We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials
-
We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1).
-
Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)
-
-
Thanks so much for all of your insight! It's been frustrating as an in house SEO to find the root cause to this. We've found additional issues since I posted the question, and we are currently addressing them.
Really couldn't be more impressed with the moz community. I'm shocked to get such excellent answers from all of you. It helps calm the team here, knowing that we can reach out to amazing people!
Mark
-
About two years ago I did a page-by-page redirect of Domain A to KeywordDomain B. Nothing changed on the site but the domain name and the logo. Nothing. NOTHING. Every page was redirected to an identical page with 301s that worked properly.
Rankings and traffic immediately tanked. I was really surprised because that domain had held the #1 position for the exact match keyword for ten straight years - although based upon an analylsis of link metrics it should have been #2 for that entire time. I had redirected other domains and never, ever had a problem.
Now it was #2. Crap! I blew a load of dough on that domain and now my income was damaged.
I didn't do anything. No linkbuilding, no new content, no nothing.
A few months later the rankings and traffic came back. My personal opinion - and lots of people might disagree - is that Domain A was getting thousands of domain queries, type-ins and social media actions every month. When we switched to KeywordDomain.com it was getting ZERO domain queries, etc. Slowly people began typing the new domain in their queries and when a few thousand a month were occurring that is when the rankings came back. Maybe coincidence, but that's what I want to believe.
-
It's very likely due to the domain switch but to give yourself something else to do to do besides what you've done so far (and if you haven't done this already) and give yourself some direction to take while you're waiting for your rankings to come back up, go ahead and isolate how the drops in traffic are occurring:
- Research what keywords mapped to which of your old landing pages and which of those keywords are now bringing in less traffic.
- Did you completely fall out of the results for some of your keywords or have you just dropped somewhat in the rankings for all of your keywords?
- Are you now only ranking for brand terms?
- What specifically has changed with your traffic
At this time, you may do well by coming up with a strong content strategy and working the PR and G+ channels to get that content out to new and existing audience members--it can only help.
-
Experiencing a drastic drop in traffic immediately after and often for several months after a redesign/replatform is extremely common. I have seen scenarios where traffic dropped as much as 75% for as long as 4-5 months before beginning to recover. There are so many issues involved in a re-platform and so many possibilities for why and where things may have gone a little astray that pin-pointing any one thing may just be impossible.
That being said, I feel your pain! As a fellow in-house SEO I am sure there is a lot of pressure on you from stakeholders to "fix the Website." We are going to be re-platforming within the coming months and one of my main jobs has been to educate everyone on the potential hit we will take.
If it's any consolation at all, I have seen companies power through that dip and come out way better on the other side. But I've never seen it happen instantly. You may want to discuss strategies like possibly increasing PPC or other paid marketing campaigns to get the company through until things start improving. Ideally, this is a discussion you have before the replatform takes place, but it sounds to me like to came on board after the move had already taken place.
Do what you can to find any potential technical SEO problems, but also encourage your colleagues not to panic and to develop some other campaigns that can bring in traffic until things start to improve.
That was more of a pep talk than anything concrete in terms of help. I know. But Sometimes it just helps to know that what you are experiencing is par for the course for any platform change or site migration.
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
-
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Hello, We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com. We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks. Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl. Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_p
Eugene0 -
Product URL Optimisation
Hi guys, We are currently trying to add new products to our site but we are in a quandary on what type of URL structure to pursue. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | michel_8
Product Name: Aspect Exfoliating Cleanser 240ml https://www.example.com.au/aspect-exfoliating-cleanser-240ml (including the size)
VS
https://www.example.com.au/aspect-exfoliating-cleanser 1.) Which is a better URL structure based on SEO 2018 and why?
2.) Is there any merit in removing the size from the URL key with the aim of attracting more traffic? Keen to hear from you guys! Cheers,0 -
Huge Search Traffic Drop After Switching to HTTPS - No Recovery After Couple of Months
Hi In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%). We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543 We fixed the redirects to 301 Double-checked the sitemaps Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com) Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.) We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etakgoz
We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS. It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving. In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?0 -
Website using search term as URL brand name to cheat Google
Google has come a long way over the past 5 years, the quality updates have really helped bring top quality content to the top that is relevant for users search terms, although there is one really ANNOYING thing that still has not been fixed. Websites using brand name as service search term to manipulate Google I have got a real example but I wouldn't like to use it in case the brand mentions flags up in their tools and they spot this post, but take this search for example "Service+Location" You will get 'service+location.com' rank #1 Why? Heaven knows. They have less than 100 backlinks which are of a very low, spammy quality from directories. The content is poor compared to the competition and the competitors have amazing link profiles, great social engagement, much better website user experience and the data does not prove anything. All the competitors are targeting the same search term but yet the worst site is ranking the highest. Why on earth is Google not fixing this issue. This page we are seeing rank #1 do not even deserve to be ranking on the first 5 pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jseddon920 -
Internal links and URL shortners
Hi guys, what are your thoughts using bit.ly links as internal links on blog posts of a website? Some posts have 4/5 bit.ly links going to other pages of our website (noindexed pages). I have nofollowed them so no seo value is lost, also the links are going to noindexed pages so no need to pass seo value directly. However what are your thoughts on how Google will see internal links which have essential become re-direct links? They are bit.ly links going to result pages basically. Am I also to assume the tracking for internal links would also be better using google analytics functionality? is bit.ly accurate for tracking clicks? Any advice much appreciated, I just wanted to double check this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
New-york-city vs. broadway as a URL parameter
We're a content publisher that writes news and reviews about the theater community, both in New York City (broadway mainly) and beyond. Presently, we display the term 'new-york-city' in news articles about Broadway / New York City theater (see http://screencast.com/t/XlifMdT9QP). Would it be better for us to replace that term with simply 'Broadway' to improve its searchability? I was doing some google trends keyword research and it looks like the search term "Broadway" in various permutations is substantially more popular than "New York City Theater."
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
SEOMoz and Facebook Graph Search
Are SEOMoz looking to integrate Facebook Graph Search (the web search section) into the product? At the moment we can measure and track rankings for Google, Bing/Yahoo, but not Facebook graph search. What are the general thoughts among the community? Do you think it will be adopted as a real search engine? I'm not overly concerned - I reckon it will take a lot to change people behaviour and have them moving away from the other search engines. It's throwing up some interesting results though in searches!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | littlesthobo0 -
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash? www.example.com/services Or www.example.com/services**/** Does Google consider these to be the same link or does Google treat them as different links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0