Huge organic drop following new site go live
-
Hi Guys,
I am currently working on a site that's organic traffic suffered ( and is still suffering ) a huge drop in organic traffic.
From a consistent 3-400 organic visits a day to almost zero. This happened as soon as the new site went live. I am now digging to find out why.
301s were put in place ( over 2, 500 over them ) and there are still over 1,100 outstanding after review search console this morning.
Having looked at the redirect file that was put in place when the new site went live, it all look OK, apart from the redirects look like this...
http://www.physiotherapystore.com/ to http://physiotherapystore.com/
Where the new URL is missing www. - I am concerned this is causing a large duplicate issue as both www. and non www. work fine.
I am right to have concern or is this something not to worry about?
-
Its really hard to analyze a traffic drop like this without some critical information about serps.
The main guess here is that some high traffic ranking just dropped, that's why im asking about the SC information.
And yes, some of all of these issues combined can cause the traffic drop. I'd try to use the analytics information looking for some specific item, such as a page what recieved a lot of traffic and then stopped recieving -
canonical has now been requested on home page.
SC only shows 1096 404's due to be fixed soon.
Some pages have wrong canonicals, for example:
http://physiotherapystore.com/a60.html has a canonical to http://www.physiotherapystore.com/a60.html?SID=km31jh6kvjfcs45oq0s2qltdc3 which is incorrect. We have a few of these that are in dev to be fixed.
I'm still not sure though if these issues could have caused a huge sudden drop in traffic?
Thanks
-
- Redirection. Its not neccesarry to create a redirection. Another way is to set rel=canonical
- Its not explicit for me the sitemap. Might be good to add it in the robots.txt
- So the problem goes over 90 days ago, this makes it more difficult.
- Still SC doesnt show any errors?
-
Thank you,
Do you recommend I go into the redirect file and add in www where it is not already there?
I am aware of meta description and there is a sitemap here: http://www.physiotherapystore.com/sitemaps/physio/sitemap.xml
Search Console data doesn't go back far enough to see the sudden drop in traffic.
-
Hi there,
There are some issues:
- Bad redirect the non-www and www version. This is causing serious duplicate
- Meta description is incorrect.
- There are no sitemap.xml
- Not necesarly an issue: you are disallowing the indexing of google images.
Also, have you chequed the Search Console?It should show any error.
Can you identify whether there was a specific ranking drop (using a search console and/or analytics)?Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results on 100% responsive site
Has anyone experienced an issue where Google Mobile site crawl returns poorer results than their Desktop site crawl on a 100% responsive website that passes all Google Mobile tests?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Redirecting an Entire Site to a Page on Another Site?
So I have a site that I want to shut down http://vowrenewalsmaui.com and redirect to a dedicated Vow Renewals page I am making on this site here: https://simplemauiwedding.net. My main question is: I don't want to lose all the authority of the pages and if I just redirect the site using my domain registrar's 301 redirect it will only redirect the main URL not all of the supporting pages, to my knowledge. How do I not lose all the authority of the supporting pages and still shut down the site and close down my site builder? I know if I leave the site up I can redirect all of the individual pages to corresponding pages on the other site, but I want to be done with it. Just trying to figure out if there is a better way than I know of. The domain is hosted through GoDaddy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | photoseo10 -
Moving to new platform
I am moving a site with great SEO and tons of pages to a new platform. Page names will all be different because they will not have the .html ending and names will change. It is on a system that does not support .htaccess. So, I don't have a way to do 301 redirects. How can I keep my competitive status? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bhsiao0 -
Site wide links - should they be nofollow or followed links
Hi We have a retail site and a blog that goes along with the site. The blog is very popular and the MD wanted a link from the blog back to the main retail site. However as this is a site wide link on the blog, am I right in thinking this really should be no follow link. The link is at the top of every page. Thanks in advance for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Why is my m-dot site outranking my main site in SERPs?
My client has a WP site and a Duda mobile site that we inherited. For some reason their m-dot site is ranking on P1 of Google for their top KWs instead of the main site which is much more robust. The main site might rank beyond page 5 when the generic home page for their m-dot site appears on P1. Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Etna0 -
New sites what is the first things to do?
Hi Guys, If you have a baby of a domain which is only a few months old what should be the priorty for getting establish once all the on site stuff has been done? I know the directories are not as important as they use to be but is there a top list that should be worked through steadly to get the new site setup on? Kind regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ao.com0 -
Migrating a site with new URL structure
I recently redesigned a website that is now in WordPress. It was previously in some odd, custom platform that didn't work very well. The URL's for all the pages are now more search engine friendly and more concise. The problem is, now Google has all of the old pages and all of the new pages in its index. This is a duplicate problem since content is the same. I have set up a 301 redirect for every old URL to it's new counterpart. I was going to do a remove URL request in Webmaster Tools but it seems I need to have a 404 code and not a 301 on those pages to do that. Which is better to do to get the old URL's out of the index? 404 them and do a removal request or 301 them to the new URL? How long will it take Google to find these 301 redirects and keep just the new pages in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0