URL-structure change - former long-tail traffic gone
-
Hey people,
I'm sure many of you applied changes to the URL structure of a client's or your own website before. So did I for obvious reason: The structure before was like www.domain.com/brand_page/_22-key-word-translatedkeyword.php (ranked 20). This was changed to www.domain.com/key-word.html.
Edit: Also on-page it was optimized, but only taking out worthless links like "keyword-link to other page" and adding a relevant SEO text (also valuable for the user)Now, for the targeted short-tail keyword, the outcome was great - ranking increased by 17 landing the page on the first SERP.
But: Before this page garnered a wide range of long-tail keyword traffic.To be exact: 2600 different keywords generated traffic for that page in a period of 1 month.
Now the newly structured site (also on-page optimized) only receives traffic from around 100 keywords.
You can imagine that the absolute amount of visits also dropped.
So I'd like to know if you observed similar results.
Another question that's coming up in this context: How regularly does Google refresh the keywords associated with a page? Like: Is this page really relevant for this one keyword we associated it with 5 years ago?
Because it is clear, when I'm looking at the aforementioned 2600 KW in detail, most don't have anything to do with the site, i.e. are not mentioned at all. Still they generated valuable traffic though.
All of this is really crucial to this project, because soon the whole website's supposed to be relaunched with optimized URL structure and of course everything else that's need SEO wise...
I'd love to hear your experiences. Thanks!!
-
I'm not saying Adwords can't be causing this - I just haven't seen where it does. Other ad networks allow users to embed links in ways that disguise that their paid ads, and many affiliate site owners hide paid ads in a way that gives them the appearance of being non-paid.
And yes, I have heard from some people that Google can sometimes confuse paid and non-paid in their analytics system.
-
Let me get this clear: What do you mean by "disguised as regular links"? Because I am only talking about Adwords and I am not aware of a way to disguise them.
If you are not talking about Adwords. For my standards, I can prove that Adwords have an impact.
Or Google Analytics is getting the seperation between paid and non-paid mixed up. Ever heard of anything like this?
-
paid ads are not supposed to impact SEO at all. While I have not seen AdWords cause this, I have seen paid ads in other networks do so when those paid ads were disguised as regular links on sites displaying them.
-
Hey Alan,
thank you for your answer. I really appreciate it.
Best believe me, I'm just as curious, probably even a little more.
I've been looking into it today and the outcome was pretty surprising: You know how Google always maintains that Adwords doesn't affect organic ranking in any way, i.e. neither positively nor negatively.
Well, apparantly, the "signal somewhere" is exactly there with Adwords. The project I took over was before managed by someone who did it to the best of his knowledge. Sadly though, despite a quite good results, his product knowledge was pretty limited, so he advertised with Adwords using keywords that didn't match the product at all. So imagine we are selling Mercedes SL600 but he advertised for Citroen 2CV. Not exactly our targeted customer segment.
But what really suprises me is that these Adwords ads generated non-paid traffic onto our website for those keywords.
Or do I miss something here? Can Adwords be a signal for Google as to what the page is about?
-
dumperama, I'm curious - if all those keywords the site has nothing to do were found within the site, or perhaps were they in links pointing to the previous version pages? There's got to be some signal somewhere that said " this page is related to this topic". That's something I'd look further into. It's possible, if it was low-level links, that once the URL changes were made, you essentially helped Google get further confirmation on the true topical focus, and that in turn devalued the source indicators that drove those other phrases.
Ultimately Google refreshes their evaluations frequently - though not necessarily very often on a site that doesn't show regularly updated content or regularly changing other off-site factors.
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
-
Does anyone have a good resource for seeing SERP feature/presentation change Year-Over-Year?
Moz only tracks general SERP feature changes for the last 30 days.
Reporting & Analytics | | homedepot0 -
Site Hacked: Is it Faster and Better to 301 or 404 Irrelevant URLs?
Hey Everyone, So our site was hacked which created a large amount of irrelevant URLs on our domain; resulting in thousands of 404 errors and pages coming up for searches unrelated to our brand. The question is now that the issues have been resolved (and site re-submitted) would it be quicker (and more ideal) to redirect important 404 errors that see traffic, have links…etc. although not relevant or just let everything 404 out? We’re not as concerned with offering a relevant user experience because these are not in our demographic but want to avoid these pages convoluting our analytics as well as issues that might arise from Google thinking these topics do apply. Any help or insight would be very appreciated. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or we could provide further details that might help. Looking forward to hearing from all of you! Thanks in advance. Best,
Reporting & Analytics | | Ben-R0 -
How do I track specific referral traffics journey through a website?
Hello, A client has asked us to track the journey each separate referral traffic visitor takes through out the website. I have had a look through analytics and am not sure how to ensure I can do this for all referral traffic visitors? Can anyone help? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | mblsolutions0 -
Organic and direct traffic swap
We moved to a CMS (Webhook) and when we did that organic traffic and direct traffic swapped places. Since we moved it organic traffic is down by about 400 visits and direct traffic is up by 400 visits. I went through the list below and confirmed everything is working. The http refer wasn't being passed for a couple of weeks but the issue was resolved and the organic traffic issue is still ongoing. Is there anything else that may cause this issue? I confirmed the issue isn't one of the below problems. during http to https redirect (or vice versa) the referrer may not be passed incorrect subdomain or cross-domain tracking can strip the referrer. 302 redirects sometimes caused the referrer to be dropped problems with cookies being lost/corrupted. javascript missing from certain entry pages (means any further page view looks like a direct)
Reporting & Analytics | | BT20090 -
Drop in direct traffic & spike in Adwords, any relation?
So I noticed a significant (around 50%) drop in Direct traffic in analytics to one of my websites (compared to last month). I've also noticed a spike in Adwords for around the same number of sessions. The drop in traffic is pretty much isolated to one specific page, and it is the same page involved in the spike in Adwords. Is it possible that Google was not recognizing a portion of the Adwords traffic? That's the only theory I have, but we haven't changed anything with their tracking or Adwords, so I'm a little hesitant to go with that theory.
Reporting & Analytics | | KiyoW0 -
Does anyone know what's happened to google analytics -> traffic sources -> SEO -> queries many of my accounts are showing a drop to zero in the laste few days
Howdy mozzers It's in the question title really. Zero impressions showing for the last few days on. Multiple accounts Any thought out there
Reporting & Analytics | | Big_Partnership0 -
Has Google changed its algorithm? My traffic has almost doubled and I don't know why.
My traffic has nearly doubled over the past few days, and my conversion rate has doubled as well. It looks like our rankings haven't changed... We haven't done anything to the site recently, although we did submit a couple of press releases through the wire not too long ago (within the last few weeks). I do not think that this is a cyclical/seasonal jump in traffic because last year this did not occur. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | deuce1s0 -
Long tail analytics
I've been playing with google advanced segments, but can't work out how to do this: Show all the keywords and traffic that send between x and x number of keyword searches per month. I'd like to have 3 different segments to show short, long and midtail keywords. Can anyone help?
Reporting & Analytics | | PeterM220