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
-
Is having the same URL in several sitemaps a problem for google?
We have 30 sitemaps, one for each language version of our site. About 5000 pages per sitemap.
Reporting & Analytics | | lcourse
To get a better idea on which pages google is not indexing, I thought about quickly generating sitemaps by page cagetories to see if there are any patterns. Any problems if I submit now new additional sitemaps dividing all our pages by product page, considering that the same pages are already in our existing sitemaps we submitted in the search console. So having same URL in more than 1 sitemap would be a problem? As a side note, we observed when adding a sitemap index that google search console in its count of total indexed pages, now counts every page twice since we submitted both the sitemap index and the individual sitemaps, so search console does not recognize in count that sitemaps in sitemaps index are identical to the ones we submitted individually in search console.0 -
Did Analytics change the way to handle Google images searches on Dec 12?
Dear all, One of the sites I'm monitoring receives a lot of traffic from image searches or images that appear in universal search results. On Dec 12th, 2015, the bounce rate for these sessions went from around 30% the day before to around 87%. See screen shot below. Did anybody notice similar bounces in the bounce rate? Did Google change something in the way that image search is handled? Looking forward to your ideas! large?v=mpbl-1&px=999
Reporting & Analytics | | AABMarketing_Frank0 -
How to turn on persistent urls in WordPress?
I'm using an appointment form on my website and I have the option to add a referral url to form submissions so that i know which pages the form submission came from. I need to be able to distinguish between organically generated form submissions and those that come in via AdWords. If referral url shows the AdWords tracking code i know the form submission came in from AdWords. My problem is that when a visitor comes in after clicking an ad and then visits another page on my website that AdWords tracking code disappears from the url. I was told that there was a way to turn on persistent urls in WordPress but I can't figure out how to do it. I'm assuming that if i turn persistent urls on the AdWords tracking code will remain on every subsequent url that they visit on my website. Is this true? Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | SpaMedica0 -
Shall I 301 a Url that has a discontinued product or shall we remove from Googles index
My web site sells shoes. These items go out of fashion and are replaced. Shall I 301 a Url that has a discontinued product or shall we remove from Googles index using webmaster tools. I seem to have a massive 301 list that carries on growing and Im concerned that to carry on doing 301s is not the right way.
Reporting & Analytics | | weddingshoesandaccessories0 -
Does PPC affect SEO Traffic?
Last week my website (www.cooke.co.uk) started PPC advertising with Google. This has been successful in increasing the amount of overall traffic to the site. However, since we started the PPC advertising, our traffic from organic search has decreased significantly. Our rankings haven't changed dramatically enough to warrant such a decrease. Has anyone else been in a situation where organic traffic has dropped as a result of launching a paid campaign? What did you do to rectify it? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0 -
Direct Traffic Spike
In February, I transferred an HTML site to a WordPress Platform. Since then, Direct traffic has spiked to nearly 400% since the WordPress transition. The Direct traffic spike took roughly 2 months before it started to kick in. Does anyone know what this could be attributed to?
Reporting & Analytics | | SteveZero120 -
Why are there url's in my np Keywords in google analtyics?
I have been scratching my head at this one. On my not provided keywords, there is a url. Keyword is the primary dimension. It doesn't makes sense why there would be url keywords for pages with a different url. For example, the keywords for page www.xyz.com/abc np - /someotherurl.com Thanks for your insights in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | konverge0 -
When i first add my url to seomoz then i had a general report of all the faults my website had in SEO and suggestions where can i find it now , i cant find it ?!
when i first add my url to seomoz then i had a general report of all the faults my website had in SEO and suggestions where can i find it now , i cant find it ?!
Reporting & Analytics | | fireproductsuk0