Traffic has dropped off a cliff
-
I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why?
-
yes, thanks for the follow up. I have already done that and am awaiting results. thanks again
-
I just looked in Google for your site and it looks like it's indexed again. Hope everything is recovering quickly for you! I'd suggest running a campaign in SEOmoz for that site (if you haven't yet) to pick up any duplicate content issues and other suggestions that we have that can further help your site.
-
It looks like you may be telling Google to ignore your site via noindex nofollow. There are two possible places this could be set:
In the Yoast plugin you can tell it how you want the robots to behave: http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta You want it to check both Index and Follow.
Similarly in Wordpress itself there is an option under Settings > Privacy. You want to check I want my blog to be visible to everyone.
-
wow, that's confusing! I was just assuming Yoast was the gatekeeper of the robots, but that's not the case. Your right, in my privacy settings it was set to block! Thanks a lot!
-
The redirects are necessary for pages that are indexed in the search engines (so people coming from a search result can get to the right page) and for pages that are linked, bookmarked, etc. You generally want to make sure that most pages you change get a redirect.
-
I am getting ready to add WordPress too and change some url's. My understanding is that redirects are only necessary if you have links on those pages....is that correct?
-
Take a look under settings (not via Yoast, but just regular WP settings) and privacy and make sure that your blog is not set to private.
Also, if you've paid someone a bunch of money to redesign your site, they should really have taken better care than to leave the noindex,nofollow on afterwards. You might want to drop them a note saying they did you a major disservice.
-
thanks, yes, i see it on Yoast, but it is set to Allow
-
thanks for the reply
are google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
yes, i have a warning in my webmaster account that states robots are being blocked by this code: User-agent: *
Disallow: /but i have no idea how to change that in wordpress
-
Ahh, I found a robots noindex,nofollow on your home page and at least one internal. That would do it!
There should be a setting in Wordpress that asks if you want your blog to be private/ not indexed by the search engines. Did that setting stay checked after you went live by chance?
-
If you're able to give us a little more information that would help.
Has the organic traffic dropped from all of the search engines, or just one?
Has it dropped for all of your pages or just some of your pages?
Has it dropped for all of your keywords or just some of your keywords?
Have you verified the site in Google and Bing Webmaster tools and looked for any messages and warnings?
When you redesigned, did you put in redirects from the old pages to the new pages (if your URL structure changed)?
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
-
Keyword rank drop, any advice?
Screen Shot 2021-08-26 at 19.02.18.png My search visibility dropped from around 13% a few weeks ago to 8.29%. I know that Google launched a bunch of updates in this past few weeks to ignore spam links, and I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the drop - some of the links to my site date back over 10 years and those links were garbage. Confusingly, at the same time, my Domain Authority went up by 1 to 32, then back down a week later. How can I restore my previous rank in the short term? We're designing a new site at the moment with vastly improved page speed, but I'm not sure what effect that will have yet (thespacecollective.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Does traffic for branded searches help a site rank for general terms?
A year or two ago we put up some websites which were specific to brands we own. Sure enough those sites (eg 'myBrand.com') started to rank pretty well for those brand terms eg 'mybrand curling tongs' (it's not curling tongs, btw, but you get the idea). We were getting a decent amount of traffic presumably from people who have bought or seen these products on our amazon/ebay stores. Before long, we see us starting to rank well for non branded searches eg 'curling tongs' even among decent competition. Next thing you know I'm getting told by the boss that we need to put up websites for all specific ranges, not just brands, because specificity is a bonus for ranking well. While there's probably a point that a site for MybrandCurlingTongs lends itself well to ranking for curling tongs, is there also an element that the branded searches we got (via making our brand known on amazon/ebay) helped the site gain recognition and authority? As such a new website about 'ionising hair dryers' would not rank well based on being specific, because it wouldn't be helped by a lot of branded traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HSDOnline2 -
Is it a good strategy to link older content that was timely at one point to newer content that we would prefer to guide traffic and value to
Hi All, I've been working for a website/publisher that produces good content and has been around for a long time but has recently been burdened by a high level of repetitious production, and a high volume in general with pages that don't gather as much traffic as desired. One such fear of mine is that every piece published doesn't have any links pointing to when it is published outside of the homepage or syndicated referrals. They do however have a lot (perhaps too many) outbound internal links away from it. Would it be a good practice, especially for new content that has a longer shelf life, to go back to older content and place links pointing to the new one? I would hope this would boost traffic via internal recircultion and Page Authority, with the added benefits of anchor text boosts.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajranzato91 -
DA dropped 7 pts in one week as well as our competitors. Is something going on?
We have consistently had a 70 in DA and now all of the sudden we are at a 63 as well as seeing the same considerable drop among our competitors. This was odd as I have not seen this type of drop in DA since being with the company. Any ideas are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeaverMike0 -
Drop of 11 places - server issues?
Hi all, I have experienced a drop of 11 places for our main keyword since our last Moz rankings report which means page 2 to page 3. I have also received an error 904 in my weekly crawl report two weeks in a row and think this may be the reason for the drop. Could this result in a drop of 11 places? Last week I also tweeked the H1 tags on my main landing pages, nothing major just a reordering of the words. Could this result in such a major drop? Final question is does anyone know of any major algorithm update last week that could have affected rankings so drastically? Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinr
Gavin0 -
Enormous 7 page drop after switching servers and adding load balancers. Thoughts?
Hello Everyone, I'm a longtime Moz user but I had to switch accounts after switching jobs. I was hoping someone might be able to give me some insight on whats going on if possible. Our startup had first page position for our most valuable keyword: "Crowdfunding real estate" for about 6 or 7 months. Once we launched and switched to a production server behind load balancers, we dropped almost overnight to 7th page and we've been there for about a month. We don't have many links yet and some of the ones we DO have are kind of spammy (no idea where they came from and in process of trying to get them removed) but we thought it'd be strange to see that massive drop. We are even pages below a competitor who has NO links and basically zero content on the page. We don't have any notifications in WMT about a manual penalty or anything. I'd really, really appreciate any advice and If anyone has any ideas, the page is at: PatchofLand.com Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatchofLand0 -
PR dropped from 3 to 0\. Why?
Hi, I have an important question and I hope you'll be able to help me find the answer. My site http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com had a PR of 3 (three). Then, I had it restructured to make it look more appealing in order to increase the conversion rate. The problem is that after it was redesigned, the PR dropped all of a sudden from 3 to 0. This is really bad, as it took me over three years to reach that point. Could you please analyze the site and find out what happened? I used SEOMOZ's research tools to try to understand and noticed the following message" "Accessible to Engines Easy fix Crawl status Status Code: 200 meta-robots: noindex, follow meta-refresh: None X-Robots: None Explanation Pages that can't be crawled or indexed have no opportunity to rank in the results. Before tweaking keyword targeting or leveraging other optimization techniques, it's essential to make sure this page is accessible. Recommendation Ensure the URL returns the HTTP code 200 and is not blocked with robots.txt, meta robots or x-robots protocol (and does not meta refresh to another URL)". Basically, the message said that the search engines cannot access the homepage (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com). May this be the reason why the PR dropped? What do I have to do to solve this problem? Is there a chance I can reach a PR of 3 again? Thank you very much for your help. It'd be great if you could help my site regain its SEO strength.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
How to best utilize network of 50 sites to increase traffic on main site
Hey All, First off I wanna thank everyone who has responded to all my previous questions! Love to see a community that is so willing to help those who are learning the ropes! Anyways back to my point. We have a main site that is a PR 3 and our main focal point for lead generation. We recently acquired 50 additional sites (all with a PR of 1-3) that we would like to use as our own little back linking campaign with. All the domains are completely relevant to our main site as well as specific pages within our main site. I know that reciprocal links will get me no where and that google is quickly on to the attempted 3 way link exchange. My question is how do I best link these 50 sites to not only maintain there own integrity and PR but also assist our main site. Thanks All!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s0