Traffic drop 98% in two days
-
I changed my theme on April 12th and within 24 hours my traffic plummeted 98%. I have also seen a huge difference in my keyword ranking. A few things have been tweaked, but with no results.
I need to get to the bottom of this fairly quickly. Do you have any recommendations of a trustworthy someone I could hire to dig deeper and find out what the %#^!$@ is going on? I didn't see that SEOmoz does the "hire and let us check it" thing.
Of course, if anyone has any free suggestions...I'm open to those as well.
Thanks
Heather
-
Yes, that sounds really plausible. Thanks for explaining that to me! I'm passing your comment on to my programmer for him to take a look.
I have a few "tech smart" people I know, I'll ask them to take a look as well - Wisdom in many counselors!
Thanks so much!
-
I'm willing to bet that the reason you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic from simply changing a theme is that the Google Analytics tracking code was not properly installed on the new theme. I know you already mentioned that you checked with your programmer and didn't find any problems with the tracking code itself, but I can see that the GA account numbers are two different accounts. I checked the source code of a page using the current theme as well as a cached version from the old theme and the Google Analytics tracking account numbers are different.
This is the page in question - http://www.incredibleinfant.com/safety/pacifier-use/
**Current theme - ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-28262936-1']);
**Cached theme - ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-32310484-1']); (Google cache from April 5th, 2013)
So if you are looking at the Google Analytics data for the 323 account, then that's why you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic once the new theme was installed. The actual data should be captured in the 282 profile, which you hopefully have access to.
And it's not surprising that you've noticed some rankings drop since that often happens when doing a site overhaul if the site architecture, internal linking structure, on-site SEO are not kept exactly the same. This decrease in rankings is likely only temporary as the search engines will recrawl and reindex the new versions of the pages.
Hope that helps!
-
Matt, the old theme was custom. I'm just going to remove the squeeze page entirely and see what happens. That way the homepage will be the blog roll. I've also added the meta description for the blog page. Thanks.
-
Those are great suggestions Matt! Thank you! I will send those to my programmer and see if I can add a blog link on the squeeze page and see if that helps also.
Perhaps it's the combination of these other issues AND the squeeze page that tipped the scale...
-
I will go through the plugins idea, Moosa and check that. Good idea. thanks
-
That's true there isn't Federico. The blog is being relaunched. Since I'm not currently adding new posts, the homepage is a squeeze page.
I had it set it up that way for about 2 months before this dip happened, so I'm doubting that's the issue. It was gaining in traffic actually.
-
I have a couple theories but I'm having trouble finding a cached old page. What theme DID you have?
I'm going to posit a few theories and maybe some direction for you to check out.
First, there is definitely a problem here somewhere.
On this link: http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/page/2/
I see: Sunscreen, Muppets, Bad Parents, New Foods, Breastfeed, Earn money at home,
On this link: http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/page/3/
I see the same exact posts.
Same on page 4, page 5.
Also, according to your archives, you have one May post - the Sunscreen post. But
http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/
is showing Muppets most recently. It's not picking up your posts or updating correctly
Also, I see 43 validation errors and some warnings. Usually these aren't a big deal, a bit of coding oops here & there. Yours are not what I normally see.
Some of the worst errors here may be contributing to problems. I'm not sure how the new theme compares to the old but this one looks like it has some coding issues - one of which may be causing Google to not like your site as much. (Imagine if you turned all your H3s into H2s at once. Google would probably not like that. Same if you went the other way.
The fact that the homepage doesn't link to the blog is probably "stopping" any juice from flowing through. You have over 6000 links pointed at your homepage and about 30 pointed at the blog. A tiny link on the squeeze page from the home to the blog may make all the difference.
The actual blog link (http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog/) doesn't have a meta description at all. This really isn't good and it should have one. You are using Yoast so this should be a simple fix. If you used to have one (ie. it was built into the theme) this could hurt. I know description isn't an SEO "factor" but not having one at all likely is, especially if the old one was related to your content.
I think your pagination issues and some of your validation errors are likely the issue, as is the theme change - I'm sure it changed either your headers, important bits of code, etc. and lacking the link from homepage - yeah, that would not help.
Hope the direction helps!
-
I really don’t think that the problem is with indexation as when i search for post title i still can see the post appearing in the search results...The only different thing is when I use this simple search “site:www.incredibleinfant.com” I see categories are appearing in the search results instead of the post titles... which is kind of different then usual.
I can be wrong but is there any plug-in that you was using in the older theme and actually not using in the current theme? Just wondering!
P.S: Idea by Fede also makes lot of sense to me!
-
Hi Heather,
There's no link in the homepage to your Blog...?
First thing you should do is remove that page and have the blog as the index page.
Then you can see what happens.
-
I've had a programmer check the code, and so far they haven't found any issues with the analytics implementation or noidexing. Not sure about the malware.
I've also taken your suggestion and contacted Marie Haynes for a consultation estimation. Thanks!
-
Sorry, I should have included the URL...it's late and my brain isn't functioning...
the website URL is http://www.incredibleinfant.com - but that is a squeeze page while I do a re-launch.
to see the back door, go to http://www.incredibleinfant.com/blog.
This squeeze home page was in place for months using the old design and Google didn't seem to have a problem indexing my articles and bringing me traffic.
Thanks
-
That is a traffic drop so steep and fast that it probably extends beyond Google. It could be...
bad analytics implementation
malware
unintentional noindex
If this was my site I would hope that I could hire Marie Haynes to look at it.
-
Post or PM the URL in question. So that me and others can provide some thoughts.
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
-
Recent redirect leading to keyword ranking drop
Hey all! Someone I work with recently redirected one of their site pages via Squarespace. They used Squarespace-provided code to make a 301 redirect. Following this, the primary keywords for the page that was redirect to have dropped pretty significantly. Any Squarespace pros out there who can help me figure out what's going on?
Technical SEO | | kelseyworsham0 -
Can anyone confirm they have predictable rating shifts based on the day of the week?
Hey all, The site in question is https://amygalbraith.com The keyword I am trying to rank for (among others) is 'Seattle Wedding Photographer'. I have seen a truly strange pattern emerge. Each Monday in the past two weeks, this site has been ranked in the top 20, usually around 11-14. Come Tuesday, it will drop completely out of the top 50, usually around page 7-8. Does anyone know of anything that might account for that kind of erratic shift in placement? We aren't making any changes to the site: no a/b testing or anything is occurring at the moment. I'm baffled. It could be a fluke. You can bet I will be trying to get screenshots this coming Monday.
Technical SEO | | amygalbraith0 -
How long after disallowing Googlebot from crawling a domain until those pages drop out of their index?
We recently had Google crawl a version of the site we that we had thought we had disallowed already. We have corrected the issue of them crawling the site, but pages from that version are still appearing in the search results (the version we want them to not index and serve up is our .us domain which should have been blocked to them). My question is this: How long should I expect that domain (the .us we don't want to appear) to stay in their index after disallowing their bot? Is this a matter of days, weeks, or months?
Technical SEO | | TLM0 -
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Please advise.
My beta site (beta.website.com) has been inadvertently indexed. Its cached pages are taking traffic away from our real website (website.com). Should I just "NO INDEX" the entire beta site and if so, what's the best way to do this? Are there any other precautions I should be taking? Please advise.
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Unsure of sudden dramatic drop for target keyword(s)
Even after studying the latest Panda algorithm, which frowns upon templated looks (kind of odd), I have been doing some thorough research trying to find out why a site I have been optimizing plummeted. It was hovering around 10, and fell to 37 in one to two weeks. After I read all about the Panda update, I assumed it was that. But the site falls in line and shouldn't be affected. I used that 3rd party duplicate content checker and the content checked out okay. I looked on my SEO Pro campaign and noticed that the on-page report got an A grade, hitting on all factors except having the keyword in the URL. So, I have a site that loads in good time and should be fairly well optimized, and falls in line from what I can tell with Google's guidelines, which I read through. So why the drop? I'm not saying this site is 100% perfect couldn't be any better, optimized to the hilt. It was designed a few years ago, but still, I am just having a hard time finding out why this site got slammed the way it did. www.spineandsportschiro.com Target Keyword(s) Roseville Chiropractor Roseville Chiropractic I welcome any on-page critiques, but mostly would like to know where to look or have some kind of insight to why the rankings dropped, so I can try and fix them the right way. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Boogily0 -
How long does it take for traffic to bounce back from and accidental robots.txt disallow of root?
We accidentally uploaded a robots.txt disallow root for all agents last Tuesday and did not catch the error until yesterday.. so 6 days total of exposure. Organic traffic is down 20%. Google has since indexed the correct version of the robots.txt file. However, we're still seeing awful titles/descriptions in the SERPs and traffic is not coming back. GWT shows that not many pages were actually removed from the index but we're still seeing drastic rankings decreases. Anyone been through this? Any sort of timeline for a recovery? Much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bheard0 -
Organic traffic still down 9 months after redesign
The Good: We redesigned our nature travel website (www.ietravel.com) in Drupal. Overall, it's a great improvement in look and usability. Also, we are ranking for more relevant search terms (the SEO was managed by an agency before, and there were a lot of junk terms in their campaigns that weren't converting). The Bad: Organic search referrals have consistently been down 10-20% year-over-year each and every month. The Ugly: I am trying to dig in and figure out why this is happening, and I'm at a loss. We are aggressively publishing to our blog 5 days a week, and I've built many keyword-focused landing pages. Here's what I do know in terms of things that could be problems which I've seen in Webmaster Tools and SEOmoz tools. I have a lot of files restricted by robots.txt - 1,337 of them. Many have to be that way by design because they are nodes generated by web forms (w/ private user data). The rest are "Dates & Rates" pages - I restricted them because for each destination they are very similar in content. Wondering now if that was a mistake. For example, http://www.ietravel.com/central-south-america/galapagos-islands/dates-rates We have duplicate title tags on 462 pages. The Lightbox Module that was installed for our photo galleries was a disaster. I am researching a more SEO-friendly solution, but that solution is a month or more away. We have 31 duplicate meta descriptions. My question is, could these errors be THAT significantly impacting our rankings? I should note that according to Google Analytics, Referral traffic & Direct traffic is also year-over-year every month since the redesign. I don't understand the Referral part especially, since we took great pains to put in many 301 redirects. There are no 404s or non-indexable pages showing up in Webmaster Tools either. If anyone has any suggestions for problem areas or red flags I should investigate, please let me know. Really, any thoughts are appreciated. Best, Carlton
Technical SEO | | csmithal1 -
My uniques have dropped around 25% since following advice here
Hi, since posting a few threads here and following instructions (post more unique content, link building etc) my website traffic has dropped by around 25% My SERPS rremain pretty much unchanged. I'm posting tons more unique content. Am I just being penalised slightly because I've made drastic changes to my site (301 .com -> .co.uk) etc or am I doing something wrong?
Technical SEO | | craven220