Hi - I have a beginner question about organic search results dropping to zero
-
Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with...
I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help?
Any input greatly appreciated
-
Building on that answer, Google Webmaster Console should also be able to give you a list of URLs that are resulting in 404 errors. Those are going to excellent contenders for a 301.
-
You bet! Hopefully this helps when you start digging into things!
-
Marvellous help Mr PhD - you've cleared up some crucial basics for me - many thanks!
-
Nope you dont need access. You set the 301s up on the current server. When the current server gets a request for an old page, it then knows where to send the user to, using the 301.
If also, if you don't mind, please mark my response as a "Good answer" with Moz.
Cheers!
-
...so I don't need to access the previous website on its previous hosting to set up a 301?
-
301 the old URLs to the new URLs. Try to keep a one-to-one relationship on the old page to the new pages. The old bedroom page 301s to the new bedroom page, the old dining room page 301s to the new dining room page, etc. You would not want to redirect the old bathroom URLs to the new dining room URLs.
You need to pick if the site is www or non www. Lets say you pick non www as your default. Make sure if anyone types in a www URL on your site that you 301 that page to the non www counterpart. Just as above, one-to-one relationship. Make sure that any links on your site link to the proper nonwww URL. Any tools you use (moz etc) make sure they start with the non www version of the website.
Good post here by Cyrus on redirects here at Moz as well.
-
It's worse than that - I've looked after the site for the last 5 years, so it's my own fault
Last 2 questions (I promise) -
1. once I've established the old URLs, how do I re-direct to the new site?
2. How do I combine www and non-www (if that's what I need to do)
Really appreciate your input on this - classic case of an old graphic designer thinking he can SEO after a couple of Lynda courses
-
- If you want to find out what the general structure of the old site: Google Internet Archive and then enter your site URL. You will see snapshots and be able to pull it all together. Bing webmaster tools actually does a pretty good job of showing old site structure and that may help.
If you want to try and figure out what pages used to rank: You can also use various linking tools (Moz OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs) and Google and Bing webmaster tools to find how people are linking to you. This will not give you all of the old URLs on your site, but at least the most important ones. Those are the most likely that ranked. Google webmaster tools will show some average ranking data going back about 3 months so you may be able to recover it there.
You can also look through your old analytics data and that would tell you what URLs were getting the most organic traffic there and based on the content figure out what was doing well. While the old site is not live, do you have any way to access the old analytics data.
The www vs non www would result in needing 301s as well. Those are two different subdomains and so you would have 2 different pages according to Google.
- You need to talk to the developer to see if anything happened 2 months ago. Maybe they changed from www to non www and that would need a full 301 setup to direct Google from the old site to the new site.
This just sounds like a site migration gone bad and unless you can ask around for data from the previous provider, it will be tricky to figure out.
-
Gosh - that's a fine response!
I've actually moved the site from an Adobe Business Catalyst site (html) to WordPress.
1. The previous site is no longer live, so I don't know how I could get the URLs that were ranking to make sure they 301 redirect?
2. The drop off seems to have happened in the last 2 months although the site was re-built around March time?
...also, I've submitted the site to Google as "princessdesign.co.uk" rather than "www.princessdesign.co.uk" - could that have interfered? - I'm puzzled by the internet archive reference.
I'll check out the meta descriptions - top tip. Any help with these two points would be most helpful, as it would appear I have a lot of homework to do!
Thanks
Mark
-
Hello!
I looked in the internet archive and the most recent version they have of this site is from the end of 2014.
http://web.archive.org/web/20141222162951/http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/
The design and URL structure is different from what you have today. Did you recently relaunch the site?
On the old site this was one of the links to the bedroom section
http://www.princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
that URL 301 redirects to this page
http://princessdesign.co.uk/bedrooms/bedrooms-at-princess-design.html
and that page shows a 404 error page.
So, if you did just do a redesign and overhaul of your URL structure on the site, you need to get all the URLs that were ranking and make sure they 301 redirect to the correct page.
You should also to look in your Google webmaster tools to make sure that there are no warnings about penalties or what not. I checked your robots.txt and meta robots and there was nothing there that would have blocked Google from crawling. The recent version of the site is image and JS heavy, I almost thought it was a flash site at first (gasp!). As the current site seems to have very little text on the page and is mostly images there is very little for the search engine to read and then know what to rank based on the text it reads. Similarly, only the home page has a meta description. While meta descriptions are not important for ranking per se, they are important once you rank, to help with click through. That is, once the page ranks, Google will show the title and description and the description can influence if the person clicks through to your site or not. With all the images, the new site is probably slower than the old one, and this can penalize you as well.
This is all based on some assumptions made quickly, so I could be totally wrong. Hope this helps to point you in the right direction!
Good luck!
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
-
Impression and click discrepancies in Search Console when filtering by date
I recently filtered query information by week and day. The impression and click totals were different depending on whether I looked at totals by a full weeks or by day. So for example, the impression and click totals when I choose a date range of monday-sunday are different when I look at impressions and clicks that same week by day and then add up the click and impression numbers to get a weekly total. At first i was expecting a slight difference since I know the data is heavily sampled but the totals were very different. Any explanations for this? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | znotes0 -
Does the new Google Analytics Search Console Beta tool use API to pull more data?
So my client has been asking for definitive proof of why the search query data provided on Google Search Console does not exactly match up the data presented directly in the Search Console itself. The simple answer is that the Google Search Console is limited to 1000 rows of data. However our client is requesting a Google article/documentation of why the new Search Console beta tool has no row limit (hence much more data for a big website). I know that the Google Search Console API was available before Google announced the new Search Console Beta tool in Google Analytics. I also know this API could pull in more data than the 1000 row limit. However is there any article available (preferably from Google) that Google Analytics is pulling this Search Console data via API? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Regular Expression Question
We are having a little trouble coming up with a goal that shows how many product pageviews we are getting but I need to exclude search results pageviews that (unfortunately) have the same URL structure. Because it's an outside CMS, we have not ability to change the URL architecture. Products are on these types of pages: https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/Porsche+Boxster+Asheville+North+Carolina+2016+Rhodium+Silver+Metallic+536911 https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/Audi+A4+2.0T+Premium+Plus+Asheville+North+Carolina+2015+Gray+638379 Search results pages have this URL structure: https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/new/ https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/?condition=new&make=Porsche&model=Boxster https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/used/ https://porscheasheville.com/inventory/?condition=used&model=A4+2.0T+Premium+Plus I am hoping to create a GA goal with regular expressions showing only the product pages and not allowing the search results pages show up. Here's what I have, it's not working - any regex experts out there who can help? /inventory/[new/][used/] Thanks as always MOZ friends!
Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing0 -
How to interpret search "clicks" in GA?
I am trying to make some sense of the data in the "Landing Pages" report under "Search Engine Optimization" in GA versus the data under the "Landing Pages" report in "Behavior | Site Content". For example, the SEO report says my page http://www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines/ received 22,000 search impressions in the past 30 days and 900 "clicks" (12.42%). What are these "clicks" when the Content "Landing Pages" report says the same page only got 382 "sessions" in the same period??? What are these "clicks" if not clicks on the search results link that should be reflected in landing page sessions on the corresponding page?
Reporting & Analytics | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Question re Google Analytics and its more accurate alternatives
Hi guys There are two main issues we have with Google Analytics, and I'd really appreciate if anyone has the time to give an answer to that. We completely miss organic traffic data before 7/22/2013 although our account is active since 2005. Any thoughts on that? Is it the not provided move that swiped out all data or something else? Even for the data we do have there is lots of inaccuracies, and we are thinking on switching or at least adding a new analytics software, any recommendations? (FYI, it turns out we do not keep access logs on the server for more than 2 months, and we might fix that for future references, but now we are looking for external solution). Any help will be much appreciated Thanks Lily
Reporting & Analytics | | wspwsp0 -
How can I easily combine moz page difficulty, google search volume and SERPS position?
I want to produce an excel spreadsheet that I can use to identify the best use of my content Writing time. So Looking at a keyword list I want Current SERPS to show me where I am now? moz page difficulty score to show how hard I'll have to work google traffic estimate so that I can see the potential payoff. I can can generate all these separately but combining them is a huge time waster as invariably the results don't come back in quiet the same order and a line by line check is required. Part of the reason for doing this is keyword exploration so that we can find new niches by generating hundreds or thousands of keywords to test.
Reporting & Analytics | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Linked my adwords account to GA and vice versa and still paid search is getting recorded into organic traffic??
Hi Mozzers, I have linked properly my adwords account to GA and vice versa and somehow I can see 3/4 of this paid traffic recorded to organic search. The most confusing part is that I can see 1/4 of the paid traffic under the "paid" metric. At this point I don't know really what should I do? Thank you guys in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Changed URL's, traffic dropped from 2k week to 1K week. Need advice!
Hi Mozers, I recently changed my URLs for my ecommerce site and my traffic went from 2,000 visitors a week to 1,000 visitors a week, over a 3 week period. Traffic is down, so are unique Kwds. I need advice on why this happened and what I should do moving forward. To brief, I have a ecommerce website, www.ecustomfinishes.com. I noticed pattern that a lot of my URLs with a unique URL structure (URL.Com/ProductDescription/ProductName) were getting a lot of entrances ~30-50 a month, and others that followed the path of my subcategory (URL.com/SubCat/Product) were getting 0-3 entrances a month. The seo pattern was that those with unique product URLs were hitting long tail Kwds, and those URLs with /subcategory/product were getting far less traffic. I changed 150 or so urls to be unique. Good idea, I thought. Since then: CON: Since then my traffic dropped from 2200 visitors a week to 1100 visitors a week. -25% week to week, over 3 weeks CON: # of non-paid keywords sending visits: -25% week to week, over 3 weeks PRO: my Urls receiving entrances +10% week to week, over 3 weeks REF: http://imgur.com/GwZT8 Question: What are your best suggestions moving forward? Any advice is much appreciated, Thank you!!! abBN3
Reporting & Analytics | | longdenc_gmail.com0