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Site redesign, traffic drops, what's going on?

by IceMustang
4 replies
Seems like every time I change something on my website, organic search traffic drops. Here's my history so far and what has happened.

August 2011: Site opens for business, so to speak.

April 2012: High traffic, 12,000 to 13,000 pageviews per day.

Early May 2012: Significant redesign, traffic crashes to 7500-9000 per day

Late May 2012: Traffic goes back up, gets to 14000-16,000 per day

Late June 2012: Edited my settings on Infolinks to decrease number of in text ads and try out a footer ad, traffic drops to 9000-11,000 per day within one day

Early July: Slight recovery, 12,000 to 13,000 per day

Mid July: Back down to 9-10k per day after changing infolinks ad settings

One week later: Recovers back to around 11k per day

This week: Major redesign, down to 7k-8k per day


Keep in mind, my URLs and permalinks have all remained the same throughout the redesigns. Loading speed is now faster on the site due to removal of clutter and useless plugins. Every time I change something on the site my traffic goes kaput. Is there any solution to this crap or do I just wait it out for a month without changing anything and give Google some time to play catch up? (I'm finally happy with how my site looks so no more changes would have been foreseen in the near future anyways)
#drops #redesign #site #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author FredJones
    Maybe some sort of site value recomputation issue - Google's been pretty unpredictable this year anyway (or at least, that's been my experience)...
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  • Profile picture of the author cjreynolds
    Originally Posted by IceMustang View Post

    Seems like every time I change something on my website, organic search traffic drops.
    Then Stop Doing That!

    But seriously, I'd give it a month to see if it comes back up to 15,000 views, if not, keep tryin stuff. Sounds like you're just going through what happens when you test stuff - try something, wait a few weeks, try something else... Your site's probably doing the 'Google dance' when you modify it, so give it time, try other stuff, then pick the version that works best.
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  • Profile picture of the author IceMustang
    Thanks for confirming my suspicions guys. One redesign caused my Adsense CPM to drop by 33%, the minor one was an attempt to fix it and the third one was cuz my site looked cheap and cluttered as hell, but now everything is fixed designwise and it should stay looking like this for a very very long time.
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  • Profile picture of the author WebMeUp
    Hi IceMustang,

    when speaking about your site's redesign, you always refer to "major redesign" or "significant redesign", and I believe that's the core of the problem.

    And that's what most of us are guilty of: we plan redesign for months and then roll it out at once just to observe a major traffic drop due to some strange reasons.

    A better strategy is to introduce one change at a time and see if a ranking drop will follow. Then another one to test further. This way, you'll know for sure whether your site's rankings really dropped due to redirects or HTML layout tweak.

    Another option is introducing the whole bulk of redesign improvements, but to different parts of your website: first to one part, than to another to minimize the ranking drop aftermath.

    There are different reasons for each site's rankings to decrease after redesign, and there's no other way than simply testing it to find out the reason. Once you know the reason, you can c ome up with a solution.

    And there's one more thing: rankings drop after redesign in the majority of cases. Sometimes you should just be patient and wait for a month or so for your rankings to be back to normal, while being consistent with your routine SEO tasks.
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