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Anyone know what happened to my traffic and how to get it back?

by TyBrown
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Attachment 24048

I recently changed the design of my site, Home - Ty the Dog Guy Ty the Dog Guy

You can see in the attached pic the day we switched, then we went a few days before realizing I didn't have analytics on the redesign. And now with analytics restored you can see where my traffic is.

Any idea how this happened or what can be done to fix it?

Thanks.
#back #happened #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Is it definitely search engine traffic that you lost?

    If so, what did you change with the redesign? My first guess would be that URLs changed.

    My second guess would be that maybe URLs did not change, but the internal linking structure changed a good bit, which caused a drop in rankings.

    There is also the possibility that Analytics is loading in the footer instead of the header and your bounce rate jumped drastically. People are bouncing before Analytics can even record them as a visit. With that full screen video on the home page, that is very possible.
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    • Profile picture of the author TyBrown
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      Is it definitely search engine traffic that you lost?

      If so, what did you change with the redesign? My first guess would be that URLs changed.

      My second guess would be that maybe URLs did not change, but the internal linking structure changed a good bit, which caused a drop in rankings.

      There is also the possibility that Analytics is loading in the footer instead of the header and your bounce rate jumped drastically. People are bouncing before Analytics can even record them as a visit. With that full screen video on the home page, that is very possible.
      Yes, it was all organic.

      We did find some broken links when we switched over the design and directed those to live pages.

      And there was SOME internal linking that changed. I wouldn't say a great deal.

      But would that cause such a dramatic drop?
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      Online Dog Training
      Salt Lake City, Utah Dog Training
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by TyBrown View Post

        Yes, it was all organic.

        We did find some broken links when we switched over the design and directed those to live pages.

        And there was SOME internal linking that changed. I wouldn't say a great deal.

        But would that cause such a dramatic drop?
        It could.

        What about the URLs? Are the URLs exactly the same as they were before the change?

        A lot of times sites do stuff like change from a HTML site to Wordpress. When that happens, URLs will often change from something like

        somedomain.com/some-page-here.html

        to

        somedomain.com/some-page-here

        These are completely different URLs and the links and authority will not pass over to the new page without a 301 redirect.
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Was just taking a look in Wayback Machine and I found one of your URLs that definitely changed.

    For Dogs Over 5 Months Old - Ty the Dog Guy » Ty the Dog Guy

    used to be

    Transform Your Dog in 60 Days VS Perfect Dog —

    That would make me think there were others, but I did not look any further.

    If there were no 301 redirects, then this is definitely the problem.

    Did you do this yourself or hire someone?
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    • Profile picture of the author TyBrown
      Originally Posted by MikeFriedman View Post

      Was just taking a look in Wayback Machine and I found one of your URLs that definitely changed.

      For Dogs Over 5 Months Old - Ty the Dog Guy » Ty the Dog Guy

      used to be

      Transform Your Dog in 60 Days VS Perfect Dog —

      That would make me think there were others, but I did not look any further.

      If there were no 301 redirects, then this is definitely the problem.

      Did you do this yourself or hire someone?
      Per your advice we went and found a ton of pages that are blog posts. They DID have the URL with a date in it, for example- tythedogguy.com/blog/12-13-15/exampleblogpost.

      When the guy did the redesign and switched the pages over he didn't keep that.

      He's working on fixing that now. Hopefully that was it. I'm very grateful to you.

      I'll let you know if it was something else
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      Online Dog Training
      Salt Lake City, Utah Dog Training
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by TyBrown View Post

        Per your advice we went and found a ton of pages that are blog posts. They DID have the URL with a date in it, for example- tythedogguy.com/blog/12-13-15/exampleblogpost.

        When the guy did the redesign and switched the pages over he didn't keep that.

        He's working on fixing that now. Hopefully that was it. I'm very grateful to you.

        I'll let you know if it was something else


        Changing ranked URLs is literally starting over, there's zero backlinks pointing at those new URLs so you won't rank for any decent traffic keywords.

        My advice is either switch all the new URLs back to their old URLs or keep the new URLs and do proper 301 redirects where each old URL points to its matching new URL.

        Once you do all the 301 redirects and manually test each URL in your browser (not logged into anything to avoid cache conflicts) then build an xml sitemap with all the old URLs, submit that sitemap to Google WMT so Googlebot will will follow the old URLs to the new 301 redirects ASAP.

        Run Screaming Frog on the site to find additional 404 error pages/URLs and fix all of them before submitting an xml sitemap to Google.
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  • Profile picture of the author NestZone
    Most of your links have change.
    Try to locate those links that where frequented in the previous design and replace them as they are.
    Also try to locate those pages not found with content, rather than using 301 redirects.

    You had to do that very fast rather than wait until google starts dropping those links.
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