16 replies to this topic

[haylieplum]

Our site was just SEOd and 40% of our traffic is gone! We have no idea why. We have 301 redirects on each page etc. Is there a list of common problems that happen once your site is SEOd? Something we could compare our site to and see if we can find the problem?

[Jill]

I'm guessing by "SEO'd" you mean that you changed all your URLs? (That's not SEO by the way.) If so, you've got a nice couple month's wait ahead of you.

[haylieplum]

No, I mean we had a company come in and do the content, add titles and descriptions, etc etc and our URL did not change but our ratings have dropped considerably.

[Hyperformance]

A good example of a great point Jill!

Is there an excellent reason the (page) names or directory structure have been changed? If so, then this was expected?

This should have been explained and expected if these type changes were to be made, and Jill is right on, this in itself, is not SEO. I can't say whether it is even good seo without knowing the reasons...was it a redo? - or a new site?

Many people can learn from this mistake... if you care to call it that -

Scott


Aha! - sounds like you have to wait for all the new content pages to replace the rankings of your old pages... yep, six weeks maybe.

[seo_challenged]

If the URL's didn't change then why the need for the 301 redirects?

[haylieplum]

Hmmm they told us that they hadn't changed anything but the content and descriptor tags etc. Good point though about the 301. That must be our problem. So 6 weeks????

[qwerty]

Are your rankings down for the specific keyword phrases the SEOs optimized for, or just rankings that you happened to have in the past but weren't deemed valuable?

[haylieplum]

Our rankings in general. People that were linking to us are gone too so it must be due to our new structure and file names?

[Randy]

Our rankings in general. People that were linking to us are gone too so it must be due to our new structure and file names?

If the structure and filenames changed, yup it's going to have a negative effect for awhile.

As a very general rule, I allow 4-6 weeks for the new URLs to be indexed and 4-6 months for the 301's to have their full effect of transferring link popularity from the old pages to the new ones.

[Jill]

One thing that's important to note:

Our site was just SEOd and 40% of our traffic is gone!

SEO does often produce less traffic. But that's okay because non-seo'd sites often bring in UNtargeted traffic. The idea is to bring in more targeted traffic, and it doesn't matter if you lose a ton of untargeted stuff.

But, I think the urls changing is probably your problem in this case. It sure is a shame your "SEO" company didn't warn you first. (And that they changed the URL to begin with.)

[haylieplum]

We had our site optimized by a "reputable" SEO company and our traffic dropped. Is that normal? Is it a common occurence that once a site is optimized it would actually have a drop in traffic?



[Merged this into your existing thread on the same topic. Please don't start new threads as people need to see the past responses in order to provide you with the help you seek. - Jill]

Edited by Jill, 15 November 2006 - 07:01 PM.

[torka]

Could be.

If you were getting a lot of untargeted traffic (i.e. people who weren't really looking for what you have to offer) and the SEO firm optimized your site so it better targets truly relevant terms, then your overall traffic might drop. In this case, though, you should see an increase in your conversion rate and potentially higher gross sales despite the lower overall traffic.

If part of their optimization process included changing your page addresses (URLs) and/or significant changes in your on-page content, that could also cause a temporary drop in rankings and traffic while the search engines sort out the effects of what was done. Typically, if this is done correctly and well, the drop is only temporary and the site bounces back to better than it was before.

Of course, if their optimization was poorly executed, you could simpy see traffic loss due to shoddy work on their part.

Whether the drop in traffic is a matter of concern or not is a function of what exactly they did to "optimize" your site.

--Torka

[haylieplum]

Thanks for responding. The traffic that dropped is engine traffic but it is also from people who were linking to us which makes me think that it must be due to new URLs and file names/ structure.
Does that mean that the company we used should have known this? I seem to think they should have.

[SearchRank]

If you have new URLs and file structure, you should have set up 301 redirects from old URLs to the new ones so as to capture traffic that lands on URLs that I assume are no longer there. At the very least you should have a 404 custom error page set up so you can retain those who get page not found errors.

[Jill]

We already answered this question at the beginning of this thread (where I merged this new one).

Is there a new twist beyond what we've already discussed on page 1 of this thread?