Traffic and impressions down

[mike_sif]

I am confused on what is going on.

I recently converted my website to wordpress.  I kept the same url structure to the best of my abilities (without the .html) and 301 all .html to / So whatever was www.domain.com/page.html to www.domain.com/page/

The old CMS was a proprietary cms done by the company who originally designed the website.  It was poorly put together and was really buggy.  I decided to move to wordpress due to many limitations particularly for SEO.

Now traffic is down about 10% and looks like the downward trend will continue, also, impressions are down by about 75%.

Any thoughts on what could be happening?

[jesse-landry]

Oof. Well without more information it's hard to say; it could be any number of things. On-page optimization would be my first guess:

• keyword placement
• title tags
• alt tags
• etc

Not sure what to say, honestly.

[Jonathan1979]

Yeh, there are lots of things really that can cause this.  WordPress sites are slower but you can mitigate this by installing caching.  Check all your redirects are working fine. WordPress will have a slightly different site structure with all the categories \ tags etc, so that may affect is slightly.

But, before you worry too much about that, it might be that you have been caught by one of the recent Google Updates. Was there a date when you particularly noticed the change?  It could be that other sites benefited from the Google Update rather than you being penalised.  Even a few serp places drop can affect traffic quite a bit.

Unfortunately, without seeing all the analytics data  \ site data it is hard to pin it down to anything.

[mike_sif]

The thing is. Besides the url difference (.html to /) the content is identical, meta tags, headers, etc is the same as before the migration. I noticed the drop in traffic the very day after the wordpress version of the site went live. I am so bummed.

[Jonathan1979]

I very much doubt Google will have updated your rankings that fast...

Do you have a date you made the change?  It doesn't sound like the drop was because of your site move, if it dropped the very next day.  Even if you had lots of 404's those listings would still have retained their place in google for a short while.

[mike_sif]

Yeah, I am with you on that.  I doubt google updates rankings that fast.

However, I switched the site the night of august 22nd and on the 23rd I noticed a decline and keep seeing the traffic decline, traffic is actually down 25% (not 10%) from last month.

If it isn't caused by the migration then what is it?

[Jonathan1979]

That's the date of the last big Google Panda update (22nd).  I think you have your answer.

See: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17268.html

[mike_sif]

Jonathan, thank you.

I looked at all possibilities, except that.  Wow, such a big coincidence. Any thoughts on how to recover?

[Jonathan1979]

It is very hard without seeing the site.  But check for low quality content \ duplicate content.  Look at your link profiles for spammy links (over optimised anchor texts, low quality links etc).

You'll just need to do a bit of research into I am afraid.  If you want to post your link we can see if something obvious sticks out.

[mike_sif]

http://www.holtorfmed.com

I've worked very hard for the content to be very high quality.

Before I was in charge of SEO a so called SEO agency did a lot of low quality link building.  Looks like it finally caught up to us. 

[Jonathan1979]

OK, I have had a quick look and I do see some potential problems:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?anchor_id=25321246274&anchor_text=holtorf+medical+group&anchor_type=phrase&group=0&page=1&return_page=1&return_source=phrase&return_target=page&site=www.holtorfmed.com&sort=page_authority&target=page

Check that page.  You will see this particular term (Holtorf Medical Group) seems overly used, thanks to a few sitewide sidebar links for example realitynibs.com

You should either get those sitewide links nofollowed, or removed,... or failing that dissavowed.  There may be other examples in that link, but I believe that is a potential cause of your problems.  I am seeing sitewide links be the cause of alot of problems lately.

Also if you go down the dissavow route, this might be worth reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel

Obviously, be careful not to remove any decent high quality links.

[mike_sif]

Thanks Jonathan!

[Jonathan1979]

No worries.  This is another good article that I found is quite good:

http://moz.com/ugc/should-domain-authority-be-used-to-determine-which-backlinks-to-remove

[Jonathan1979]

Also Mike, you may want to have a look a Ahrefs.com.  I have just checked it and there are alot more backlinks showing up you need to look at.  If you google for a coupon, you can get it half price, or just get a refund within 7 days.  It can be useful for these sort of situations, even though Moz does alot more analytics etc.