My website is struggling to receive traffic I think I have a serious error

[EGOL]

I believe that the content needs significant improvement to be competitive.

I don't mean this as an insult, but just that competitive content clearly and completely addresses the queries that might bring people into the site.

This is obviously a matter where opinions are many.  Here is one.

[R0bin_L0rd]

Wow, this is pretty thorough, good effort!

Chantelle, you mentioned that you did a http -> https migration, looking at some of the pages in http they seem to redirect to https using a 302 redirect. I would use a 301 redirect instead - 302 means "this move is temporary" so Google treats it as less strong. Essentially it doesn't give a clear enough signal to Google that the new pages are replacing the old ones, Google seems to have some http pages still indexed but I don't know whether it's just not picked up all the redirects. Once you have all the 301s sorted, I would submit a http sitemap to Google to prompt it to crawl the old http pages and realise they are redirected.

Chantelle, when did the drop happen? And how defined was it? It sounds like, from your initial message, you went from a lot of traffic to not much at all in the space of days but was it more gradual than that? Was it before the https migration/ When did the agency make the changes?

The rogue canonicals effectdigital have found sound like they might be confusing things, that could line up with the coverage issues you saw Chantelle.

effectdigital - those links you found. Does it look like they have been around and like that for a while? Or were they recently added?

[effectdigital]

What Robin says about 301s and 302s is pure truth and that could also be a significant contributing factor, especially if it's quite widespread. Chantelle remind me at some point via email to look into this and nail down the 'exact' URLs that are 302-ing. If there is a problem there, we can find it and address it

[travelmagazine]

Yes, my hosting company offer a service and they did the http to https for me. I have just contacted them now asking how they did the migration so it can be changed.

Could you give me a couple of examples of the 302 redirect please.

The change was about 16 months ago now. The site was doing very well in traffic and then we decided to get a seo company in. They did some work but then I noticed they were doing silly mistakes, so then I got a company from the uk and then noticed some daft cheap links and some errors that occurred. at one point my site crashed so I got rid of them. the traffic dropped like a led balloon and ever since I have been trying to fix things.

So, instead of concentrating on content, I have been trying to fix all the errors which is hard when you are a novice

[R0bin_L0rd]

If you type in the url examples you gave above but replace https with http you should hit a 302 (the ayima Google Chrome redirect plugin should show you).

Out of interest - how did the SEO agency make your site crash?

[travelmagazine]

I don't know how they crashed it. I was away for the day and then got a number of phone calls to say the site was down. And when I checked it was down and was down for around eight hours. The company said they did a mistake on the site as they were speeding the site up and they were changing the header of the site.

[travelmagazine]

my hosting company have responded with the following regarding the redirects. they have said if this needs changing to contact them

The following https redirect is set for your website:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]

[R0bin_L0rd]

Hmm, I don't think that addresses what we are trying to change. I think you will need to discuss with them the status code they are using as part of the redirect - unless I've missed something none of the above seems to include anything specifying status code.

[effectdigital]

As it turns out, Robin's insights here (that HTTP redirects to HTTPS via 302 redirects, instead of 301s) turns out to be pretty much hitting the nail on the head

Here's the data for anyone who is interested (and can help OP more):

• https://d.pr/f/TskHsn.xlsx (spreadsheet download)

I spent a lot of time on this data. I compiled all of OP's backlinks from many sources (Ahrefs, Majestic etc) and then re-crawled using Screaming Frog. This shows all of OPs backlinks, their current status and critically how they 'land' on OP's pages / URLs (at the destination end)

Surprise surprise, almost all links point to HTTP (not to HTTPS) and are then 302 redirected instead of 301'd, thus cutting off almost all link equity post HTTPS migration

Whoever fked up here, did an epic job of messing up OP's internal SEO authority flow**. This is probably now, the leading on-site factor in terms of OP's site struggles on Google (so thanks for that Robin Lord!)

I still think there's an off-site element, but this needs fixing ASAP. All HTTP->HTTPS oriented 302 redirects must be converted to 301s with immediate effect

[travelmagazine]

Thank you so much for this. One of the SEO companies who did this is part of a well known SEO franchise, so all what I would say is, don't use that franchise. I found out today, that the franchise in question that a lot of the people who are part of the franchise don't know much about SEO. They seem to take on the work and then they send it to someone else to do for a lot less, making what I have been told a 500% mark up on profit.

Hopefully I can now start getting my traffic back to normal and start building up my site and getting the articles out there.