Traffic stats disaster

[Houses]

Hi,

We have recently moved a few old websites to an existing one and redesigned the existing website too.

The visits in Analytics have fallen though the roof in the last few days.

I would expect the traffic to have gone up because visitors from the old websites should now be on the redesigned one.

Not sure what the problem is entirely.

GA code is on the site but not before the closing head where I asked for it to be put. It's just before closing body tag. Does it make a difference? (It's a CMS site). GA code must be working because visits are being recorded (tens rather than the expected hundreds).

Redirects have not been done properly - not sure what IT have done there. Would the lack of proper redirects be the sole reason for the drop? I am still hassling for 301's to be sorted.

Thanks all

[EGOL]

Would the lack of proper redirects be the sole reason for the drop?

Many things could cause a traffic drop.    It sounds like your site is a candidate for lots of problems.

I would hire a pro to review the site since the site has these obvious problems -  my bet is that there are other problems and things that could be improved.

I think it would be money well spent.

[Houses]

Thanks Ergol.

The site is indeed a candidate for lots of problems (poor meta data, duplicate content etc) but they will have to be sorted in time. Roger Bot is crawling as we speak and I'm sure he will be deeply unimpressed!

The IT dept have only done a few redirects and these seem to be a bit random in the choice of which to do and where to redirect them to! I would love IT to sort the redirects as soon as possible and if I can prove that the lack of them is very detrimental then they may do them quicker....

Obviously there can be other reasons for a traffic drop but I guess I need to know whether the GA code will be affected by where it is and whether it is reporting true stats or not. If the position of the code doesn't affect the stats very much, I can assume the redirects are a major contributor. If the code is not collecting data properly, it will be hard to go to IT and say their lack of redirects are affecting the visitor numbers adversely.

Hope that makes sense...

[SVmedia]

Hi Houses, and your GA code is probably fine.  It's javascript, so nothing wrong with it being before closing body.  I actually don't even think it matters as much with the asynchronous tracking codes.

and my first reaction to this read was the same as EGOL's.  Permalinks changed, old ones didn't get redirected. This is essentially like starting over (for those pages, not entire domain), if it's a new url, it's a new page to search engines.

and just so you know, most CMS' make it darn easy to implement redirects, or usually your hosting account will have some kind 301 tool.  It's literally as easy as typing the old url, the one that replaced it, then clicking "ok".

[Houses]

Thanks.

Just had some light shed on matter though - the GA code was only partly correct. There was one lot of code on some pages and another on the others. Unfortunately the majority had the wrong code and it has now been updated. I found the missing traffic on one of our old GA numbers.

Still working on redirects though but they can't be done through our CMS - it's an ancient version of Alterian and one we are locked into for some time :(.