blog traffic died after domain change
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I went in and bought the plan to get my own domain name. Just took wordpress out of the title and got rid of ads.
Unfortunately, traffic dropped significantly when I did so. Before my site was getting 200-250 hits/day, now it is down to just around 100 hits. Some pages that used to be my most popular don’t seem to be getting any hits at all.
Anything I can do to address this? I assume that the domain change was the issue, but I thought all the pages would just be redirected. So I basically have to build up search engine cred from scratch again? Is something else wrong?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi there!
Have you setup the domain bangkokherps.com to be the primary domain for your website?
When you added the domain, have you added it as the primary domain over the old webstie that was driving traffic?You can check that from our dashboard -> Domains.
If you did that, then everyone visiting the old website with .wordpress.com should be automatically redirected to your new domain and should not loose trafic.
Thanks
Stefan -
Yes, it is set up as the primary domain, has been from when I first got it.
Yet the traffic noticeably crashed.
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From what I can tell it’s definitely search engine traffic that has contributed to the majority if not all of the drop. Is there something I need to do to get back on the search engines? I guess I naively assumed the results would just transfer over.
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I’m getting frustrated because the only response in this thread was something that I’d already done.
I tried to start a different thread about the problem and it was closed immediately by a moderator because I already had a thread open.
That moderator told me to use direct support from LiveChat. However, the support person didn’t suggest anything to help at all, he just said that nothing looks wrong with my site, views fluctuate and that’s that.
That can’t possibly explain what’s going on. On Insight I can see that I had averaged over 100 views/day in EVERY month for the last 89 consecutive months, going back to when my site was only six months old. In fact, I had not fallen below a 150 views/day average at any point in the last 84 months, and I had not fallen below 175/views day average in any month in the last 67 months. This March I averaged 198 views/day even counting the poor last week of March when the switch occurred.
For April, now that I bought my own domain and switched off ads, I have fallen to 53 views/day average. And it appears that virtually that entire loss has been in search engine results.
That can’t be random fluctuation. You don’t consistently have 175+ views a day every single month for over five straight years and then suddenly drop to 50 randomly. And that doesn’t randomly happen the exact same time that you decide to buy your own domain and switch off the ads.
I also began editing my pages to remove dead links, improve some text and add some photos (which usually increases views), and I changed my top-page menu (but nothing in the top menu pointed to any of my high-results pages anyway). So I asked if that could have affected anything, and the help guy said no. And I can see myself that pages I haven’t even touched yet have lost views just as much or more than the pages I edited.
Anyone have any theories? The fact that something happened is indisputable. I wish someone was wiling to work with me to figure out what. I paid for two years of an upgraded account and right now it’s looking like it was all an enormous mistake.
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Hello again, I’ve gone ahead and flagged this thread for Staff attention and input.
While we are waiting for them to answer here, I’ll also go look for previous forum threads that address this issue and post links here. To the best of my knowledge the only thing that will help here is time and perhaps resubmitting your site map to search engines.
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Howdy –
It’s been nearly a month since any new content was posted on bangkokherps.com. My first suggestion is to try adding new content, on a regular schedule. Make sure you’re using post tags as well.
Site traffic can fluctuate widely, and it’s completely normal.
There’s some more tips available in these pages:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/grow-your-community/ -
I forgot to mention that I did go through and double check all the settings to make sure your site is allowed to be indexed by search engines. Those are all set correctly.
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Thanks for the speedy response staff-zinnia
Does having a long established site on a dotwordpressdotcom address and then switching to a custom domain impact search engine and site stats as well? Thanks again.
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OK-here’s an earlier reply of interest:
Changing a domain does lead to a drop in search engine traffic as search engines will need to re-index your site at the new domain. This takes a few weeks after which traffic should return to what it was before the domain change.
You can read the rest of that reply for more information. Hope that helps.
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I can go to “Traffic” and see that I’ve only gotten 1,155 referrals from search engines this month. I averaged 4,000-5,000 referrals a month every year for the last five years and have not once gotten fewer than 3,000 referrals at any point since 2014.
Everyone keeps pretending this is random chance, when no one who knows anything about statistical fluctuation or SEO would ever attribute that to random chance. You can’t stay above a threshold for 70 consecutive months and then suddenly fall to 1/3 of your previous worst month without any explanation.
And there is an obvious explanation. The exact moment my views dropped is also the exact moment that I got the new domain name. Just no one is explaining why or how I can go about fixing it.
It’s been nearly a month since any new content was posted on bangkokherps.com. My first suggestion is to try adding new content, on a regular schedule.
I stopped posting new content BECAUSE the views had crashed and I want to figure out what’s wrong before I start posting again. As the drop occurred almost immediately after my most recent post, that is obviously not the cause.
And my website is not focused on new content and has never relied on it. I often go 6-10 months without posting at all, and the traffic continues at a predictable pace because my traffic is based on strong pre-existing content.
I’ve had this site for 8 years and it is by far the best field guide to Bangkok’s reptiles and amphibians. It has always relied on strong pre-existing content and once-high SEO results for traffic. New content on a regular schedule is not the purpose of the site and has never been necessary for traffic to stay consistent.
Site traffic can fluctuate widely, and it’s completely normal.
But my site traffic doesn’t fluctuate. I have the last five years to prove that. What happened when I got the new domain is not normal.
I’ll repeat, Insight shows that I had averaged over 100 views/day in EVERY month for the last 89 consecutive months, going back to when my site was only six months old. In fact, I had not fallen below a 150 views/day average at any point in the last 84 months, and I had not fallen below 175/views day average in any month in the last 67 months. This March I averaged 198 views/day even counting the poor last week of March when the switch occurred.
For April, now that I bought my own domain and switched off ads, I have fallen to 53 views/day average. And it appears that virtually that entire loss has been in search engine results.
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justjennifer – that is a fascinating thread that you linked. It appears that multiple people have had the same experience as me, and like me were given false information about what was going on. I am glad that kokkieh stepped in and gave what appears to be a believable answer given the data.
So he said 4-8 weeks. I wish someone had told me that from the beginning. At this point it has been 5 weeks and yesterday was my 4th-worst day for visitors, so I’m still waiting.
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Hi bangkokherps,
So he said 4-8 weeks.
That’s right — unfortunately this timescale isn’t something we have control over and it’s just a case of time while search engines do their work.
In the short term, it may also be worth following @kokkieh’s suggestion to use Google’s change of address tool in Search Console:
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