Viewcount loss after upgrade from Free to Personal
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About two months ago I upgraded my blog A Niche in the Library of Babel from the free version to the Personal plan. Since then the viewcounts have dropped from 40 a day to 10. It never had a lot of traffic, but these last two months are the worst in many years. It was fine for the first two weeks, but then was cut in half, and has been dropping still more as the weeks have passed.
I asked the support staff about this, and they said that it took a while for the search engines to pick up the new domain name. They should have done that in days, though, not months. I tried the titles of some popular entries on common engines, and they all seemed to get hits.
The blog has been around for nearly ten years, and the most popular entries tend to be the older ones. I wondered if the hits came from a particular reference whose link might have been broken, but the references never seemed to come from any particular place. In any case the older name, babelniche.wordpress.com, still works.
Any thoughts on what to do? Has anyone else seen this happen? Thanks for any advice!
John
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hello John,
It can take weeks after changing the domain on a site for search engines to re-index the site content at the new domain – the general guideline is around eight weeks, though that can be influenced by other factors like how regularly you publish new content on your site, whether your site was verified with search engines prior to the domain change and whether you used their webmaster tools, like Google’s Search Console to notify them of the address change, etc.
I see we’re at right about eight weeks now since you added the domain to your site, and in this time you’ve only published two new posts, so I’d say it’s fairly normal that your search engine traffic has not recovered yet.
Please try publishing new content on a more regular basis for a while – each time you publish a post we ping the major search engines to tell them to come check your site for content, and the more this happens, the faster the content get re-indexed.
And if you haven’t yet, please verify your site in Google’s Search console, and optionally with Bing as well. Your site will be indexed even if you don’t do that, but verifying your site can help make it happen a little faster:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
When all’s said and done this is in Google’s (and the other search engines’) hands, though – they decide for which search terms they give people a link to your site, and not all those people are guaranteed to click it.
And as my colleague also said via email, it’s normal to see a drop in traffic over the holiday season. The address change definitely contributed to it in this case, but nothing is broken here.
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