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Sudden website traffic drop after changing CMS from Magento to Shopify

         

Tony_Omahoy

3:24 am on Sep 22, 2020 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



Before anything else, there are two domain versions of a website: a .com, and .com.au version. Just two months ago, we used to only have one domain, which is the .com domain, and I built this site at Magento. Then we moved the website to Shopify, so we rebuilt the website on Shopify.

When we did that, what I found out with Shopify has something to do with the pricing concerns of the platform which prompted us to make a .com.au version on top of the .com initial version of the website.

So, for the clients, if we are going to show them pricing in US Dollars we need to redirect them to the .com domain, if we have to show them product pricing in AU dollars, allegedly, we need to redirect them conveniently to the .com.au domain.

So, what I've done, as their website manager, is duplicate the domain .com and .com.au. So I can have USD pricing for clients at .com and AUD pricing for the clients at .com.au.

What we did was, we redirected most of the links to the .com.au domain when I re-launched the website because the .com.au domain is brand new, and we want it to get indexed.

For at least 4-5 weeks, this seems to have worked for both sites as they were indexed without issues.

My concern though is that the .com version, as reported by GSC, has several pages valid pages record which is more than the actual number of pages on the .com version of the website.

Please see attached screenshot [prnt.sc...]


Meanwhile, the .com.au version, still being reported by GSC, only shows a few 100 pages, which is a more realistic account of the actual number of pages on the website.

Please see attached screenshot [prnt.sc...]


Additionally, we changed to redirect so that the previous URL on the Magento CMS redirected to the .com.au domain on Shopify. We changed those redirects to point to the .com domain because we wanted to get these pages to rank better since there is more traffic in the US.

So we wanted to get the traffic for the rankings of these ones more compared in Australia, because Australia seems to stop ranking quite well and quite quickly, so we push them back to this one so that they should start to rank.

The problem now is that these pages are not ranking very well at all. They are not being indexed properly. When you check it at google search console, it says not indexed. But, if you are going to search it on the google search engine, it will appear and stated as indexed. Moreover, the keywords are previously ranking for the wrong pages.


Please, I appreciate whatever inputs the community can provide for this dilemma. Thank you so very much in advance Webmaster World Community!

tangor

3:14 am on Sep 26, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



@Tony_Omahoy .... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

Sorry for delayed reply ... often other threads "suck all the air" from the "room". :)

If you use the search box at the top of each page for "traffic drop after changing" you will find a treasure trove of comments.

USUALLY, any major change in CMS will result in a traffic drop as the search engines, in general, need to re-evaluage the change v content presented. If all is logical your traffic SHOULD eventually return. MEANWHILE, make sure that any redirections you needed to insert are absolutely correct and lead to the SAME CONTENT ... don't shortcut anything in that regard. redirects need to go to VALID content EQUAL or SAME as the content/url being redirected.

Good luck!

virtuahub

9:08 am on Sep 30, 2020 (gmt 0)

5+ Year Member



please use 301 redirection

tangor

6:03 am on Oct 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



@virtuahub .... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

londrum

6:32 am on Oct 2, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I’ve just put a new site up myself (about four months ago) and have been watching the traffic and indexed pages closely, and I think it’s pretty normal for them both to bounce around. New sites seem to get indexed in a burst, get a burst of traffic, then it will drop back again, then a few days or a week later it will come back, but higher than it was before. This has been going on for four months with me, but always steadily rising over time.
(Note that google says they’ve indexed all the pages in GSC ages ago, but they don’t all appear when you do the site: operator in search )

tangor

9:13 pm on Oct 3, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



@londrum ... how many pages on this new site? if 100 or less and they don't all appear that might be a worry that something else is going on.

Meanwhile, if you can find the pages indexed with a site:"textstring" query the page is there, just not getting to the serps.

londrum

10:30 pm on Oct 3, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



It’s 50,000 pages in total. After four months they’re showing 2,000 when you do site:example.com. Sorry, I didn’t mean to hijack the OPs thread... I was just saying I think it’s pretty normal for rankings to jump up and down on a new site. It’s almost like google are testing them out, giving them some early traffic to see what the users think of them, before dropping them back down to a more realistic level. Then you have to build it back up over months. Two months is too quick.

NickMNS

12:52 am on Oct 4, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



After four months they’re showing 2,000 when you do site:example.com.

I wouldn't base any decisions on "site:" searches, these are typically unreliable and variable. 2000 today could be 4000 tomorrow and 100 the next day. There is no correlation with reality.