New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
loss of SEO Traffic after server migration
Hi All,
I recently changed my hosting and i noticed that my organic traffic has been dropped by about 50%-70% .
I have verified that i didn't lose any links which could cause this & response times are also good.
Does anyone have an idea why google has put penalty against my site ?.
Comments
Hard to say without knowing the domain - but did you change any URLs of pages/posts and/or forget any redirects? If it's WordPress did you click the "discourage search engines from crawling" button when getting setup on the new hosting?
ip's don't matter anymore so if that's what you're thinking that's not it
Thanks for your reply. Due to security issues i cannot share my business domain here. I didn't change anything of those you mentioned. Also site is served through Cloudflare so IP change should not be an issue here i think.
Google also did an update on the 4th of December you could have been hit.
As @BradyH says Google have done some algorithm changes recently which affects SEO traffic.
A site I look after was affected after a previous one but their latest update has brought traffic back by about 60%.
I don't really do SEO so don't understand what you need to do but if you have someone who does it, or have it outsourced, they should be able to monitor and work out how to bring it back up.
They do in order to be more profitable with Google Adwords, as they used to be great not anymore, as current “competitive cost” £15-£50 per click which will not guarantee any sales it’s just waste of money.
you need to check in your Analytics about aquisitions and browsing patterns to find if something is blocked. Same thing, look into your Search Console for possible crawling errors or something (Google Crawler's IPs may be blocked or something). Also try to compare geo-location of visitors from past and present times to help you with some pointers.
I love the SEO stuff. 9 times out of 10 moving your site to another host wont affect the rankings any.
A few things to look at.
1. are you on shared hosting plan, vps or dedicated server?
2. is Shared I would recommend moving to a VPS or even Dedicated.
3. Check your site load speed a great tool to do this is gtmetrix.com If you have a dedicated server it is possible some of the extensions were not set back up on the new server and you lost some speed there.
4. check to make sure the IP that you have is a dedicated IP and not shared.
5. Check to make sure that IP has not been black listed.
Here are a few things I would recommend looking at. Without looking at the site and backlinks and so on its all just a guessing game.
Or it could be a case of bad luck that your site gets hit with the new updates the same time you move the web host.
Definitely nothing to do with that. Google SEO update hit a week or so ago, affected many people including me.
@voxin
I'm also using cloudflare and it has minimum role in affecting ranking unless their edge server are down! But they re-route the traffic in such case. But connection from cloudflare edge to your server origin also matters a lot.
If you have migrated to new host then please check the TTFB (Time to first byte) in Gtmetrix. The purple bar will show the "wait time" of your page. This wait time affects Google/Bing ranking. If time is higher then the page download will start slower which will ultimately give you lower ranks.
A normal Wordpress page on a better host should have less than 200ms wait time. Many LET hosts I've tried here have wait time of 400ms to 600ms quite popular here. The exception I found is Ramnode and Racknerd which are having low TTFB (lower is better).
Just few hours ago I've commented on another thread with a screenshot that how my pages are loading 2.5x faster when the "Wait time" fell from 400+ms to around 170ms after switching host. I'm just giving you a general reference:
my other dollar 2 host:
racknerd:
and similar good results for Ramnode too!
You can literally feel the connect-speed in your eyes when you type naked domain in browser (all cache/cookies/storage deleted).
Google loves instant page loads. Needless to say my Google Search Console graph shows the average rankings have gone higher!
Check the node server load. It should not hit 100% consistently (except when taking backups). Or the sites will load slow.
Lastly check the processes your site is using for each page load (like user browsing 3-4 pages on your site). Processes/scripts should be cached. Their is Opcache and APCu. Enable it from your PHP installation. It will help to load pages quite faster as it cache in memory (50mb to 100mb).
other things you can do:
move javascript to footer.
combine them.
combine css. or use inline styles.
use less images. Add rel="lazy" to lazy load in chrome and FF.
enable clouflare cache everything at edge with s-maxage=86400 (it caches your page at CF edge for 1 day. Good for inner-pages. For homepage you can use less value. I use 300 seconds; then cloudflare goes to my origin and fetches it again).
I am on a VPS currently. website speed hasn't changed much after switching my hosting, I don't see my VPS IP address is blacklisted. May be Google's algorithm update did it.
I can share my experience when I was changing the server with IP. I saw that my SEO goes down. It was up after a few months. (I believe 3-6). No Cloudflare. I think google look at IP. If IP and domain is old it will give better SEO. This is my opinion and experience.
Another thing is to remember to whitelist your IP for mailboxes. So it is better to keep a separate IP for main only.
With Cloudflare as a proxy, does google know the origin server ip?
I believe google won't be knowing origin server IP as Cloudflare just acts like a reverse proxy hiding origin
Google doesn't cares about changing IP.
One of my client's site uses Akamai's CDN and the IP changes almost after 3-4 days.
Never had issue about site ranking going down or up because of IP changes.
Yes, if IP received is blacklisted/spam then it may affect.
How recently?
1st Week of December
well, as the others say, I don't think changing IP is affecting you. I have a news site also, last month and this month I have changed my server 2 times, the IP and server location all differents.
But I don't see any drop in the organic search traffic itself it all stays the same, and yeah the last thing I heard that google change the search algorithm again, you might affected by that.
And also just a quick note, google pagespeed score might affect your SEO.
You might wanna check that
I miss the old days when people designed websites for people, not bots.
Yes. Indeed.