organic traffic drops on new site launch

[gjt]

After a recent site redesign based on the Iron and Wool Readytheme my clients' organic search traffic has, according to Google Analytics, taken a nose dive of 40% in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

While we lost the first 3 days of Google Analytics data due to a broken tracking script, the organic traffic dip has correlated directly to the new site going live.

At the very same time, Google Analytics is reporting an increase in direct traffic that closely matches the drop in organic traffic. So, overall traffic in Google Analytics has not changed that much but the source of that traffic has.

And, according to Google Search Console, there has NOT been a drop on Google search traffic since the new site went live. In fact, Google search traffic has increased slightly. So, we seem to have conflicting data.

It is worth noting that the previous incarnation of the site used the Google classic tracking script. After the new site went live we used the Miva Google Analytics module/Universal tracking. But once the organic traffic drop became evident we reverted to the original classic tracking script thinking that may be the issue. That proved to not be the case however and data for both classic and Universal tracking scripts has been very similar.

While these anomalies certainly appear to be some sort of tracking issue we can't be certain that the organic traffic drop is not real. Perhaps it is real. Perhaps something else is going on.

The discrepancy between Google Analytics search traffic and Google Search Console search traffic is particularly perplexing.

Any thoughts on what might be going on are greatly appreciated!

URL to the site in question below...

http://www.avinylfence.com

[Dan - Glendale Designs]

All pages are passing '/' as the url via _trackPageview in the Analytics tracking snippet. This being our old ga.js template based integration implemented at the moment, difficult to say if the same situation existed with the stock Miva Google Analytics features in this case, but I recommend rolling back to stock Miva and looking at the short link integration vs. what is being passed via the Analytics tracking snippet. If you are using 3rd party short links of any sort, adjustments will most likely need to be made to account for those. If you revert to stock Analytics and the pageview checks out, there are any number of other things that can cause this, but you definitely need to make sure your tracking snippet is solid first and formost.

[gjt]

Thank you Dan, I'll look into your suggestions.

[RayCheselka1]

Hi!

I understand that this is a bit late, but I'm hopeful it will help someone in the future.

Recently, I worked with a client that launched a new website in MIVA. Unfortunately, there were a few aspects of the launch that were mishandled. Website traffic and visibility in search completely dropped off. After running through some normal check-up items, I found that an x-robots-tag at the server level was telling bots to "noindex." This was a first for me. Apparently MIVA actually puts it in, in development. While it's good process to keep that development site out of the SERP's, it needs to be removed at launch. MIVA support told me they request permission to remove it prior to launch. In my clients case, they approved, but the tag remained on the site. This was a costly issue.

Anyway, I think this article may save people some time and money.
https://www.webfeatcomplete.com/blog...earing-solved/


Thank you,

Ray