The Mystery of the Missing Links: Why are web site Visits Down 30%?

Inbound links are the key to Search Engine Optimization. For publishers, a well-cited web site is a source of high page rank and more traffic from search engines. SEO experts often stress the importance of being linked by “high value” web sites for giving your web site a boost. But the search engines also know that thousands of diverse web sites are also less likely to be wrong.

A large on-line publisher recently contacted us with the following inquiry: “our web traffic dropped after our redesign six months ago, and traffic is still down.” Where their web traffic had been trending positive, we now saw that web traffic, measured in visits to the web site, had dropped 30%.

Comparing web traffic reports before and after the redesign didn’t reveal anything significantly different about the use patterns. The redesign was successful at improving navigation and pages per visit were up. But where were the missing visits? One big answer: Search Engine referrals, especially Google referrals, were down 50%.

Looking for clues, we turned to web usage reports. The web analytics tool this publisher used reports based on volume. And for the first five or more pages of the reports, there was little difference in activity. But when we downloaded the top several thousand web pages (they have a lot of articles), we saw that the number of visits to the lesser used pages dropped dramatically. The old version of the site had a longer tail of pages with few requests per month.

When they redesigned the site, this publisher set up redirects for many of their pages. Unfortunately they made two SEO errors: 1) they missed a lot of URL variations that had given users multiple ways to access the same material and 2) they used 302 redirect codes (temporary redirect) instead of 301 redirect codes (permanent redirect).

These two SEO mistakes lead to their losing page rank credit for thousands of links to their site. First, they lost “credit” for the links. Then they lost page rank credit for the redirected pages. Finally, the effect of their moving content from linked URLs was to “break” the linking web sites (from the perspective of the users and web masters of those sites). This lead to a loss of goodwill, and formerly modest linking sources no longer showed up at all in the long tail of the list of “top referring sites”. And these modest referrers had a big impact on this large publisher.

This left the publisher with three significant tasks: 1) create better programs to handle missing links (even at this point, six months down the road), 2) eliminate navigation "breadcrumbs" from the URLs so that each article text has a single endpoint URL, and 3) create a quiet “referrer relations” program to rebuild credibility among linking referrers.

If you are planning a web site redesign, or you are implementing a new Content Management System, remember this motto: “Make New Links, but Keep the Old.”

Labels: linking strategies, seo, web analytics