Joomla 1.5, SEF, Traffic and Getting Naked
May 06 2008 - Tagged in: SEO , SEF , migration , joomla 1.5 , extensions , components , compassdesigns.net
Over at Copyblogger, Sonia Simone made a recent post about Getting Naked. No, it wasn't a college party, but rather the concept of being honest, sometimes painfully so in your blog. Current wisdom among bloggers is that this is a good standard to follow, you'll see popular bloggers ranging from Dooce, SEOMoz and even Joomla's Alledia sharing things that traditionally would be thought of as perhaps private. In each case, the sharing has been well received, and all importantly, worthy of traffic.
On a side note, you can read more about this concept of honesty in blogging in the excellent book Blog Marketing
I thought I might do some sharing of my own with some real stats about my blog here, perhaps someone out there might have some good ideas about the problem I have!
A couple of months ago I migrated to Joomla 1.5 on this blog, I have been scrutinizing my Google Analytics reports and have found some depressing results. It seems that at the point I switched to 1.5, I have lost about 20% of my traffic!
In the Analytics graph below, you can see the point in march when the site was migrated, and then a significant drop in traffic.
I knew the migration was going to change the links across my site, and I had a plan to redirect old URL's after migrating. I anticipated some traffic drop, but this was surprising. Comparing the site usage from, say, February and April, was not encouraging reading.
My immediate reaction was to start rummaging deeper into the Analytics to isolate the reason. When I did this, I came up with several observations that did not make much sense.
First stop is where the traffic is coming from. As anticipated, in absolute terms, the biggest traffic drop is coming from Google, which is my biggest source.
Clicking on the Google (organic) link will show you the keywords that are getting the traffic. Its here where things started to get confusing. As you can see below, all my major keywords did show some traffic drop, but nowhere near enough in absolute terms to account for the 24,644 (103,474-78,830) visits I had dropped from Google. For some terms, I had even increased in traffic!
[Note: Actual terms edited... I am not *that* naked :)]
So where could the missing traffic be?
I still have not really been able to track this down. The only possible clue I can find is the number of keywords I am getting traffic for. In the bottom right of the organic Google keywords it says in small letters: " 1 - 500 of 46,507". This means I got traffic, either in February or April, on 46,507 keywords. My strategy for redirecting old URL's was based on some global edits in htaccess for my "big hitters". It turns out I was dead wrong.
Seems I both gain and lose form what is know as the Long Tail. A chunk of my traffic comes from searches on obscure keywords, just a few hits at a time. But all added up, the misplaced URL's aggregate that traffic into a significant amount.
What should you learn from my migration?
The million dollar question right now is "Should I migrate to Joomla 1.5 for my website"?
Everyone's stock answer is "it depends". Well, one of the things it depends on is how much traffic your site gets, and what you depend on it for. I like to think of myself as relatively knowledgeable about SEO, yet I got tripped up and paid the price in a big chunk of traffic. If you want to migrate a popular site, you need one of two things:
- A seamless way to redirect thousands of URL's
- Be using a SEF extension that produces identical URL's on 1.0 and 1.5
One thing I have realized is that the people who are going to be hugely influential in the adoption of 1.5 is going to be the developers of the various SEF extensions. The current list includes:
Conclusion
So I still only have a guess on what my traffic drop is due to. If you have any ideas, please share! Or maybe you'd like to tell us about how your 1.5 migration has gone....
You'll have to excuse me, I need to go and put my clothes back on....
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Good Web Practices
said:
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... Great post! Interesting to see the effect on moving from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5... On one of the sites I converted I saw a drop too. Thanks for sharing  |
alledia
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... Hi Barrie I think you're right. We have 380 keyword phrases that bring more than 5 visitors per month. We have 12200 that bring 5 visitors or less. A 10% drop in the number of those less popular means 5000 less visitors per month. If that drop goes over 10% you start to talk about a substantial number of visitors. |
David Childs
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... An interesting article I ran across on this subject mentioned the effect of 301 redirects can have on your traffic 'sandbox effect" Also in Google Webmasters, Do you have a lot of URLs showing as not fund? Has the # of entries of site:compassdesigns.net changed? |
Administrator
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... @Dave A fascinating article, good find! I'll look into those other points too... |
trichnosis
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... starting to use different urls is a big disadvantage for moving from J!1.0.x to J!1.5 because of this i will not move my joomla 1.0.x sites to J!1.5 |
kor
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... Hi Barrie, Thanks for your reply on http://www.joomlashack.com/community/index.php?topic=9929 I think I am also suffering from the long tail effect. I did the same as you: creating a few 301 redirects to the most popular articles. Also I lost most visitors coming from Google. I have spent hours, no, days analyzing Google Analitics and Webmaster Tools. A few things come to mind: *the decrease according to server sided Advanced Web Statistics 6.7 (build 1.892) is less drastic, but is significant. *I migrated april 14th 2008. As of yesterday, May 26th numbers start to increase again (sandbox?) *I am worried about the duplicate URL's pointing to articles. Example (to make sure what I mean): 1: coming from blog style menu item +> /webdesign/441-playstation-portable-als-user-agent 2: clicking on "read more" or linked title => /webdesign/15-over-webdesign/441-playstation-portable-als-user-agent I am considering: * installing SmartSef, but although the 1.0 SEF links (content/view/etc) will still work then, the new 1.5 SEF links will not (that is, it doesn't on my test server, and I don't know enough about the internal Joomla! logic to be able to tell if this is possible at all or not). This means that it will take a while before google has indexed all new URL's again, if I would do this *creating some smart 301 redirects from example 2 to example 1 (not happy about this) *creating some smart rewrite rule to rewrite example 2 to example 1 (I have no clue if this is possible at all, maybe this is nonsense) regards, Kor |
262Media | e-Branding
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... It would be nice to see an update in this post ans see how is your website doing after the'sandbox effect' is gone. Ive done several migrations from 1.0 to 1.5 and from other cms into 1.5. I use Apache Rewrites and a good knowledge of how both Joomlas handle urls to achieve my goals http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html It takes a few weeks / 2 months for pagerank to get transfered to the new urls but i did not see a major drop in google ranks or google generated visitors. In my worst case page gets n/a as a page rank but it just droped 5 positions in google top results and once the page rank got 'transfered' from the old page client website was back in 1st place within 2 months. @ kor this is a good tutorial to start with: http://www.addedbytes.com/apac...beginners/ |
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