How I ruined my SEO

Which pages or queries in GSC specifically lost traffic? Was there a handful of keywords that drove most of your traffic that you’ve lost? Or is it down across the board for all articles?

ok, as I was curious

this was your old site blog.johnnyreilly.com (note:hosted on on the blog subdomain) https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablog.johnnyreilly.com... https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://blog.joh... archive.org picks it up until december 2022

this is your current site https://johnnyreilly.com/ (note: no subdomain() https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajohnnyreilly.com&pws=... archive.org seems to pic it up late december 2022, start 2023 https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://johnnyre...

between old pages and new pages you have a redirect chain https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/page/201/ -> 301 -> https://johnnyreilly.com/page/201/ -> https://johnnyreilly.com/page/201 final destination (which does not seem to be the correct new URL)

you had an domain movie, URL change and a subideal old 2 new migration if you do not want to loose traffic with URL changes, follwo this spec to the letter https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

if you do not do this correctly a traffic pattern like yours must be expected.

if you do this now you might be abble to recup about 50% of your old traffic, might

additionally you haver massive self made internal duplicate content (tag pages show full pages), soft 404 (non existing pages i.e.: https://johnnyreilly.com/page/fake-url-for-soft-404-error-ch... trigger HTTP 302 redirects and then even more behaviour)

As others have said, this strikes me as a multi-faceted problem.

It's possible Google devalues those sharing (even inadvertently!) GA tags in the rankings, although I don't think there's been any public proclamations from Google on that. But if that were the sole culprit, only your GA instance would reflect that. The fact that you're losing real traffic (as reflected in what the 3rd party tools are telling you) makes me think that's probably not the case/or at least the only thing that's happening.

Not implementing re-directs would also definitely be a culprit. But if it's just images you failed to re-direct, that's likely not the main thing either unless you were getting a majority of your traffic from Google Images.

Since this happened post-Core Update, I would want to know two things:

1. What keywords dropped and what replaced you 2. Whether the drop was site-wide or isolated to individual categories or groups of pages.

Regarding #1: Was what replaced you a big, high authority publisher? Or was the content simply more comprehensive or otherwise a better match for the user's intent? Very likely could be E-E-A-T-related, in terms of the algos determining that you don't have the authority/expertise to rank for what you were ranking for previously.

Investigate those possibilities first and you should be able to better map out a plan for re-gaining that traffic.

Changing all images to be lazy loaded is not a good idea for SEO reasons (and perhaps not a good idea for regular usage of the site either). If it were, browsers would just do it automatically. Using hints on your images is only useful if you are doing it strategically, which means only lazy loading images that are offscreen on the initial page load. Otherwise you are not actually giving useful hints to the browser on how to load your page in the correct manner, and thus you are just better off letting the browser use whatever internal logic it has to decide how and when to load the assets.

Basically you can think about the optimal, minimal set of resources to render your page being:

- HTML

- Required CSS

- Above the fold images

Then at that point, download all of the other things to make the page work in the way you want (javascript, etc). Anything else is delaying the initial page-load. Because your images are lazy loaded, your page load looks like the following:

- HTML

- Required CSS

- Some above the fold images (profile.jpg, etc)

- Massive, >300kb blobs of javascript (runtime-main.js, main.js)

- Above the fold images in the post

This is not good. It doesn't make sense for your page to download 300kb of javascript before downloading the 18kb image that is above the fold. Now you can partially solve this problem by making the javascript asynchronous, but that still is just another band-aid on the problem, as then the javascript and above the fold images would download concurrently, which is still not optimal.

What you want to do is have above the fold post images be loaded eagerly (the default), and then lazy load ones that are lower on the page. If you aren't going to do that, you probably are better off just not having the images being lazy loaded at all, especially if your page includes 300kb of javascript which is likely going to be much larger than the combined size of all the images on the page.

Is there really no way to rotate your GA tag without creating a new property in Google Analytics? That seems like a glaring omission.