AWS and SEO

Good morning,

I hope someone can help with the following topic.

We just moved a website (a magazine) from a shared and old server to Amazon Web Services. The website (in Python/Django) has undergone technical development to improve speed insight.

We applied Dynamic Rendering too, and the Speed Insight performance is excellent.

The migration was smooth and didn't generate any issue; it occurred between 24 and 25 May.

Meanwhile, we're now hopefully fixing the Core Web Vitals in Search Console. The process has started.

As a result, we're facing a 30% drop (either web search and image search) in organic search and can't understand why.

We also experienced many internal visits into the Analytics flagged as Direct Visits from Dublin (where the AWS infrastructure is based; the website comes in Italian and English. The original server was based in Bruxelles).

Note: direct visits increased while organic visits decreased instead.

As a result, we just excluded the related IPs from Analytics.

What should we look for?

Did anyone experience a similar behaviour and is willing to share suggestions on what to analyze?

Many thanks for your support.

Best,
Gaetano

 

Have you examined your site in Google Webmaster Tools? That would be the place I would start. You can pinpoint when you started having problems. And more importantly you could examine whether your page indexing has changed. Google has been making a lot of changes in the last few months that affect how pages are indexed.

My site, about 2 months ago, went from 10,000 indexed pages to below 3,000 indexed pages in less than a week even though I made NO changes. Once I discovered that, I started re-doing a lot of pages and now have just over 3,000 indexed pages with more getting indexed every day. My click through count went through the floor at the same time essentially becoming near non-existent.

 

Thanks mmerlin,

Nothing has changed in the Search Console so far.

The Web Core Signals fixing procedure has just begun, with a minor improvement (it takes 28 days, Google says).

The number of valid pages indexed has not changed so far. We already slimmed the website down due to Crawling Budget issues months ago (which I assume it's what you faced because we faced almost the same after the December Core Update).

The only thing that changed/dropped was the #impressions and clicks accordingly. Given the dramatically increased #direct visits, I can only assume there's an issue at tracking visits, by Google, due to the new location/architecture (?).

 

AWS is awesome for SEO benefits compared to other web hostings.