[Support request] Google Organic Traffic Drop After Switching to GP

[Ivaylo]

I replaced my WordPress Theme with GP on the 09th of August and since then I started seeing a drop in Google Organic Traffic. It’s most severe ( or maybe all of the loss ) in Google Images. See attached screenshot.

So is there a change in how GP is showing, indexing, and creating a path to images differently?

Looks like Google is trying to find all those indexed images from the beginning.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

[Ivaylo]

Below is example URL

[David]

Hi there,

GP doesn’t do anything with the images, if you add an image to your post content, then that function is managed 100% by WordPress.

GP can only adjust the Featured Image in its Blog Settings.

But we don’t add any code to the Image HTML or any code that would be directly related to image SEO.

Do you know if you’re previous theme did something specifically regarding Image SEO ?

[Ivaylo]

I’m not aware of any special thing to SEO images from the previous theme.

It can’t be a coincidence as the drop starts the moment the theme was changed. Anyway, I will keep monitoring GSC to see if it will start to get back to it’s previous state. I suppose images are being recrawled and will be temporarily ditched out of the search results.

[David]

If you change theme, then the HTML being output will change, that in itself can prompt google to recrawl pages. Which may be behind what you’re seeing.

[Ivaylo]

Yes, seeing a huge spike in Google Crawl Rate. All in images – like 30x times normal.

[David]

What was the previous theme you were using ? The most i can do is try and make a comparison between GPs output and that of the old theme. Their maybe something different.

[Ivaylo]

The old theme was Publisher. https://betterstudio.com/

Would be very grateful if you can make a comparison from your point of view. Thanks!

[David]

I had a look at a couple of their demos. I could not see any noticeble difference.

They use <figure> and <img> HTML markup which is the same in the core Image block. And both were using alt tags for the image description as well.

The only thing i can’t speak on is that your current site is using Social Snap sharing . As you can see here, it is modifying the HTML of the images by quite a lot:

The Green highlighted elements is what WP outputs
The Red highlighted elements is added by Social Snap
The Yellow highlighted element is what the core Img element but it has been manipulated by social share.

Was Social Snap being used on the previous theme install ?

[Ivaylo]

Social Snap was installed before and it is now installed again.

Thanks a lot for trying to help me. I will just wait for a few more days and will let you know what happened in this topic.

[David]

Ok, let us know how you get on!

[Author]

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