SEO search referrals have dropped over 90%

Hi. I am new to S2. We have a travel site that consists of a directory of hotels, restaurants and shopping, along with weekly topic articles. We added S2 to make different types of content available to different member levels. Basically there are 3 levels: non-subscribers, free subscribers, and paid subscribers.

Non-subscribers can access about 50% of the content (primarily the directories, which are not on WordPress).
Free subscribers (Level 0) can access another 49% of the content, which is the WordPress articles
Paid subscribers (Level 1) can access another area of downloadable content (maps and tours).

We were averaging about 100,000 unique visitors per month, but since we installed S2 our referral traffic has dropped from about 2,500 per day to under 200 per day.

Two questions:
1) Is it correct that the content that is restricted to even Level 0 will be blocked from Search Engines? Is there any way to include it in searches to entice people to get to the site for that content, even if when they do land on a Level 0 page they need to create an account? Or is it just like a robots.txt file restriction?

2) We really haven’t turned on any restricted content yet by page, post, or category ID # (this was to be the last step in the process), so it doesn’t really make sense that the search engines would be blocked at all, until we restrict those very pages or posts. What other settings could be affecting this in S2?

Thanks very much

Hi Doni.

1) Is it correct that the content that is restricted to even Level 0 will be blocked from Search Engines?

Yes, if it requires the person to be logged in (e.g. Level 0), then the search engine bot will not have access to that content.

Is there any way to include it in searches to entice people to get to the site for that content, even if when they do land on a Level 0 page they need to create an account? Or is it just like a robots.txt file restriction?

Instead of using the access restriction to protect the whole page, you could instead use conditionals to protect part of the content only.

That way, the page will be loaded instead of redirecting to the Membership Options Page, and you can have some teaser content public while the Level 0 protected part will only be shown to logged in users. [hilite path]Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Scripting -› Simple/Shortcode Conditionals[/hilite]

2) We really haven’t turned on any restricted content yet by page, post, or category ID # (this was to be the last step in the process), so it doesn’t really make sense that the search engines would be blocked at all, until we restrict those very pages or posts. What other settings could be affecting this in S2?

I don’t know, I can only think of the restrictions protecting the whole page/post. Do you have less pages indexed in the search engine now? I think in Google you can do [hilite mono]site:yoursite.com[/hilite] (use your actual domain name).