How long before rankings return?
-
We recently had a redesign of our website and moved it from a static html site to WordPress. During the development the WordPress installation sat on a sub-domain. Our programmer and designer had the privacy setting inside WordPress checked so the search engines would not crawl the pages while being developed to avoid duplicate content.
Fast forward two weeks when new site replaces old. Guess what privacy setting was not fixed. So about 3 days after the site is live organic traffic drops by 80%. Do a little research and all of our great rankings are gone. Notice that our page rank is also gone...Hmm...
Upon further inspection the noindex tag is on every page of the site. It's now removed and has been 3-4 days. I've resubmitted inside webmaster tools and I'm just curious what y'all think the likelihood is that everything will come back to how it was before.
-
Thanks..I have built a couple social bookmark type links and have linked to our homepage from our /blog which is already wordpress and gets crawled quite frequently. Here's hoping!
-
The biggest factor will be how frequently Google crawls the site. Once crawled, as EGOL says, it can be quite quick.
However, if you were moving from a .html site I'd venture a guess that it was quite static. If that was the case Google may have dialled down the crawl rate to reflect that and not visit as frequently. If you have access to log files you could check that.
Like with most things SEO the best approach is probably "build some links". New links turning up on sites that are indexed more frequently serve as a good signal to Google that something is changing at a new crawl could be in order.
-
Thanks! We actually replaced the old pages so they dont need to be 301'd. The URL structure remained the exact same.
-
Thanks...It's a site that's been around since 2003 and has 50k plus links. It took the spiders about 3 days to remove it from the index from the time the new site when live to when we lost rankings. It's been 1.5 days now since I removed the tag. Hope to see it back soon
-
A couple of months ago one of my competitor's had a designer toss their redesigned site up with noindex follow on every page. BAM... they were gone from the SERPs in 48 hours.
We had a great laugh over it and checked their site daily to monitor how long it would take them to figure it out. The site was out of the index for a couple of weeks and then they removed the noindex. Within 48 hours they were back in the SERPs at old rankings.
The amount of time required to get back will be related to the power of your site and how many spiders are coming in. If you have a new site with very few links it could take weeks for it to come back. However, if the site is crawled heavily you should be back in a few days.
-
One thing you didn't mention which immediately caught my attention, what are you doing with the old static html pages? Make sure if you havent done so already to properly 301 redirect the old html pages to the new pages. There is actually a WordPress plugin which can help you out on this also, Simple 301 Redirects
Its really tough to say with Google on a situation like this, my guess is once you have fixed all errors and have 301's and new sitemap setup properly within 2-4 weeks you will be back "close to" your old rankings.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is this site ranking higher?
We've put a fair bit of effort into delivering value here: https://lewescountycars.co.uk/ But a search for "Lewes taxis" or "taxis Lewes" puts this site above us: https://www.lewestowntaxis.co.uk/ As you can you see, this is a tiny site that we outperform in most ways.... what can we do to rank above it that we haven't already done? Thanks in advance - Gerard.
Technical SEO | | Paul7301 -
Lower Level Pages Being Ranked for Key Terms
Good Afternoon We've been having problems with a site for a little while now. It had a penalty (partial link) a few years ago and never really recovered back to it's full potential despite the fact that the penalty was eventually removed and we've since changed the domain completely as well as moving over to https and left behind / disavowed bad links. In the Moz ranking stats now, I'm seeing that some of our lower level pages are ranking for core terms and the erratic nature of the ranking graph seems to indicate that Google is confused and not knowing what page to pull. For example, the top level page would be Hotel in Spain but the page that is ranking for that term is one of the individual hotel information (lower level) pages lets say the Holiday Inn . The lower level page has info on the individual property but also makes reference to it being a "Cheap Hotel In Spain" My suggestion to resolve the problem is to scale back the references to the top level terms on the hotel pages and reintroduce breadcrumb links to help Google follow the structure of the site again Does this sound reasonable or would anyone be able to suggest anything else to try?
Technical SEO | | Ham19790 -
Retaining Image Search Rankings After Migration
Hi There, I have a client with a very interesting dilemma out there. If you do an image search his images appear quite high in the rankings. However the way he achieved this isn't exactly within Google's guidelines. He is basically hiding the images within CSS. The reason behind this is that the pages have changed over the years and the images didn't fit in with the new existing text but he still wanted to maintain the high image search rankings. He is now changing to a brand new site and so this page he has been able to tweak successfully before, will no longer exist. He want's to know what is the best way to maintain his image search rankings. will a 301 redirect be enough? I know the morality issues of hiding images, but I want to know if he did what would be the best way to preserve his current image rankings. Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | nezona0 -
Moving to New Domain - Ranking impact
I understand that when migrating to a new site, even if done perfectly (page level 301s etc) that rankings will drop in the short term and each site will be impacted differently. I picked up the following comment and was wanting to get a few experts thoughts on whether I can quote this to my client: "In our experience, even when 301's are correctly executed, we see a short term fall back (7-30) days and then about a 90% carry through after that period for about 90 days and then back to full strength. "
Technical SEO | | steermoz80 -
Totally confused by titles being too long!
We use a wordpress site and have tried some SEO plug-ins in the past. In the analysis, I am getting more than 2,000 pages have titles that are too long and from the results it looks like it was a result of one of these past SEO plug-ins. Do I need to go through and change all those titles? How bad is it that so many of the old blog posts are too long? Some are too long only in the archive link... So confused and hating the idea of reworking thousands of posts! Thanks y'all!
Technical SEO | | Longsphoto0 -
Page Rank gone - technical difficulty?
Hi all, after coming back from the holidays, I noticed that our PR (6 on the homepage) has vanished into "Unranked". All other sites are also "unranked". I tested other domains - PR still there, so the problem does not lie in the PR checker. There are no drops in traffic, rankings, no messages in the GWMT, the same numer of indexed pages, inbound links okay (all natural)... As you see, I checked everything I thought could be a hint to a solution, but found nothing... This goes on for the 3rd day now (after my holidays, maybe even longer). Could there be a technical problem causing this "drop"? Our website: http://www.access.de/ I am thankful for all hints/suggestions... Thanx...
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Ranking in more than one country
Hi, I have a website http://goo.gl/IrJz4 and currently it was ranking well in Google US serps. And now i want to rank well it india too. Does doing more links will bring the results or do i need to do any on page seo ? Please advice me.
Technical SEO | | Dexx220 -
Syndication partner ranking in Google News for our content
Our blog is part of Google News and is syndicated for use by several of our partners such as Chicago Tribune. Lately, we see the syndicator version of the post appearing in Google News instead of our original version. Ours generally ranks in the regular index. ChiTrib does have canonical URL tags and syndication-source tags pointing to our original. They are meta tags, not link tags. We do have a News-specific sitemap that is being reported in WMT as error-free. However, it shows no urls indexed in the News module -- even when I can find those specific URLs (our version) in the News. For an example: Here is a ChiTrib post currently ranking in Google News
Technical SEO | | CarsProduction
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/sns-school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone-20120301,0,3514283.story The original version is here:
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/03/school-carpool-lanes-are-a-danger-zone.html The News sitemap URL is
http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/kickingtires_newsmap.xml One of our front-end producers is speculating that the Facebook sharing code on ChiTrib is having an effect. Given that FB is FB and Google is Google, that sounds wrong to me when we're talking about specifically Google News. Any suggestions? Thanks.0