Rankings Dropped After Redesign
-
Hi,
I've recently redesigned our website with the main changes being sidebar changes and source ordering (making the main content appear before the sidebars). No URL changes have been made. A few days after making these changes our positions dropped heavily and have been dropping ever since. It's been a week and a half now and traffic is down by around 40%.
Google has the new changes cached. Do people feel this just a temporary drop and will we rankings to go back at least or should we revert to the old structure?
Website: http://www.diyorgasms.co.uk (NSFW)
Thanks
-
Ok thanks, I just did it as always thought it was good practice.
-
He was joking, Google can tell what is content and what is layout, making content appear before the sidebar means little to google unless your side bar is very very big
-
What do you exactly mean with this comment?
Thanks
-
(making the main content appear before the sidebars)
heh... google was insulted that you thought that he could not tell the content from the wrapper.
-
It may be that the timeing is just a coinsidence, as there has been a update a few days ago that has caused many people to lose ranking, look into the penguin update
-
It isn't uncommon to see a temporary drop in rankings after a site redesign, i've seen it take anything around a month for the rankings to return.
In my opinion, changing back to the old site design/structure should be the last resort, as if you do this, you will be nervous of ever changing it again, and no good can come of that scenario!
As the site structure has remained identical, you should concentrate on the on page optimisation.
As you are a pro member, i would use the SeoMoz to check some of the basics.
- Set your old site up under another url, preferably on another server, make sure you no index, no follow the site as you don't want it being picked up by the bots.
- Set up the "old" site in SeoMoz's web app with exactly the same keywords as you have set up for the new site
- Run the on page reports for the keywords in which your rankings have changed on the new site and old site.
- Compare the findings, fix any problems on the new site.
Secondly
Once the full crawl has been done, check through the site errors (duplicate page titles, duplicate content etc)
As already said, the rankings dip is not uncommon, but the above will help you confirm that there is nothing wrong with the site.
Hope that helps and good luck!
-
There has been no title tag changes at all. No change to the robots.txt for many months the same as the htaccess and rel=canonical. The dropped hapened straight away after the redesign (within 2 days). You think I should revert?
Thanks
-
Did you change the title tags of some of the pages knowingly or unknowingly? This could be one of the main reason. Other reasons can be accidental changes in the robots.txt file, htaccess file or incorrectly placed rel=canonical, meta noindex tags on certain pages. There is also a possibility that your website is hit by recent Penguin update or for over optimization. You need to check your website against all of these possibilities.
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
-
Migrating Magento site to Shopify Plus without dropping in SERPS
We have been looking at moving our ecommerce store www.pretavoir.co.uk from Magento to Shopify Plus. However, as we rank quite well at present we are interested in hearing experience others may have had making this change and also any advice that you may have... Also, any general comments on Shopify appreciated..
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
New Re-design will my website rankings drop?
Hi guys, I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work. Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position? Apperciate any advice around this Thanks
Web Design | | edward-may0 -
Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
Hello Fellow Forum Members: Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this. Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings. By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site. As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%. Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently. In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with. By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more. Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best. So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform? We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
Home page is not the highest ranking page?
Our websites do not have the home page as the first page in the search engines. It's something benign like the privacy policy page or the directions page! I've thought of adding no index to the privacy page, but then the directions or contact page would show up instead of the home page. One odd thing I've noticed, is that on our link to the home page on our menu and footer, the link is /default.aspx?mb=rte. But that shouldn't make a difference and default.aspx should rank first, right? What can we do to fix this?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Preserve Rankings When Switching to a New Site
Hello community! I have a quick question for you regarding preserving my SERPs once I switch a development site to replace the current production site. Basically, we are switching to a new CMS and will be featuring the same content, architectural layout, URL structure, etc. Again, the only difference is that it's going to be on a new CMS. Upon switching to the new version of the site, what would be the best strategy for making sure we preserve our rankings for content already ranking highly within the search engines? Likewise, is there anything additional we may be able to do right-off-the-bat in order to assist content that may not be ranking highly in the SERPs, rank more highly?
Web Design | | NiallSmith0 -
Drastic rankings drop
SOS SEOMozzers hello all. I woke up this morning to find out our rankings for two main keywords: 1. internet marketing firm
Web Design | | vijayvasu
2. marketing firm dropped from being #8 on google to not being invthe top 50. last week we upgraded the site to HTML5 . We checked the on page via pro tools and everthing seemed fine. We checked Google analytics ( traffic was beginning to fall) and we checked webmaster tools - ( there were not critical issues etc) So now i am bewildered as to what possible happened to wipe us of the search. Please can you help - the site is www.gunshotdigital.com0 -
Will Switching To a CMS System Help Rankings
I would like to transform our 400 page website to a CMS system. We rank failrly well for most of our keywords and not so much for others. Our website is currently optimized with lots of unique content, but we need to transform to a more professional website with lots of options. Will doing this transformation affect our rankings if Redirects are correct ? Any recommedations for a Easy CMS that is very SEO Friendly?
Web Design | | hfranz0