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
-
Redirect to get better ranking
I have three pages of my website ranking for a keyword: landing page and two blogposts. They all rank on top of page 2 (positions 11-13).If I redirect these articles to the landing page, will it help to bring it up in rankings?
Technical SEO | | imoney0 -
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
Rank a site that was 301'd
We had a customer that had 2 sites. They left us, and 301'd site A to site B. Things didn't go well. Now, a year later they want to use us again. Ideally, I would undo the 301. Has anyone done this? Would I be better off starting with a new domain? If you've done it, how long before it started to rank like you expected/hoped?
Technical SEO | | TimColeman0 -
Website not ranking for noncompetitive terms
Hi, We've took over a website last July and no matter what we do we just can't get it ranking in Google, even for noncompetitive terms. here is the website in question: http://www.alignandsmile.co.uk Ideally the client would like to rank for Canary Wharf but that location is competitive, the site doesn't even rank for 'Dentist New Providence Wharf E14' despite it being included in the title tag on the home page and in the content throughout the website. Directories with Align and Smile's business information do rank however. I opened a case with google through Webmaster tools and they 'reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google.' So I'm a bit stuck. The site ranks top for the keyphrase in Bing and Yahoo...we are really struggling with Google! Any help would be much appreciated. many thanks Marcus
Technical SEO | | dentaldesign0 -
Ranking Multi-Language Site
Recently we updated our website to a new version. Our website has a structure in which the English page is our main page with about 50 subpages. All these pages are translated in 5 different languages. The different languages are divided into folders. For example www.ourdomain.com/de containts all german pages. The pages with products would be for example: www.ourdomain.com/products for english and www.ourdomain.com/de/produkte for the german page. On our previous website this used to be simililar. After the website update the SEOMoz crawls are showning duplicated page content/title errors for the pages saying that the pages in other languages have the same content/title as the basis English webpage. Any idea how I can solve these errors?
Technical SEO | | Exp0 -
Ranking via partial match
If I wanted to rank for "red hot widgets" and my domain was redhot.com, would it be better to obtain backlinks (via "red hot widgets" anchor text) pointing to: A) redhot.com (homepage) or B) redhot.com/widgets Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | martyc0 -
Dismal content rankings
Hi, I realize this is a very broad question, but I am going to ask it anyways in the hopes that someone might have some insight. I have created a great deal of unique content for the site http://www.healthchoices.ca. You can select a video category from the top dropdown, then click on a video beside the provider box to see. The articles I've written are accessible by the View Article tab under each video. I have worked hard to make the articles informative and they are all unique with quotes from expert physicians. Even for strange health conditions that don't have a lot of competition - I don't see us appearing. Our search results are quite dismal for the amount of content we have. I guess I'm checking to see if anyone is able to point me in the right direction at all? If anything jumps out... Thanks, Erin
Technical SEO | | erinhealthchoices0 -
It's imposible to keep track of rankings?
Hello, here something interesting I'm Using Rank Tracker from SEOMOZ And from the link-assistant's Rank Tracker as Well... I need to track Google.com and Google.co.ve (venezuela) so I did... i got my keyword an here are my results. 1 Keyword A at google.com (united states) Rank Tracker SEOMOZ = pos 6 Rank Tracker OTHER = pos 6 Manual Query on google.com = 9 (I used the exact url seomoz tells me its using) 2 Keyword A at Google.co.ve Rank Tracker SEOMOZ = pos 8 Rank Tracker OTHER = pos 7 Manual query on google.co.ve = pos 8 So.... Why it's that?, so far I think that google.com for me down here (it actually says "Español") it's a different index? for latinamerica? only spanish pages? maybe it's because there's a couple of minutes between looking with one tool and the other... any help, would be great... Dan
Technical SEO | | daniel.alvarez0