Can your site be penalized for changing the url structure and if so how long till you get back?

[deciph22]

I'm doing well on yahoo and bing and the only reason I can think of for why I'm not showing on Google is because I changed the url structure a couple of months ago. I have solid on and off page done for this site.

[loopyal]

Hello deciph22 Also check that you have no links that still point to the old structure urls Ad check that you only refer to your home page in one way - don't refer to it as / and also as index.html or any other default page. I see a lot of sites that do it and it will hurt your ranking

[mediabase]

Hi Lh66, First of all I want to make sure to you that if you had changed the url structure for your website then somehow it will affects your website ranking.  In general If someone wants to change the url structure then it will have to perform 301 redirect because If someone has changed the old url then it will have to redirect to the new url to know the users that old page has been chnaged to the new page(url).

For this you had to know that  which is the  best strategy for picking up the url.

From the above link it is clear that how to change the url structure for a particular website.After changing the url structure you should  know the exact reasons that why change in url affects seo.

i hope that your query had been solved.

[charles1]

If you have already redirected your links with 301 redirect it will pass on 90-99% of link juice.

So you would only see a small change in your rankings. If it's a new site with few links then there shouldn't be any change.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

[Francisco_Meza]

If you already did 301s, then build links to those pages. Check your GWT and see if they are counting it as a 404. Also submit a sitemap in GWT ASAP.

[deciph22]

It was a brand new site so there wasn't many new links and I did create redirects to them

[Mcarle]

When you changed the url structure did you also do a redirect?

Did you have many links going to those older urls?