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
-
Site redesign - 301 Redirects
I've just overhauled a website, leaving lots of former posts in the dust. I've set up a 404 redirect to the home page so that if anyone goes to one of those old pages they land on the home page instead of a dead 404. But, there's a couple urls from the old site I'd prefer to redirect to similar pages. These urls have forward slashes and I don't know how to get the slashes in when I copy it over to the new site. This is probably something easy, but I'm baffled. This www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury/whip-its-nitrous-oxide/ becomes this when I copy it www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury-whip-its-nitrous-oxide Can someone help me out?
Web Design | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Log-in page ranking but not homepage
Our homepage is outranked by log-in page for "primary keyword" in Google search results; for which actually our homepage was optimised. I have gone through the other answers for the same question here. But I couldn't find them related with our website. We are not over optimised. We have link from top navigation menu of blog to our homepage. Does this causing this?
Web Design | | vtmoz1 -
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings
Hi, Does interlinking on mobile site helps in seo & improvement in rankings. Our desktop site & mobile site has same urls. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Website Redesign - Will it hurt SERP?
Hi - I am planning to redesign my blog and I was wondering if this will affect my rankings? The new website template (custom designed) is much more user and seo friendly. The content, url structure, internal linking structure, meta tags, and site structure will remain exactly the same, but the visual design will be different (new sidebar widgets, and slightly different layout on inner pages). The current website is ranking very well (mostly top 5), has a healthy backlink profile, strong social media presence, and great traffic. I have heard that switching to a new template will dramatically hurt the rankings. Is this true? Are there any exceptions? Any ways I can prevent the rankings from dropping? Would really appreciate your input. Thanks in advance. Howard
Web Design | | howardd0 -
New Website Redesign: Any Design Comments or SEO Suggestions?
Hi! We recently launched our new website after MONTHS of work. Now that it is live, we are looking to fine tune the design and SEO efforts. This is our new website. And for reference, this is our old website. Any and all comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your help! Mike
Web Design | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Question About Site Redesign and Nav / Page Structure
Hey guys, i am currently redesigning our company's site, and have come across some things that I'm not quite sure of. We used to have individual service pages in our main navigation (design, video, marketing) before the redesign. In this new design, i had the idea of making just one "services" or "capabilities" page, where these three services would each be outlined, and each service would have a list of links to more specific landing pages. Obviously, breaking it up correctly with HTML5 using the andtags. What I'm wondering is that if i'm going to be penalized for having those three services that aren't necessarily related too closely on the same page as opposed to having the one page for each service (like we have now). Any help would be greatly appreciated, and let me know if i need to elaborate more. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | RenderPerfect0