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
-
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 -
How would a redesign, content update and URL change affect ranking?
Hi guys, I have a question that I suspect there is no simple true or false answer to, but perhaps someone has done the same thing as we're pondering wether or not to do? We're taking over an existing site that ranks very well on all the important keywords and is obviously very well liked by Google. The site is today hosted on a sub-domain (xxx.domain.com). When taking over, we'll have to redesign the site and recreate most of the content on the site (unique). The site structure, URLs, incoming links etc. will remain exactly the same. Since we are recreating the site, we also have the opportunity to move the site off the sub-domain and on to the main domain (domain.com/xxx - 85/100 Moz rank) and do a 301 Permanent Redirect on all old URLs. Our long-time experience is that content on the main domain, ranks way better than the sub-domain. The big question is wether or not Google will punish us for both changing the content and the location of the site at the same time? Cheers!
Web Design | | mattbs
Matt0 -
Best techniques for trying to rank a single page website?
I am new to SEO and am currently trying to market a single page website. Its proving to be hard. I have managed to get the site to page one for a few keywords and it is improving (upto page 2 for some desired keywords) but it seems to have stuck there for a few weeks now - with no movement. I am able to develop it if required. However I thought that I would just ask if there was anything that could give it a nudge without this? I have done on-site optimisation. As far as I'm aware that's about as good as it can be. So any advice?
Web Design | | Chstphrjohn0 -
Surviving a Redesign
Hi there, I'm in the process of building a new site using Shopify for our e-commerce site. We are currently using a WordPress site (www.batesmillstore.com) that was built by third party developers. I am concerned that we could see a drop in our organic traffic once we make the transition from the WordPress site to our Shopify site. Does anyone have any recommendations or a checklist we could use to make sure we're doing this properly and so that it is as smooth of a transition as possible? Thanks,
Web Design | | TheBatesMillStore
Bianca0 -
New more "helpful" internal linking causing SERP & traffic drop?
Still dealing with the weird traffic drop on my website. I have removed a bunch of old links from a defunct blog, 301 thin pages, added text to remaining pages. I'm still stumped. So awhile ago I freshened up my website and thought I was "helping people" by making sure they could CONTACT the studio more easily... I added more links to the "contact page" I thought this would help conversions...This changed the number of links to my entire site....Would this be the problem with my ranking/traffic drop? http://bayareaboudoir.com/babinternal1.pdf
Web Design | | Squee1 -
Getting ranked on google
I help run a small real estate site in ireland www.aplacetorent.ie and Im in charge of seo. I have read lots of books over the last year or so and while they offer lots of advice some of them dont actually show you what to do. I have joined distilled and I think its the best thing i have done in the last few weeks and am learning a lot but if anyone has any advice i would be very grateful. Thank you
Web Design | | Kessie0 -
Site Ranks on Page 1 - Would launching new site hurt that
Hello, I currently have a website ranking in the top 7 for my main keyword. The website was built in 2004 and is definitely outdated, yet still ranks very high and brings in business. If i launched a new site on this domain, what would happen to my rankings? Would they drop? would they rise? If i don't launch the new site, will this site eventually drop due to being old and outdated? Any advice would be helpful...
Web Design | | Prime850