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.
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
-
Conversion drop after site move
Have just migrated current and active site to Magento 1.9 and a new hosting package (dedicated and reasonably powerful for what we need). But we seem to have had a drop in conversion rate. I don't really know whether it's anything to be concerned about the moment. I've set up extensive server level 301 redirects for old pages. Would be glad of any thoughts? Thanks you
Web Design | | seoman100 -
Help, site traffic has dropped significantly since we changed from http to https
Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff. A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages. Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in: I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though... As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it? Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!) Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com Thank you!
Web Design | | MobileDay1 -
Correlation of PageSpeed Insights and YSLow scores to high rankings in SERPs
I'm pretty well rounded when it comes to SEO, but I'm just frazzled when it comes to YSlow and PageSpeed Insights. Of course, individual factors are important to site performance, but it has become increasingly difficult to recommend open-source and hosted platforms that don't pass muster on many of the performance standards being tested. For example, entity tags, expires headers, and cookie-free domains are nearly impossible to set with hosted platforms, and none of the major open-source CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Odoo, etc., consistently put javascript at the bottom or make "fewer" HTTP requests. Mobile is now king, so quite a few people (including myself) need to "mobilize" their website by late April or risk dropping in mobile search rankings. Nearly all my clients run multi-lingual e-commerce websites, so that really limits options but makes it that much more important to keep current with Google's SEO recommendations. What platforms perform best taking into account any correlation with YSlow scores/PageSpeed Insights to high floating sites on SERPs? Would one spend the money to "fix" their current platform that has worked very well to date or switch to a mobile-ready platform?
Web Design | | kwoolf0 -
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 -
Tips on website redesign on site with messy URLs?
So I've inherited quite a messy website. It was in drupal and the owner wants it in wordpress. One of the problems is the link paths. Should I try to recreate them exactly? i.e. something/somethingelse/page/ or use redirects (which I'm not confident in doing). Also, some of the pages end in .html, others in a back slash and others without slahes, there's no consistency. Do you have any tips in general? I remember an older seomoz blogpost about successful website relaunches (with press releases and mass emails and stuff being sent out on launch to boot). Thanks!
Web Design | | seonubblet0 -
301 Redirect ! Joomla Pages, Already ranking. ( just wanted to change the url
hey guys hope everyone had a new year. I am ranking for a page on my site that i want to ( not specifically move ), but just change the url name: It is too long i think and i want to move it from one portion of my architecture to another menu. I have never physically done a 301 redirect myself, always had someone do it for me. I wanted some pointers. Since it is a fairly new site 4 months old! What are my options. Do i need to 301 redirect the page, if i am changing the Structure and AI of my site, or can i just change the url as is and it will still get ranked? How do i keep that url put delete the page and redirect it ? Sorry its very simple but i wanted to get the communities help to continue on ! Best Wishes HAmpig
Web Design | | BizDetox0 -
Homepage and Category pages rank for article/post titles after HTML5 Redesign
My site's URL (web address) is: http://bit.ly/g2fhhC Timeline:
Web Design | | mcluna
At the end of March we released a site redesign in HTML5
As part of the redesign we used multiple H1s (for nested articles on the homepage) and for content sections other than articles on a page. In summary, our pages have many many, I mean lots of H1's compared to other sites notable sites that use HTML5 and only one H1 (some of these are the biggest sites on the web) - yet I don't want to say this is the culprit because the HTML5 document outline (page sections) create the equivalent of H1 - H6 tags. We have also have been having Google cache snapshot issues due to Modernzr which we are working to apply the patch. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/issues/1086 - Not sure if this would driving our indexing issues as below. Situation:
Since the redesign when we query our article title then Google will list the homepage, category page or tag page that the article resides on. Most of the time it ranks for the homepage for the article query.
If we link directly to the article pages from a relevant internal page it does not help Google index the correct page. If we link to an article from an external site it does not help Google index the correct page. Here are some images of some example query results for our article titles: Homepage ranks for article title aged 5 hours
http://imgur.com/yNVU2 Homepage ranks for article title aged 36 min.
http://imgur.com/5RZgB Homepage at uncategorized page listed instead of article for exact match article query
http://imgur.com/MddcE Article aged over 10 day indexing correctly. Yes it's possible for Google index our article pages but again.
http://imgur.com/mZhmd What we have done so far:
-Removed the H1 tag from the site wide domain link
-Made the article title a link. How it was on the old version so replicating
-Applying the Modernizr patch today to correct blank caching issue. We are hoping you can assess the number H1s we are using on our homepage (i think over 40) and on our article pages (i believe over 25 H1s) and let us know if this may be sending a confusing signal to Google. Or if you see something else we're missing. All HTML5 and Google documentation makes clear that Google can parse multiple H1s & understand header, sub & that multiple H1s are okay etc... but it seems possible that algorythmic weighting may not have caught up with HTML5. Look forward to your thoughts. Thanks0 -
Switched From Wordpress, Traffic Dropped In Half
Hello, Thank you for taking a look at my issue. My site: http://www.getrightmusic.com A month ago, I switched from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. The reason being I wanted a more powerful membership functionality with media uploading. After I switched, my traffic basically dropped in half. I was averaging around 4-6,000 unique visitors per day and now I am at about 2,000 per day. I resubmitted a new sitemap to Google webmasters. I also set up 301 redirects on my top 80 urls that were ranking well and driving traffic in Google. Not only did Google kick me off of my top spots in the SERP's, but I no longer get indexed as quickly as I used to. With the old Wordpress site I would get url's indexed within minutes. Now they aren't even getting indexed really at all. Is this a normal occurrence when switching site designs and systems? Do you think Google will just take a little time before they give me back some respect? Is there anything I should be doing to get back to ranking and getting indexed faster? Thanks for any help or any insight you may have. Jesse
Web Design | | getrightmusic0