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
-
Can we re rank our Penalyzed website in Google?
Hello This is Maqbul, from India. I have a jobs portal blog [ bharatrecruit.com]. It was getting around 50K to 100K Views a Day and made me $100 a day. But after a few months, my competitor made negative SEO with 12,000 Spammy backlinks. Suddenly my site was hit by Google and now it is getting 200 to 300 Pageviews a day. So the question is I did not disavow bad links for a long time like 3 to 4 months. Now I disavow all the bad links but the website is not ranking. Can we re-rank this site or create another website. Please reply must. None of the bloggers can answer this. Thanks, Regards Maqbul
Technical SEO | | vinaso960 -
Will 301 affect my present Google ranking
Hello , I am in a fix right now. I have a website which is ranking well for many keywords in search engines.I am redirecting all my pages and blogs to new website with new domain name for better user experience and will be adding more content to new website. If i redirect all pages and posts from present website to new website will it affect my present rankings. What can be the possible effects that my present website will have. I need to fix this as soon as possible. I want to redirect so please tell me what best should be done as well. Thanks
Technical SEO | | wallacep0 -
Good organic ranking/Poor local ranking
Hi, I am a local retailer with a physical store in a major US City. My website is very well ranked on major keywords related to my business from an organic result perspective (between 1st and 3rd spot). However, in terms of local results (google place), my website isn't even ranked (except for one specific long tail keyword). Anybody know why? Thank you so much for your help. This is driving me crazy:-)
Technical SEO | | larose370 -
Struggling to get indexed and ranked
I am working on a brand new website and really struggling to get the site indexed and listed for it's business name! I don't normally struggle and have got clients ranked for much more challenging keywords so I'm a bit stuck! The site is a new domain and has been live for about two months. The business previously used an old domain and this has been correctly 301'd to the new domain. There is no duplicate content with any other website when checked through Copyscape.com Webmaster Tools has been set-up and verified and this shows the site is being crawled but in Google site:www.website.com.au shows no pages as being indexed. Google Places has been set-up and verified, the site has also been added to local citation sites. There are also a few incoming links from other sources. Robots.txt is fine and has been checked. Business name mentioned in the title tag, footer and throughout the site. Does anyone have any ideas how I might be able to get ranked or is it just a waiting game? Or have I missed out something really obvious?? My last step is doing a crawl test to see if this brings up anything I have missed. Thanks Karen
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
WHOIS-info a ranking factor?
Hi How important is it to configure your domain info in the same way as the contact info of your website? I heard having a long expiry date on the domain and having proper contact info helps create domain trust? Any tips on this? Info on how to set this up in an optimal way? Thanks in advance Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
What is campaign based rank tracking tool? How to use it?
I'm having difficulties with SEOmoz Rank Tracker tool. During last month, it hasn't worked properly. I was suggested to use "campaign based rank tracking tool"- I would like to learn if anyone has already used it? Thanks, Sema
Technical SEO | | WTGEvents0 -
PR Ranks
Do they really have a lot of value on how a site performs on Google? What is the best way to raise your PR Rank?
Technical SEO | | CalgaryRealtor390 -
How will a domain change affect my rankings?
My company will undergo a domain change in the next few months. Other than implementing 301 redirects, what else can I do to help the search engines realize the site has moved? What kind of impact on rankings can I expect to see? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | raylau0