Rankings Dropped After Redesign

[diyorgasms]

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

[diyorgasms]

Ok thanks, I just did it as always thought it was good practice.

[AlanMosley]

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

[diyorgasms]

What do you exactly mean with this comment?

Thanks

[EGOL]

(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.

[AlanMosley]

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

[JustinTaylor88]

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.

1. 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.
2. Set up the "old"  site in SeoMoz's web app with exactly the same keywords as you have set up for the new site
3. Run the on page reports for the keywords in which your rankings have changed on the new site and old site.
4. 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!

[diyorgasms]

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

[OptimizeSmart]

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.