Is Fall In Keyword Ranking After Launch of Revamped Website Normal
-
After launching my redesigned website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) Google ranking has dropped significantly for competitive keywords. The previous version of the site and the new version both have approximately 450 pages. My website developer was careful to implement 301 redirects.
Monitoring Google Webmaster tools it shows that Google has picked up a quantity of duplicate content. More than 950 pages or shown in their index while my site only has 450 pages. There are also certain pages which require canonical which tags my developer is in the process of implementing.
The relaunch was July 10. My developer is of the opinion that this fluctuation in ranking is normal and that it will take Google about one month to reindex the new site and remove the old pages from the directory. Is this accurate?
Anyone have any ideas on why my site has tanked in Google's search results?
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Alan Rosinsky -
The previous version of the site and the new version both have approximately 450 pages. My website developer was careful to implement 301 redirects.
Two comments.
-
If the 301s were done correctly and this site does not have a lot of links then it might take weeks for google to find the 450 new pages, get them indexed and forget the 450 old URLs.
-
Maintaining the rankings requires more than redirects. If the onpage optimization elements (title, h1, etc.) were not maintained or if they were changed then rankings could tank. I have seen lots of cases where developer puts the same title tag on every page and rankings tank, or developer puts site in frames, or uses javascript links because he thinks they are cool.
One of my competitors had a redesign done and developer noindexed all the the pages. It took them a couple weeks to figure it out after the site disappeared - but rankings came back immediately after the fix. So, technical glitch can cause problems too.
-
-
Your developer is about right. It is normal to have fluctuations after a page redesign. Even more if you changed the URL structure.
Although 301 do carry pagerank, it is diluted just about the same as if it was a link. So you are actually loosing some pagerank by going with a different URL structure.
Make sure you implement rel=canonical to all pages that were moved or a 301.
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
-
Competitor's new site ranking with out much keywords - How?
Hi all, One of our competitors have recently redesigned their website with new content. Now I can see much less keywords in the content. And page title also changed away from keywords. Still this is ranking at good position. How? Previously they used to have much landing pages with related keywords which some of them are missing now. Still I wonder why this website is ranking high? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Recovering organic traffic and Google rankings post-site-crash
Hi everyone, we had a client's Wordpress website go down about 2 weeks ago and since then organic traffic has basically plummeted. We haven't identified exactly what caused the crash, but it happened twice in one week. We spent a lot of time optimizing the site for organic SEO, improving load times, improving user experience, improving the website content, improving CTR, etc. Then one morning we get a notification from our uptime monitoring service that the site was down, and upon further inspection we believe it may have been compromised. The child theme that the website was using, all of the files were deleted and/or blank. We reverted the website to a previous backup, which fixed the problem. Then, a few days later, the same exact thing happened, only this time the child theme files were missing after the backup was restored. We've since re-installed and reconfigured the child theme, changed all passwords (Wordpress, FTP, hosting, etc.), and we're looking into changing hosting providers in the very near future. The site uses the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which has recently been reported as having some security flaws. Maybe that was the cause of the problem. Regardless, the primary focus right now is to recover the organic traffic and Google rankings that we've worked so hard to improve over the past few months up until this disaster occurred. The client is in a very competitive niche and market, so I'm pretty frustrated that this has happened after we were making such great progress, Since the website went down, organic search traffic has decreased by 50%. The site and all internal pages are loading properly again (and have been since the second time the website went down), but Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting a number of pages as "not found" witht he crawl dates as early as this past weekend. We've marked all errors as "fixed", and also re-submitted the Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools. The website passes the "mobile-friendly" tests, received A and B grades in GTMMetrix (for whatever that's worth), and still has the same original Google Maps rankings as before. The organic traffic, however, and organic rankings on Google have seen a pretty dramatic decrease. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to recovering a website's authority and organic traffic after it's experienced some downtime?
Web Design | | georgetsn0 -
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Moz crawl showing up ?s=keyword pages as errors
Hi all, Hoping someone can she some light on a fix with ref to wordpress and the search function it uses as Moz is craling some pages which reference the search domain.com/?s=keyword Errors showing up are duplicate pages, descriptions and titles. The search function is not important on this site and I have tried to use a plugin which disables the search page which it does but these errors still show up. Can anyone assist as this is the final piece of the puzzle and then we're down to 0 issues on the site.
Web Design | | wtfi0 -
Would you consider these website designs an upgrade?
Hello everyone, I've asked a few questions in here regarding website design, etc. So first I want to thank you guys for the responses, and second I want to apologize I hope I am not boring you guys. I just feel like this is a forum of qualified people and I value your opinions greatly. Now to my question, I am considering a redesign as we are not happy with our current site located http://www.studentdebtrelief.us/. We think it feels outdated, not structured well, no good call to actions, ten different fonts, blurry images, does have good integration with social media, boring and bland news page, etc. I just wanted some opinions on these other sites that were designed by the fellow we are considering hiring. I've gotten some feedback from a friend that he doesn't think they would be an upgrade from our current site, which I totally disagree with. Though I am the first to admit design/creativity is not my strong suit, so I don't value my own opinion on this very much either, lol. I am hoping I can get some insight from you guys here. Do you think the designs below are of higher quality than our current site? Would you be more inclined to continue reading these sites than our own? Is there one in particular you think is the best? http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/archive.jpg http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/zazachat.jpg http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/jetpeppers3.jpg http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pbs_9001.png http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fidgetfeed.png http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/haute.jpg http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/worketc-732x1362.jpg Thanks for the help
Web Design | | DemiGR0 -
Is anyone using Humans.txt in your websites? What do you think?
http://humanstxt.org Anyone using this on their websites and if so have you seen and positive benefits of doing so? Would be good to see some examples of sites using it and potentially how you're using the files. I'm considering adding this to my checklist for launching sites
Web Design | | eseyo1 -
What do YOU look for when reviewing technical website criteria?
Wanted to get everyone's thoughts on this. One of my clients was asking me what they thought of a certain website design company. They wanted to use this company because their designs were very beautiful but wanted to be sure that contracting them would be the right decision. After I made my formal review and recommendation I thought this might be a great topic of discussion for the amazing SEOMOZ community. So, what factors do you look at when determining which design firms are worth their weight?
Web Design | | JusinDuff0 -
For a varied product type or keywords group is it best to have several sites?
Hello everyone... Question: I have 7-8 generic keywords that I would like to rank for, is it possible for one site to rank highly for all these different keywords, or would this be best achieved by making 2 or 3 websites in total targeting different keywords (product sectors)? More info: We are in a niche industry & would like to know if it would be beneficial to have several websites made for specific product types rather than one main site? Although these sub classifications of products are nice, they are competitive as they have a high search volume Would it be better to build specific websites that only do that one type of product and have related keyword in domain, content & blogs on the site to that effect to increase relevance and positions as a result? Thanks
Web Design | | Ray_UK0
