Google place 7 -> 40, why??

[ie4mac]

Hi,

my new site http://www.ie-mac.com/ just dropped 33 places from place 7 to place 40 on goolge.com , for the two word combo: ie mac

Did I screw up? How?

Background Info:

1 Two weeks ago I moved my whole site from my old domain http://ie4mac.com/ to http://www.ie-mac.com/ with the goal of obtaining a good ranking for the keyword combo: ie mac. Apparantly tis worked- The site showed up on place 7.

2. I changed the design of the site and put the video on the front page. Good so far, still place 7, but: The text that google was showing was half the ALT-Tag of the Video first-slide image and the other half was our trademark disclaimer.

3. I changed the ALT tag and the disclaimer to give users a more inviting text on google. THis worked, google now shows the text as intended, but: For the desired combo: ie mac the site dropped to palce 40!!

My best guesses at this point:

1. I'm using wordpress as a CMS and the all-in-one-seo-pack plugin to set custom titles etc., and the google XML sitemap plugin to buid an XML sitemap and notify google. During the couple of days, I made a lot of chnages to the site. Could be that the plugin pinged google a lot of times. Could this be part of the problem?

2. The site is hosted at http://www.ixwebhosting.com/ , because they give users dedicated IPs and a good price. However, the loadlevel on the server I'm on is always very high (10 - 20). I'm using a CDN for images and a caching plugin so the site loads in less than 2 seconds according to http://tools.pingdom.com/ . Unless the cache is empty, then it's 9 seconds. This is not great, but it's also no new, so:

What could have caused the sudden drop from 7 to 40??

Thank you and kind regards

[ie4mac]

Hi Keri,

that's an interesting idea. I thought about it: Right now, I don't feel ready to write a post like that. I'll keep it in mind though: If I have to move a site again I will prepare it better, do more detailed monitoring and if that works, I'll have material to write a post that's worth reading

Thank you!

Timon

[KeriMorgret]

If you have some lessons learned that would make for an interesting blog post, feel free to write it up and submit it to YOUmoz!

Glad to be able to help, and sorry I didn't get in here sooner with the GWT link [my avatar doesn't readily show it, but I am an associate for SEOmoz and I try to help provide timely help].

[ie4mac]

Hi Keri,

now that was a helpful answer! No, the old site wasn't verified. The new one will be. During this move I learned a lot ... Next time I have to move a site I will follow the procedure outlined on the page you posted.

Thank you!

Timon

[KeriMorgret]

Or quickly in some aspects at least. I'm glad for your site it's working well. A thought -- have you done a change of address in Google Webmaster Tools (if the old domain was verified)? Wouldn't hurt. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83106

[ie4mac]

Hey Keri,

thank you for asking!

Yes, it did recover. For a couple of days it was on place 8, i.e. almost as good as before.

Then, after some minor changes on site, it dropped slightly (place 13 now). I'm sure it will recover from that, too. What I learned form this whole experiences is that google reacts quickly, either way. Therefore I'll be much more patient during future drops following onsite changes

Cheers,

Timon

[KeriMorgret]

Timon, how is your site doing now? Has it recovered, or are there still issues?

[ie4mac]

Hi Damien,

thank you! I hope what you wrote applies in this case, too. I do not yet have the experience to find this normal. If there is, in fact, no big screw up to be found and it just takes time to recover, I'll give it time.Knowing it's normal definetly makes me feel better.

Thank you!

Timon

[krissy-cca]

Timon,

I would give it a bit more time - rankings usually drop with a site change like this. I even have it with pages that are ranking and then I change them when they're not moving domain.

DD

[ie4mac]

Hi Lewis,

I have the site crawled by seomoz and checked out the results. There a a few minor things to sort out (i.e. too long urls in old blog postings etc.), but non of them are new.

I would have expected a dip during the transition, as you wrote. But first the opposite happened (good placement, place 7, first page), followed by a huge dro (place 40, i.e. last spot on 4th page).

Is such a big drop normal? Should I just wait? Or am I still missing some big mistake here??

Thank you!

Timon

[ie4mac]

Hi Damien,

yes I did. In fact, I kept the URL structre and 301 redirected all pages. Checked that redirections work, too.

[CPU]

Assuming everything else being equal it is often the case that when a site is moved to a new URL and 301 redirected (which I see you have done) that there is a short term dip in rankings and traffic.

If you have access to the Campaign tools here I would set up a campaign for that site and the crawl diagnostics may point you in the right direction of any problems you may have introduced during the switch.

[krissy-cca]

Hey,

Did you identify all of your most authoritative pages and 301 them to the new URLs? or have you simply 'switched one off and turned the other on'?