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.
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
-
Which links to map across in site redesign
Hi there, I'm currently doing a fairly major website redesign for a client. They are moving to my hosting so I am creating the site on my cloud account and have edited my host files to work on it. The site structure will stay largely the same as it is quite a straightforward services site. However I'm moving them onto Wordpress from a different set up and I'm not sure how many of the links that they have, that aren't straight forward pages, I need to create redirects for. I have used Screaming Frog to get a list of all their URLs, of which there are 82. However alongside text/ html links I have: image/jpeg text/css
Web Design | | Frog-Marketing
application/javascript Do I need to create redirects for all of these link types? Or just any of the pages I'm not using? Many thanks, Sarah.0 -
Site redesign - 301 Redirects
I've just overhauled a website, leaving lots of former posts in the dust. I've set up a 404 redirect to the home page so that if anyone goes to one of those old pages they land on the home page instead of a dead 404. But, there's a couple urls from the old site I'd prefer to redirect to similar pages. These urls have forward slashes and I don't know how to get the slashes in when I copy it over to the new site. This is probably something easy, but I'm baffled. This www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury/whip-its-nitrous-oxide/ becomes this when I copy it www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury-whip-its-nitrous-oxide Can someone help me out?
Web Design | | julie-getonthemap0 -
What factors make a ranking difference between Desktop and Mobile?
Hi all, What makes a website rank better on mobile? Usually page load speed and mobile responsiveness matters and makes a difference to rank w website better on mobile than desktop. our website is surprisingly ranking better on Mobile but not much on desktop. What might influenced here in improvement in mobile ranking and drop in desktop? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Drop in rankings after AMP implementation because of lack of facebook comments
Hi, we are amplifying our site, but one of the things we can´t include on our AMP version is the Facebook comment box. Some of our articles have hundreds of comments on them and we noticed that Google was crawling those comments and using them as a ranking signal (the more comments the better we discovered). Now we are wondering if these articles would drop if we launch the AMP version without the comment box. As this would reduce the written content on those pages a lot. Anybody tested this before or has an idea on that would work out? Thanks for your help!
Web Design | | guidetoiceland1 -
Will interlinking using dynamic parameters in url help us in increasing our rankings
Hi, Will interlinking our internal pages using dynamic parameters(like abc.com/property-in-noida?source=footer) help us in increasing our rankings for linked pages OR we should use static urls for interlinking Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Google Translate with "no-follow" just for users' use, no ranking
Hello, I tried to search but here is a little unique situation. I would like to translate my website in 2-3 different languages not for ranking purpose, but only for some minority users within Italy to understand the content in their native language. Using "no-follow" with a Google Translate link would damage SEO? if not I would like to use it. Here are few points: Give users the ability to switch the content to their language with a link Tell Google not to follow the translated pages, because I don't want them to be used for ranking or searches I would start simply with Google Translate to see if people actually are interested, then later translate by human but still don't want google to follow I could also start with human translation instead of Google Translate if really needed, I know it is a no no. What I'm very interested is to make sure that those pages under "no-follow" won't affect my SEO in good or bad right now, because we would like to keep as it is. Thanks a lot
Web Design | | angelowei0 -
Usual time to index and rank a new site
Hi Just wondering if anyone knew how long it usually takes for a brand new site to get indexed and ranked? I launched a new site about 5 weeks ago. So far I have had 96,000 pages indexed but the majority haven't ranked particularly well or appeared. The ones that have ranked aren't ranking high even though they have better content than competitors sites... And my old domain. Do I just need to hang tight and wait till my domain authority improves? Is there anything I can do to speed up this process? cheers
Web Design | | DavidLenehan0 -
Can "poor" subdomains drop PR of the root domain?
The page rank of my company's website has dropped from a 6 to a 4 over the past year or so. In that time, we implemented subdomains for development sites to show clients progress on their websites. I noticed that our "dev" sites are being indexed while in development and my question is, will Google drop pagerank of our root domain purely off of these "dev" subdomains? Example - our site is www.oursite.com Dev site - development1.oursite.com I just began investigating the drop and this came to my mind yesterday but am not too sure what type of impact these non-credible subdomains will have on our root domain. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | ckilgore0