Did I cause my 70% drop in organic traffic?

[scrubcouture]

Held top 10 SERPS for brands over the past few years, did a site redesign on May 19th, site used to have a long left hand nav consisting of each brand I carried. Site redesign was an attempt to make it cleaner and more compact. Now the site has a top nav menu with categories based on garment type and the addition of a brand category, no fly out nav menu, these links just open the sub-category page.

On the 10th I checked my SERPS and almost threw up, off the map, no where to be found at all. Would a site redesign take almost 2 months to reflect? Am I being penalized by Google(no notification in GWT). I'm lost and thinking of how to tell my landlord I'm not going to be able to pay rent in a couple weeks.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Danny, did any of these responses answer your question?

[scrubcouture]

Thats looks interesting!

[scrubcouture]

I saw an increase after the redesign, that's why I'm so confused, last month was my best month ever YTD, now I'm down to 400 from 2500 organic search impressions a day. Everything dropped on the 10th, mozcast shows activity. googlebot is set to index, follow. Not familiar with record rule, i use a CMS. www.scrubcouture.com is the site in question here.

[socialengaged]

You may want to try Barracuda Panguin Tool. You have to connect to your analytics account first, but it shows your traffic decrease and on a timeline all penguin, panda and various algo's changes made by Google, with full explanations for each change. WIth this tool you may be able to understand wich changes affected you most, and repair

[BlueprintMarketing]

Make sure your category pages are linked to each other as well. So your architecture takes this form because of internal linking. Keep category page that is linked from another category page, and not the homepage, does not have as much link equity flowing to it and is now 2 levels deep into the architecture

When looking at the internal links of a website the main thing to consider is whether or not you are consistently sending the search engines to the correct page. This especially becomes a concern with large websites where the possibility of multiple pages targeting similar keywords is more apt to exist, and from a user, conversion and crawler perspective a preferred page exists.

Use http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

to make sure the site looks good to you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7XOy2cz0aQ&feature=player_embedded

Did you use a record rule firmly making the changes to this website?

I hope this is a account sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

You did a site redesign on 19 May and deployed then? If you did and saw a immediate decrease in the SERPS it is normal

However after this amount of time I imagine that you would at least be ranking for your brand words or something similar to that. However it can take over three months to gain your traffic back

If you have a Google Webmaster tools account and you do not have any messages from them telling you you and penalized and you have not been penalized.

Use mozcast.com

And compare that with your analytics data it will tell you if there was a change in Google that could've triggered this result.

Last but not least some web designers forget to do a no follow no index removal make sure that is not still there. You can use this cool check or look at your source code

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/robots-txt-generator/

Sincerely,

Thomas