Is Fall In Keyword Ranking After Launch of Revamped Website Normal
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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