New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?

[JamesBryant]

Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site.

My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all?

The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map.

Any help would be gladly received.

Thanks

James

[David-Kley]

It can take a while, sometimes up to a few months. Google doesn't work fast, and it looks like you have already resubmitted the sitemap and fetched the pages. When we launched our new site, we saw a drop for a month, then we started to come back. Now after 6 months, we are higher than we ever were.

"Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages"

Agreed.

Was the new site launched on the same domain?

[McTaggart]

If you want to DM me a few more details I'll take a quick look. Did you make any significant changes... hosting/domain/CMS? Have you compared speed of updated site to old one?

[JamesBryant]

Thanks for your response, most of the urls remained the same and the small amount that weren't were 301'd correctly.

The things we are noticing are some less optimal anchors and the HTML site map missing but the XML site map correct.

I will look into the possibility of toxic links but I think this is less likely as there are not too many links and it seems a massive coincidence that it happened 3 days after the site update, but who knows!

[JamesBryant]

Thanks for the article, the old site has been restored but the rankings have not come back after 3 days, would you have expected them to be back now?

[TheeDigital]

Normally a traffic drop like this is because someone failed to do 301 redirects of the old pages to new pages. I can't imagine the new site having enough technical issues or things wrong with on page optimization to cause the drop. It is also interesting timing, as the latest Penguin update happened recently, so the new site may not be the problem at all, but instead could be toxic links.

[McTaggart]

This is very useful when you're managing a migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos - without specific details I can't advise on other issues...