New URL Structure caused virtually All rankings to drop 5 to 10 positions in latest report ?.. Is this normal
-
Hi All,
We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' ) and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago.
We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions i.e from 3rd to 10th etc...
Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells.
I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?..
Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated...
thanks
Pete
.
-
Hi yeah I meant fetch and render.
-
Hi ,
Sorry, Do you mean using Fetch or something else ?.. We have almost 10K pages so how can I re-crawl the site in Webmasters ?..
We have submitted new maps and I can see from the stats that Google Did crawl the site last on Friday 14th .
thanks
Pete
-
Generally it makes sense that this can/does happen. One thing i would say, have you re-crawled the site in webmasters?, if not google may still be crawling your site and finding 404 pages. This is something that google doesn't like and could have an adverse effect on rankings
Thanks
-
I know you are pinning this on the structure of the site, however, when did your structural change take place? Could you have also taken a small hit from the recent penguin / panda refresh that has seemed to have rolled out recently??
We certainly saw a little movement here.
This is a link to an article from Barry Schwartz on the rumblings.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-shift-panda-penguin-19437.html -
As soon as you change URL structure you are creating new URLs. So effectively you are giving Google a new site to work with. The 301's and current link profile will help to pull those new URLs into shape for Google and to have a drop is expected.
I would be focusing on getting some more quality links coming in and create new content to help the recovery process and move into a stronger position.
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
-
Reasonable to Ask URL of Link from SEO Providing New Links before Link Activation?
My firm has hired an SEO to create links to our site. We asked the SEO to provide a list of domains that they are targeting for potential links. The SEO did not agree to this request on the grounds that the list is their unique intellectual property. Alternatively I asked the SEO to provide the URL that will be linking to our site before the link is activated. The SEO did not agree to this. However, they did say we could provide comments afterwards so they could tweak their efforts when the next 4-5 links are obtained next month. The SEO is adamant that the links will not be spam. For whatever it is worth the SEO was highly recommended. I am an end user; the owner and operator of a commercial real estate site, not an SEO or marketing professional. Is this protectiveness over process and data typical of link building providers? I want to be fair with the provider and hope I will be working with them a long time, however I want to ensure I receive high quality links. Should I be concerned? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
New site migration (multiple sites into one + new domain)
Hi, I have read so many very helpful guides and experiences from you guys that will greatly help me but I have a few questions please. Our company has 3 sites, the main site and 2 sites for different product ranges: BrandProductName.com (main site - DA = 22 raking well for product name) Productname2.com (DA = 10 ranking very well for product name and little competition) BrandProductName3.com (DA = 10 poor ranking) We wish to bring all the sites into one with categories for the 3 different product. The main site is an e-commerece site whereas the other 2 are not (currently). On top of this as the main domain has one of the product names in it they wish to change the domain to be just Brandname.com. So the plan is to combine site 2 and 3 into site 1 and change that domain name. As you can imagine this is going to be quite a job. I am fairly happy with the steps required (having read all the guides and migrated many sites in the past) but with the added domain name change this is a little daunting. So my questions are: Should I merge the 3 sites into 1 and then changed the domain at a later point? Should I change the domain of the main site first and then merge site 2 and 3 in later? Should I just do it all together? Or based on the data i have provided do you disagree with the plan, what would you recommend? We are not in a massive rush to complete all of this so we have the time to plan and execute this when we are fully ready. Any help / advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csimmo0 -
Website redesign, some urls are no longer available. How do I mitigate ranking drops?
I am currently refreshing my WordPress business website. I used a theme that had a built in portfolio option. I wanted to strip down the bloat and move to something more simple to better articulate my message. Upon switching themes I will loose my urls for my portfolio projects. I should have never used this built in function but it did exactly what I needed and wanted here is an example. http://silvernailwebdesign.com/portfolio-view/central-jersey-claims-association-wordpress-consulting/ Now on my staging site these portfolio pieces have vanished and the urls are indexed with google. I could create posts and recreate the portfolio pieces however the problem with the url is the /portfolio-view/ portion. I cannot recreate the part of the url. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I receive some traffic through the portfolio pages but not much, however, I do not want to loose any traffic. I am looking for a strategy that will solve this url issue with WordPress. I have about 10 separate portfolio pages with this url issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Different URL structure Desktop VS Mobile Regarding SEO when building a new seperate mobile site
Hi I have a old OScommerce webshop, that i will keep for now, but i have build a complete new mobile site for mobile devices, but it has another url structure. Can i launch this site without any problems when its Google Mobile Search Engine that index the mobile site, and then just make the neccesary rel alternate tags for the desktop site for the product pages and main categories that i can. There will be some differences in the urls i cant make a alternate for.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | noerdar0 -
My website has dropped in the rankings drastically. How can I get it back up the SERPs?
I manage a website that I took over 6 months ago - the site was sitting happily on page one of google so I haven't had to do much to keep it there - other than a few onsite improvements. However, last week the site dropped off the SERPs. The site is http://www.pro-techairconditioning.co.uk/content/home.html Could someone please suggest reasons for this and ways to solve the problem? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SWD.Advertising0 -
Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls
Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
For example: http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!0 -
Adding video snippet caused drop of star rating snippet in google SERP. Any solution to show both?
We are using on our product pages review schema markup which showed up well in google SERP. Now we added schema video markup as well and google shows in SERP now only the video snippet, but not the review snippet anymore. Any idea whether there may be a solution to show both video and review snippets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Sudden rank drop for 1 keyword
A page of mine (http://loginhelper.com/networks/facebook-login/) was ranking in the top 10 for keyword (facebook login) and has been for at least 2 months, moving between 5th and 10th. Suddenly in the last 3 days the rank for the keyword dropped from 7th to 46th, yet none of the other keywords have been affected (they target other pages) and their ranks have continued to improve. I am trying to figure out what caused this sudden drop in the ranking of 1 page (the page has quality mainly text based content and isn't in the least bit shallow or spammy) I have been thinking perhaps a crawl or server error may be to cause leaving the page temporarily unavailable or with a big load time... Otherwise what could cause one page to drop so much so quickly whilst other pages improved their rank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netboost0