New Website SEO Implications

[I.AM.Strategist]

Hi Moz Community,

A client of mine has launched a new website. The new website is well designed, mobile friendly, fast loading and offers a far better UX than the old site. It has similar content but 'less wordy'.

The old website was tired, slow, not mobile responsive etc but still ranked well. The domain has marketing leading authority and link metrics.

Since the launch, the rankings for virtually every word has plummeted. Even previously ranked #1 words have disappeared to page 3 or 4.

New pages have different URLs (301s from the old urls are working fine) and still score the same 98% (using the Moz page optimiser tool).

Is it usual to experience some short term pain, or are these rankings drop an indication that something else is missing?

My theory is that the new URLs are being treated like new pages, and that those new pages don't have the engagement data which is used for ranking. Thus, despite having the same authority of the old pages, as far as user data is concerned, they are new pages and therefor, not ranking well - yet.

That theory would make logical sense but I'm hoping some experts here can help. Any suggestions welcome.

Here's a quick checklist of things I have already done:

complete 301 redirect list
New sitemap
Submitted to console
Created internal links from within their large blog
Optimised all the new pages (img alts, H1s etc)

Extra info:

Platform changed from Wordpress to Expression engine
Target pages now on level 3 not level 2 (extra subfolder used)
Less words used (average word count per page from 400+ to 250)

Thanks in advance

[I.AM.Strategist]

Thank you so much for the extremely long and detailed response.

Here's an example URL: https://www.bodycatalyst.com.au/technology/cryolipolysis-fat-freezing

The /technology/ sub folder is new. This target page now doesn't have a link from the homepage which I suspect is a critical factor.

[Dezzign]

The joy of the new site eh. Sometimes no matter what you do this can't be helped and is just temporary. You've completely changed your site framework and URL structures so it may take a little time for Google to trust the site again.

But firstly, some blatantly obvious things like.

1. check robots.txt file for unintended blocks
2. check some of your main pages' canonical tags to ensure they are matching the real URL
3. check for nofollow & noindex tags in the source code on some of the main pages
4. check your country and language targeting hasn't changed in your hreflang="en-us" tags
5. check you haven't accidentally changed the country targeting in Webmaster tools
6. check a whole bunch of your old URLs to double check the redirect chain. Use a tool like https://httpstatus.io/ and paste in a bunch of them
7. check your htaccess file for some kind of accidental googlebot block ( RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^googlebot [NC,OR] ) (some devs use this)
8. check if any old trusted schema markup been completely taken out

As far as content length goes, I wouldn't worry about that as long as it is good content - but that also depends what niche your site is in and whether or not content length is a factor.

But you say, you have added an extra folder to your URLs. This is usually worse. Was your old URL:
example.com/clean-short.html   -  and now you have
example.com/useless-folder/another-one/now-long-full-keyword-here.html  - This URL structure would hurt your rankings no matter what you do.

If you have changed all of the following it will be a bumpy ride:

1. your URL structure and the keywords in it
2. your main title tag
3. the content of your H1 & H2 tags

Share your URL if you want some further advice as someone may see something very obvious that you've overlooked, but without seeing the live site it makes it harder to help.