I had a minisite built in a WP blog. The site is a year old. It had excellent position in the SERPS for many important keywords. The site had 20 pages indexed in Google. Following the great positioning of the site, I decided to invest in it. I changed the site to a Drupal site, built 20 more pages, redesigned everything, but I maintained the Titles & urls of the old pages in the new design, to preserve the links and also to preserve the SERP position. Once the site was ready, I changed the IP's, pointing to the new server. In 5 days, the site has stopped ranking for most of the keywords it ranked for and now there are only 7 pages indexed. Do any of you have experienced with something like this before? Why has the page almost disappeared from Google SERPS (it still is there for some keywords), but lost about 75% of traffic an SERPS. I have just added a sitemap, but have a hard time understanding what has helped
Maybe the drastic change made Google look at it as a new site, so now everything has to start form scratch.
Why? Would not make much sense. Content, title & url in the old pages is the same in the new site, so the pages which were there in the old site have not changed at all. I have added new content to the site and changed the site from a Wordpress to a Drupal Platform. Site has improved much also and has some new content. It just does not make any sense. Has anybody experienced this before?
phinelinda is right - you basically re-made the site for the search engines... What's with the IPs? The domain is located in a different location now?
Wait for some time and your results will be back to normal. i had this problem when i redesigned my site
The site structure is the same, (as far as urls). The urls follow similar structure as before. The 20 pages which were indexed before, are exactly the same in the new site (same structure & url). I am not saying you are wrong, since it is evident I have lost the rankings, but I do not understand in what sense has the structure of the site changed.
THe site was remade for the human visitor, not for the SE's. I just used the same structure as before. The domain is located somewhere else, this could explain partly a change in the serps, but not the number of pages indexed, or so I think.
Midi is spot on: If your hosting has changed countries you might have been moved into a different index, exspecaily if you are using a not country spefic domain like a .com. This can be corrected in the google webmaster tools. Also adding a lot of new content can lose you ranking, sometimes your kudos will then be spread across more URLs meaning you don't have enought left to rank very well. Sometime small sites have the best chance of ranking on high compertition terms.
Did you change your meta description from one site to the other? And did you check to make sure the drupal site has the meta description tag in the header? I know it sounds kinda silly, but I have seen this kind of thing happen to one of my sites. And it was directly related to the meta description. About 6 months ago I changed the theme on one of my wordpress blogs. The problem was, the new theme did not have the meta description tag. After changing the theme, within a couple of days the site disappeared from its steady ranking in certain keywords. It went from page 1 and 2, to past page 50 in 2 weeks. The site was usually losing 1 - 2 pages every couple of days. When I found the problem, and restored the meta description tag to the header, the site recovered its ranking in a mater of days. Since that experience, I have changed the theme 3 more times. As long as the meta description is in place, the site stays steady.
Changed cities, same country, but it is a .net, so I will follow your advice and select my country in Webmaster tools. Will not heart, for sure. Thanks for the suggestion. I could understand and agree to that, but what I do not understand is why some of the pages do not show when I run the search query: site:http://www.mydomain.com As said, I expected SERPS to change overall, expected traffic to increase due to the new content and much better aspect of the site and content for thye user (among other things, I took 3 block of adsense out and site has no advertising anymore), but did not expect any of the pages to disappear from the index. I am having trouble understanding why this has happened. I have the feeling that in some days, the full site will be indexed again and hopefully increase visits, I just do not understand why they have disappeared if the urls and structure are the same THanks. actually the site did not have keywords or desciption before, now I added a description tag and keywords to every single page, so it should improve versus old, but again, what I do not undesrtand is it disapearing from the SERPS.
Why not change it back to wordpress? You will probably regain your rankings slowly. If this isnt an option just acquire some nice backlinks and improve the content on the site. Good luck
Just give it a couple of weeks, you should be back to your initial SERPs. Meanwhile continue building links and adding content
I've had this happen before when moving sites from one hosting company to another - the site bounced for awhile then came back.
Everyone here is stabbing in the dark because they cannot look at your site. Why don't you post your URL(s) and some of those important keywords that you used to rank for (and their approximate old ranks) so that we can actually 'research' your problem rather than throwing out wild guesses.
Nobody knows for sure how Google ranks anything. I do think that IP addresses play an important part. In fact, probably the most important part. Basically, traffic is routed over the internet based on IPs, not domain names. When you change hosting, you change IPs. Now, Google might give some consideration to a Domain name, but who knows for sure? I wouldn't really worry about it too much. Make sure you have the basics covered. No broken links, a good sitemap, and make use of the robots.txt file. Google really loves this one
The sudden change must have affected it. I am sure eventually google will re-index you and put your links back to same position they were at. But that might take time. Try submitting a reconsideration request to google. IP address should not be an issue, as I moved servers recently as well, and haven't seen any decline in traffic.
i was thinking to change my blog template too,(because IE load my website having problem) but i also heard before some people said it will loose some ranking and traffic. in my case, i still using wordpress, did not change to other platform
I spent 9 months last year planning a complete site redesign. We were an ASP site and converted to a CMS where all page names are extensionless. I changed EVERY URL on the 4000+ page site. I changed the layout (theme) of EVERY page on the site. I changed EVERY <title>, EVERY <h1> (and added them where they didn't exist), added numerous <h2>s to almost every page, changed EVERY <meta name="description"> element... 1 month after the redesign Google had recrawled most of our inbound links, and we were already ranking better for almost all of our keyword phrases. We rank better now and get more organic traffic than the company ever has in it's 10 year history. So do NOT avoid making changes to your site because you think there is some kind of penalty for doing so. It has nothing to do with Google not liking changes. 99 times of 100 when people make changes to things like <title>, <h1>, themes, etc. and see negative effects, it is their own fault for not having thought through what they are doing. They do stupid $hit like change the <title>, <h1>, etc. to what they 'think' it 'should' be without looking at which keywords are already bringing traffic to that page or without looking at the backlinks to that page to see what keyword phrases are being used by other sites to link to the page. And then they wonder why their rankings dropped... and blame it on Google not liking them changing their page... That is total BS. Changing your site requires serious thought and planning, but if done properly you will get predictable results... BIG improvements in rankings and traffic.