Hi all, I have recently updated one of my websites, I have changed all link structure, added page titles, keywords, h1, h2 and the rest of on page SEO. when I have uploaded the new sitemap.xml to google I have noticed the number of indexed pages dropped from 599 to 29 pages, also traffic dropped from search engines such as google and yahoo..... I used to be no 2 on yahoo for some keywords even though my website was not optimized at all...search results 1,140,000,000 I was no 2 now I am on page 5........ Is this something normal and how long will it take for my 6mths SEO hard work to start paying off??? Please help... Thanks to you all..
I think you have read through all SEO advice regarding to a mass change on on-page factors could caused temporarily lost in website ranking already. If you never had read any of it I will sum them up in short here Hope this help Title Tag : This is the most important on-page factor for now. Any change made on this tag only could bring your site down for a while. It should take around 7 - 20 days before things settled. Google has a much aware when you did change on title since many webmasters abused them before. They have to take a look and evaluate site ranking again. Meta Description / Meta Keywords : Has a little to no effect unless you do spam on Meta keywords tag. That could be a huge lost for your site for the spam activity. H1 - H6 : These tags could give you a positive effect if you do use them properly. Please remember - H tag is use for only important wording you want to emphasize and not a content. You should not put too much wording / long phrase / long sentence on H tag or your page would be degraded / banned by Google. Content : It has a little to no effect unless you have done a mass change on them, or change a whole page. As you mentioned you did change a whole page then you should not surprise about rank shaking. You should already prepared for this when you made a change like this. Your six months SEO effort will not in vain. Be patient and careful before do any change next time. Especially on title tag and content area.
Sxperm! I can not thank you enough for your help! Thanks I have changed the title tag to make it more descriptive I did not change it completely e.g I did not change it from sell cars to sell houses.. The previous pages did not have contents so I have added contents to them with keywords implemented I made sure each page describes its self in title, h1, h2 contents, keywords. I have changed all long URLs from this mysite.com/folder/old_page_not_example.html to mysite.com/new-page/ I have added new pages to the site.... Thats all, I think as you said I have to wait and I hope it works... Could you please let me know is h1 needs to be used only once on each page??? I have used it just once on each page I hope this is right... Thanks Sxperm and thanks to all DP users for the help and support...
It does not matter the way you change. Even if you change from "sell cars" to "sell car" then it does still count as a change, even single character has been added. Yes that is right. As I said, H tag is used for emphasize purpose so just use once per page is enough I hope your site could get back to rank as it were. However, I cannot guarantee about this since you made a lot of change. When this type change has been applied, Google will re-evaluate the page value. I hope you done on right thing and no spam like has been made. Good luck mate.
My purpose of the complete change: the site needed a face lift, bad menu navigation and no SEO has been done on the site at all. Spam is not on my list as you can see. Thanks for your help