I'm looking at a project to completely redesign a site - new urls for the vast majority of pages, new folder structures etc. Now I know all about redirecting the old pages permanently to the new pages, and I know to expect an initial drop in traffic as the new urls get crawled. My question is - can anyone who has gone through this process quantify how much of a drop they had in search engine traffic - 20% for a month? 50%? - say for a site that at the moment averages 2 thousand search engine generated visits a day across all search engines? Is there any way to know what to expect?
If all your Ducks are in a row....meaning you have the pages 301 redirected correctly. The site is set-up and optimized correctly. Then the drop will be minor for one month. I lost about 10% traffic and my keywords dropped about 3 spots on average. But after a month the site was right back where it was. Google is good not dropping you site too much.
I'm not sure if it is related, but I changed titles on my website and my traffic went down by 70%. Now it is almost 2 weeks after, but traffic still low. May be it is coincident and my problem not related to the title changes.
first off, mate,, if quantifying was that easy, we would see many search engine like google.. its not easy .. rather it differs for everybody indexed in google and depends on google for traffic. i did a major change i had to start from square one. If you can keep the page tree structure intact with same titles, descriptions, you can be back on track with a small hickup (my be a month or two) but if the change is major.. consider starting from ZERO. again.. no body can give you concrete analysis or estimation of the % drop in traffic or serp rankings..