I recently launched a redesign of a site with a client (www.expotv.com). All 301 redirects were properly implemented and have been tested until we were blue. Mod_rewrites were set up to prevent duplicate indexing throughout the site. My robots.txt file was set up properly. The new site is much more seo friendly and contains well structured visible content. Since the launch and recrawl, we’ve seen as much as an 87% drop in organic traffic. The site launched on April 27th and now (may 11th) we are still seeing the traffice dropping day by day. The site has been fully crawled and recrawled, and our index is roughly 41,000 pages (mostly consisting of product level pages with reviews, thousands of different kinds of products). With keyword research, we’ve found that the top level pages (home, about, general category pages) are doing better than the old site, but the product level pages have dropped off the face of the earth. The keywords from the product level pages is what drove the majority of our traffic though. How come with the 301 redirects properly in place did we lose so much relevancy? Has anyone seen this much of a drop off with a site relaunch? If so, how long does it take to start to see a rebound? We expected a drop, but not a continual drop. Why are the product pages having so much trouble ranking? The important ones can be accessed in a page depth of 2 or 3 clicks (for crawlers). I’ve also noticed that all of the product pages, which dropped so heavily in rank with the redesign, now have a google PR of “n/aâ€. here's a product page: http://www.expotv.com/videos/reviews/8/Sony-HDRSR1-AVCHD-4MP-30GB-HighDefini/39877 Note: the site has not engaged in any grey or black hat techniques. No hidden text, no spamming, etc… Only videos are in flash, the site is 90% html search engine friendly content.
I am seing a lot of grey for new pages too, although those are already in the index and cached. It's almost as if Google has implemented some new page age thing. My guess would be, that everything gets back to normal within two months.
umm, im starting to get worried now because lately i have read a lot of similar stories to this, and i am currently finishing off the redesign of our company website, which currently has a high pr and page 1 ranks for competitive keywords.
Is it broken? If not why redesign? I have gone through several redesigns on my own sites, but I have not done a whole lot of forwards. I have rather tried to keep the url structure by setting some intelligent mod rewrites, so the Engines would still find the url where they were looking for instead of being sent somewhere else.