Hi, Recently I re-worked my website and put all the content in a database. This of course changed my urls, so I put 301 redirects into the .htaccess and recreated the sitemap (incl xml verison). Now traffic has dropped right off, the site is is still in google (verified by site:www.domain.com) but no longer ranks 1st page for the terms it did before. It's still 1st place in Bing etc but is way down in Google (I can't even find it any more). Is it usual for this to happen? I thought the redirects would maintain my position. One other thing, as part of the site re-work I included a new blog which talks about a multitude of subjects. Is it possible that the blog dilutes my site's subject matter? I am tempted to re-install my old site. Thanks
Doing a full Re-Work on any website is risky business and will always dramatically drop your traffic at first. What I always do when re-working a site is create a bridge between the new site and the old site until the new site becomes stable, by keeping the old site and slowly removing it when the necessary pages on the new site get indexed properly etc. It takes a bit of time, but the reworked site will pick up eventually.
Yeah!! it does impact the rankings. But, if the contents are not changed, you can expect to get back the rankings soon if all the 301 redirects are okay.
Google uses file creation dates as a ranking factor, so if you over wrote your old index with a new one, with new creation date, thats usually a pretty big factor.