What would you call a dramtic drop in search engine ranking? I have redeveloped a site and the client has told me that "their has been a dramtic drop on the search engine pages with a given search string now that the new site is live, then when they did the same search with the old site" They have told me that the site is now listed on the second page or dropped a few places on the first page. To me this is not a dramatic drop as the new site has only been live for 3 weeks and I am not fully reindexed with the search engines (though Goolge seem to be doing a far better job than MSN or Yahoo at this time). Am I wrong and do I need to worry?
Second page is not a drastic drop, rankings can fluctuate a lot daily on some terms, by fluctuate I mean a lot more than dropping to page 2! If you just did a redesign have you kept the same text/copy and meta tags? If your keywords density for that term has changed it may be the reason. Did you keep the site structure & page names the same? That could also be a reason.
If you can pinpoint a change you made to the page thats the subject of the drop then change it back. Its unlikely to be anything to do with the actual design - more likely a title change maybe.
Thanks lads, Its been a complete redsign. The guy who had it never placed anything new on it for over 3 years and just left it dormant. I don't think there is anything I haven't changed, meta info, new page titles, upto date content, everything. I'm more than happy with the way things have gone (in fact one search string that we never came up on now has us on the 2nd page of Google) and I think it might be just the client not understanding how things work that is giving them the wobbly legs, even though I have explain it to them time and time again.
Try using the google adwords tool to check the volume of searches to the terms you used to rank for compared to the volume for the terms you rank for with the new design. If you can show an increase in traffic to the site then it doesn't really matter about individual 'trophy' rankings.
I measure "drastic drops" not by where I am on the serps per say...but by how much traffic I have lost ... i could be on the second page but only lost 5% of my traffic. If I lose 2o% or more of my traffic I start to worry.