New Site Redesign, Google Listings Now Either Strange or Gone Entirely

After launching our redesigned website, Google listings are gone or strange

[paully11]

Hello all-

I am curious to hear any ideas you may have about the following situation:

Early this week, the company I work for launched a redesigned version of our ecommerce website. Prior to this week, our old version was ranked highly for many of our products on Google. Several products had the number one page rank for searches of the product name.

Following the launch of the new design, our Google ranks have dropped off dramatically, and many of those that remain have a very simple appearance in the Google Search Results that lacks a Page title or description.

To view this listing, go to Google and search for the keyword "[snip]". This result is the sixth result down from the top. Many of our other products are suffering from similar search results.

Is this problem simply the fault of our code changes, and if so, can anyone pick out the problem in our HTML? Our development team does not seem to have any specific advice on this problem so I would like to pose it to everyone out there for feedback.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing all of your thoughts.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 7:24 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2004]
[edit reason] Removed URI References and Specifics - Please refer to TOS [/edit]

[The_Hitcher]

Theres not enough info here for us to go on but it does depend what you term a 'redesign' have page names changed?, Does the new site create new obstacles that Googlebot is unable to traverse, ie weird menus and the like?

Its rare that you get a developer, designer and an SEO all rolled into one and if you do find one, chances are, all their skills are thinly spread. There are a few who can manage all three very well but they're much in demand.

Its a vague question as it stands. You need to look at what content has changed (text, tags etc) and look closely at the new navigation. Did it swith from text links to graphics? Lots of questions......too many answers.

[wanna_learn]

if your page mydomain.com/product1.htm was positioning well, no gaurantee that mydomain.com/New-productpage.htm will position too.. if you have replaced it with earlier one.

See that you keep the name of new pages same as old ones as far as possible, as those are the pages which were already indexed.

[HarryM]

Take a look at the cached versions of your pages. Find ones that have been cached since your update. Do the caches display as you would expect? Is the source code what you would expect?

I know from experience that it is possible to create pages that validate and show correctly in browsers but still serve faulty content to SEs.

[Amygdala]

Have your links changed from old to new site design? That is to say, if I had bookmarked one of you old internal pages and now went back to it, would it still be there as I expect (only looking different owing to your new site design)?

[Galtego]

The_Hitcher is right about the importance of SEO during redesign. A search engine expert should be present before, during, and after major design work. The company should bring one in now to do a salvage job.

[the_nerd]

Why not try and get the old site back online - and then take your time before you change a winning team?

[Jon_King]

On page:
Does the new text match the old page? Is it in the same order? If not, this will almost always effect your ranking.

Off page:
Are the new page file names the same as the old ones? If not, those old pages in the index link nowhere, and the new ones are yet to be properly spidered and ranked.

[nippi]

"Our development team does not seem to have any specific advice on this problem so I would like to pose it to everyone out there for feedback."

This is pretty disgraceful. Why don't they?

[wanderingmind]

Helluva lotta things can change during a redesign. And more often than not, programmers/ developers of the new site do not have a clue about SEO. They are just not trained to.

I have done redesigns - nothing wrong, but URLs and file names changed, and sites suffered for several months.

You have an ecommerce site - these typically have complex URLs. Perhaps, the earlier URLs were crawlable by the spiders, but the new ones are not. Or perhaps the earlier URLs and the new ones are crawleable, but Google is taking its time cralwing and indexing the new URLs. If this is the case, it can go on for a month or two.

Your site may lose internal PR or anchor text benefit by links from pages to each other turning graphic, using strange redirects, new page/filenames etc. Just cannot say.

I suggest the same that someone suggested above - try to go back to the earlier site and do this properly once again wiuth the help of an SEO.