page update, ranking plummeted

serps are down after new site layout

[vampke]

hi guys,

new year, new site is what i thought
unfortunately google doesn't seem to like that thought :-(
has anyone any experience with this as well?
is this a passing thing?
will the serps go up again in a couple of days?
basically what i did was to create a new look, but the contents is the same
i just optimised the site for navigation and put it in XHTML (w3c validated mostly - before it was html 4.01 with a lot of crappy code - i inherited the site :))

is this a known thing? what can i do about it, should i put the old site online again?

thanks for feedback

[adamxcl]

In my experiences with this, it went like this. I did a major update and pages almost immediately dropped dramatically and some just disappeared completely. Then, presumably after more googlebot crawls which I do get pretty much constantly day and night, the pages came back the next day or so. They usually came back a bit better than the previous positions or the same.

[DerekH]

I had something similar, and indeed I even posted here to ask if XHTML was a problem!

Suffice to say, with a few deep links from outside, I've managed to prompt Google into getting on with the job in hand and pages are flying back into the index. But it was a long and painful wait, watching every changed page (ie all in the site) become URL only and then vanish!

At last I feel able to put clean underweat back on and relax...
DerekH

[skippy]

Did a major redesign on a site once and had the same thing happen as DerekH. Will not do that one again. Easier and less painful to just start another site.

[eyezshine]

Yep it don't take much changes either. I just changed the title of one of my sites on every page and poof! Gone.

It's slowly coming back though but nothing like it was. It's like the site got sandboxed because something changed on the pages?

Google is a touchy little girl! She don't like change.

[caveman]

A lot of very smart, very savvy members have told me this that there's not much too this, but I don't believe it. Too many reports to the contratry, including some of our own experience.

What's hard to suss out however is the common thread running thru all these reports, i.e., the real cause of the issue... if there even is one real cause.

I doubt that it is simply change large scale changes of any kind.