Will rankings ever come back after site redesign?

[shallow]

Almost all the hundreds of pages in my site were ranked 5-6 before it was redesigned and launched several months ago. Now only two pages are ranked in the entire site (excluding a forum). The home page is back to PR six and one page is PR three.

I'm curious as to why only two pages have been ranked?

[shallow]

Is this such a silly question? I've never been through site relaunching before. Would love to hear some of your insights about this. Thank you.

[jbinbpt]

What kind of changes did you do?

Wholesale changes can start you out from scratch.

[tedster]

It's important to appreciate that it is the URL that ranks, not a "site" and not a "page". "Site" and "page" are common language words without any techincal meaning. If a redesign changes the URLs and does not take intelligent care of the old URLs, then it can take quite a while to rebuild traffic. Backlink power can be broken and so on, losing what has been painstkingly grown in the past.

So depending on what you changed and how your new site is configured, it may be a long time until you build up new rankings. If you accidentally introduced new technical problems with Supplemental Results [webmasterworld.com] or Duplicate URLs [webmasterworld.com], you may even have some critical repair work to be done.

[andrewshim]

redesigned and launched several months ago

Do you mean your site was offline for some time while it was being redesigned and are you talking about PR rank or serp rank?

Site facelift should not affect your PR but major changes to your site structure (file location or name) will. Major changes to your content affecting KW density may cause your serp ranking to fluctuate.

[jd01]

In addition to the above, you might have drastically changed your link structure (or type of links text v. graphic), which can also cause issues.

The first thing I would do is make sure any URL changes 301 redirect to any 'new/replacement' URL.

Second I would check the entire site with a 'spider sim' or 'xenu'.

Justin

(I recently moved 12,000 pages using proper redirects, leaving the old URLs linked within the site for about a month. The new URLs were all indexed and ranked nearly immediately.)

[shallow]

Thanks so much for the replies. To answer some questions:

I conceptually redesigned the site but I hired a highly competent web developer to build it from the ground up and put it into a Content Management System. Prior to that my 500+ page site was created by lil 'ole me with (shhhhh) FrontPage.

Yes, almost every url changed but we used 301 redirects.

The site was developed while on another domain and then launched early one morning while I was literally asleep (lol). The site was never offline, except for maybe an hour or so during the launch.

I'm not sophisticated at all in this stuff and have never heard of Supplemental Results, Duplicate URLs, 'spider sim' or 'xenu'. But I *will* take a look tomorrow.

btw, traffic initially dropped but it's getting back to the original level and will probably soon exceed it. Income has improved also. So I'm not complaining, just curious about the widespread lack of page ranking.

Thanks again for all your input.

[inbound]

Visible pagerank is not what would concern me, it's the positions and traffic you are getting after the re-design. It sounds as though your traffic is back to where it was so I'd forget about toolbar PR and put your efforts into improving the site further.

[jd01]

Maybe I mis-understood the question…

If you are asking about PageRank, you'll have to wait for the next update. I thought you were asking about pages in the actual index.

Justin

[shallow]

Yes, I was talking only about page rank. I don't follow this stuff enough to know if page rank is important any more.

My site is actually doing well after the redesign.

Thanks again everyone for the input!

[Whitey]

Well you need to pay special attention to Tedster's remarks. The new site architecture is critical, and a site can hop along very well and then "bang", it can be lost as Google crawls through the various links and levels, when different indexing paths are discovered and matched by Google that then throws out the site.

Repair takes a long time - so it's best to check before such damage is done.

Sometimes PR can be stripped from the duplicate pages.

I'm not saying this is the case, but you ought to pay special attention to this, then secondly the PR which will kick in quickly [ although it won't be visible for a while ].