Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
All the urls stayed the same....Is this normal for Google to drop the rank after a redesign?
Not if you've done it right, and it sounds that you're aware of the most important factor involved... which is keeping your urls the same. How about your nav structure in general?
I've seen TBPR disappear from changed pages occasionally, though, and come back. Just did a big site rebuild, though, with no TBPR changes at all.
Do a search on Google for an exact string of words (in quotes) unique to each page to see if Google has the page indexed, and look at the Cached link to see what version of the page Google shows.
The cahced pages are still from the old design though.
I feel it would be safe to assume that Google has your new page indexed when you see the new design cached. Until then, it's likely that the index is returning data on the old page when you search. I've seen infrequently spidered pages take a while to appear in the cache, and frequently spidered pages sometimes appear in a day or two. This also depends on where in the crawl cycle you happened to be when you updated.
With regard to your original question...
Is this normal for Google to drop the rank after a redesign?
...I thought you were talking about ranking in the serps, not PageRank, when I said "not if you've done it right." I've heard PR confused with rankings, but never heard it called "the rank" before. I really wouldn't worry about it, though, unless you can't find your content after the new page is cached. It's extremely unlikely there's a problem.
