Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The home page was dropped for its own unique name, even though the home page only changed in design, not content or optimisation or URL. The content within the site had been reorganised on subsequently all these URL were changed. The normal methods were used to limit the impact of this, the xml sitemap uploaded to webmaster tools and 301 redirects for old URLs to new ones.
After the cold sweat of everything disappearing for nearly 1 week, the site partially returned to Google, the html site map appeared for its unique name.
A week later the rest of the site started to reestablish itself in the index.
The same thing has now happened with 2 other launches we carried out in the last 6 weeks. Site dropped and then returns with sitemap for the unique brand name, then eventually everything is fine.
I’m not saying this is a definite relationship but there seems to show some correlation with site launches where a trusted site suddenly changes its internal linking structure.
Has anyone seen anything similar to this? In the past we generally only saw a dip in positions or the loss of 2 or 3 keywords until the site was re-indexed.
[edited by: tedster at 10:12 am (utc) on Dec. 8, 2008]
The content within the site had been reorganised on subsequently all these URL were changed.
To the SEs, it have have looked as if you had removed every page (bar the index), and replaced them with new ones. In those circumstances, it is not unusual for the site to be treated as a new one, subject to 'sandbox-like' effects.
Major restructures always carry such risks, and are best avoided. If they cannot be avoided, then it is better to do it in phases, giving the SEs a chance to 'digest' the fact that it's the same site, changed, not a new one.
And / Or protect your changes with 301 permanent redirects.
[edited by: Quadrille at 11:07 am (utc) on Dec. 8, 2008]
However with these last few cases I have not seen Google respond to these re-launches in this way before, I'm not complaining I just thought there is something slightly different going on here. Its the dropping in SERPs for even the brand on the home page which strikes me as being something a bit different, we never normally see this, niche searches yes we expect this.
The sandbox comment is interesting, this also crossed my mind.
[edited by: Dubhglais at 12:03 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2008]
I am sure they are not inconsistent - it's just that we mere mortals don't know the logic that's being followed!
I do have a feeling - and it really is no more than that - that restructuring sites with greater authority brings greater risks of these effects; *my* logic is that the 'loss' of such sites (as perceived by Google), would have wider effects on the serps.
I have zero evidence, and I avoid such restructuring, but I have done it on a few occasions (and always regretted it!), and the one time there was serious 'damage' was when I moved a senior site. All the tiddlers bounced back really quickly and pretty smoothly. I'm the first to say that one experience proves nothing, but I have seen various forum posts that seemed to recount similar experiences. Like yours :)
And I must add that there seems to be a wide range of views on this; in another place, I was roundly castigated and abused for suggesting that there was any risk at all attached to a 301-assisted rebuilding (100% transfer of rankings without any risk of a blip? I wish!), and I've seen threads that demonstrate a healthy contempt for 301s.
The trouble is, these things cannot be rigorously tested by sane people on valuable sites, and we'd need to see a fair few logs of problem restructuring (with details of what had been done), to build a picture, and I don't think we'd ever be able to build a decent mount of data.
[edited by: Quadrille at 12:27 pm (utc) on Dec. 8, 2008]
