Should I file a reconsideration request after my redesign?

[bode]

After a site redesign last December, my site went crashing down 30 pages when I realised that the meta titles and decription had not been included in the new site.

I had been building a steady amount of links of various quality and reached pages 1 and 2 for my keywords after 2-3 months of seo on my 2 year old site. Since then I have gained more links, validated the html and css and optimised my site.

For the past 2-3 weeks my site seems to have settled on page 8. I feel my site is of comparable quality to my competitors even though the majority of them break google webmaster guidelines. My links are also stronger with higher authority.

So will my site eventually reach pages 1 and 2 again?

I'm not sure if I was penalised at all. My url returned position one whilst searching for my domain. I had no more than 10 reciprocals to directory sites which I would clear out after a while and don't link to bad neighbourhoods.

Should I request a reconsideration or does that put me on some kind of web offenders list?!

Thanks

[tedster]

Did the redesign also change the urls for your pages?

[bode]

Unfortunately I decided to change them except the homepage and domain of course.

So with new urls, does google wipe the site's history and trust, then start over making those older backlinks redundant?

[tedster]

Google indexes a url - not the same as our intuitive idea of a "page" or the "content". But this doesn't sound like a penalty, it sounds like problems from changin all the urls.

Any backlinks to internal pages will have lost their benefit unless you place a 301 redirect froom the old url to the new one, and that means less PR flowing around the site. Your new urls will gradually get indexed, but depending on how frequently Google crawls you, it may take a bit longer than you would prefer.

Unfortunately I decided to change them [the urls] except the homepage and domain of course.

Are these two different things for your site?

[bode]

RE: Are these two different things for your site?

Not quite sure what you mean, but my site had about 10 pages at the time. I didn't change the homepage or domian name, but changed the inner pages to "seo friendly urls."

There were quite a lot of backlinks to these pages, but 301s were set up shortly after the crash. I'm fairly sure that they are working ok. I set them up in cpanel "with or without www."

I get crawled often as I'm always tweaking....can this incur a penalty?

[tedster]

Yes, too frequent tweaking can cause problems with ranking if you tweak in sensitive areas.

[bode]

I'll assume I may have also triggered an algo when playing around with the homepage's titles.

Think I'll just have to sit this one out and see if my position changes. I'll try and get as many deeplinks as possible to help the site.

[BillyS]

Geeze - why would you ever change the URLs? Two years is an long time to wait before deciding to change them... Still, a 301 should help in the long run.

I see these kinds of posts all the time. Folks learn about SEO then start redesigning everything so their site is "optimized." If you're optimized now, then try to reach a steady state. I would definately expect a drop following this move, but that over now. Don't go too crazy with the deeplinks, Google will see right through all your efforts. Concentrate of quality and you will attract deep links naturally.

[bode]

The majority of the site was only a couple of months old, but I wasn't aware that google placed so much weight on less important pages. My fault for reading the wrong forum!

Point taken with deeplinks; I did a few just to help G index them. At what point should I request GWT to remove the old urls and delete the 301s?

[tedster]

I would say maintain the 301 redirects indefinitely. If at some point you manage to get the webmasters of the other sites to change all those backlinks to direct links (often a hopeless job) then you might go forward with dropping the 301 urls. But they will stop showing up in search results over time anyway, though you may still see them in your WebmasterTools reports, purley as information for you.

[bode]

I happy to report that 3 days ago, my site has returned to page one on google and positions 1 and 2 for a less competitive keyword.

I've learnt my lesson, but at least I can concentrate more on my real work than on gaining links and wondering what went wrong.

Cheers for the advice.

[johnnie]

Wiping your URL-structure will cause you to lose A LOT of your inbound linkjuice to 404s. Set up a 301-redirect from your old URL structure to your new one.