Wordpress theme change drops rankings by 70%?

[jpt85]

Hi everyone,

i've got a pretty serious problem! i've recently (22nd August to be precise)undergone a website revamp and installed a custom developed wordpress theme for my website. The redesign, which i got custom done by a webdesigner is currently up and running, and up until three days ago (7th - 8th Sept 09)the transition to the new design went very smoothly.

however, it seems the new theme (although visually better) is not liked by google as i have now dropped out of the rankings for the majority of my keywords and phrases.

Up until three days ago, i was number one in the world for various terms over the past year. This is no longer the case as i now rank anywhere from 5-10 on page 1, to page 15.

The result is a decline in traffic by around 75% - enough to get me seriously worried. Given that this is the first time i have changed my theme since i first began my site in 07, i am in stress mode trying to figure out what the hell i need to do / redo to get reindexed for my major keywords.

I understand that google may have updated its algorithm/reindexing (caffeine) however i think this is too coincidental given my site was revamped only two weeks ago, however i'm completely open to all comments/help

i still rank for some terms but no where near the amount i use to. I am still indexed with my sitemaps working fine.

Why has my traffic dropped so dramatically? what can i do?

any help more than welcome

Cheers

JP

[edited by: tedster at 12:57 am (utc) on Sep. 10, 2009]

[jpt85]

well put tedster.. i think i have opened up a can of worms (for myself at least) of issues to consider when doing a redesign / restructure.

i thought i had considered everything but everything wasnt nearly enough.

[tedster]

I do think that kind of Google-bug would be extremely rare - but who knows? They work overtime to allow only their idea of quality pages into the top rankings, measured by more means than we can even guess. And in truth, their top priority is the search user's experience, not the webmaster's traffic.

[jpt85]

and you would think that an input into a 'good users experience' is content - which is certainly not reflective of a blank white space!

to further fuel speculation, i was de-indexed for all my categories lists - pages that included a bulleted list of all posts indexed in that category. And yes, all lists are relatively small, hence leaving a large white space under it...