Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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]
also, when you say revamp I am assuming content remained the same, just the design/layout changed? .. and the URL's remained the same?
If so, my guess is that the web designer/developer has got some fundamental things wrong in the template (301, old URL structure vs new, H1 etc) - they always do.
Once had a developer 301 redirect all old pages to a 404 page .. for a very big client .. eek!
i am very familiar with SEO - this was predominately the reason why i got my site custom redesigned, to ensure that the elements were there for me to tweak.
I've done various checks and there seems to be no indexing problems in google.
No content has change, no links destinitions have changed and the url has not changed. The only item updated was the new wordpress theme.
has anyone else had a similar decrease over the past few days? is this the start of the google caffiene?
anyone else had similar problems with new themes?
This would ensure that the theme is actually the problem. That's the problem with being a Google-centric webmaster (algo chaser). We don't know for sure what is causing what.
Cheers
It seems a little too close in timing to be a coincidence.
On the flip side however, a theme change should not affect my index as essentially the content and links are all still there.
Highlight important elements with the same colour on both pages.
Description
Title
Navigation
Body Text
H tagged text
Compare the patterns of the two.
I suspect that you will find that the page has been reordered or something missed.
If you can put up the HTML produced the same page old theme/new theme you can then put these through your favourite SEO tools. I use goRank and see if anything is thrown up. It is not enough to assume that "the content is the same".
Cheers
Sid
PS Hint: I have #1 pages for competitive terms with prominence over 90%. Reordering your page, even just one element moved in the flow of the page can have a major effect on prominence.
find a blog with that theme and compare it to your old code and your new code. that should give you big clues to if you broke anything major.
Have the file names/ structure changed, if so did you 301 the original pages ?
I have just changed the sidebar and footer to remove many of the internal links i had - hopefully google will recognise this and adjust the serps back to what they were.
on another note, i'm curious if anyone has a comment on the following:
for one of the terms i was ranking position 1, i now rank 7th. However, i still have site links under the URL. What i mean is that even though i rank 7th, google is still placing placing internal site links in the results. is that a sure sign that i have been penalised?
starting to think the drop is attributed to my change in sidebar and footer
That is a wise place to look. Many people forget that Google (and the other search engines today) will break a page into "visual" segments for scoring. And internal linking changes - especially when keyword text is involved in the anchors - can also cause ranking shifts and even penalties.
even though i rank 7th, google is still placing placing internal site links in the results. is that a sure sign that i have been penalised?
I'd say no. I've even seen sitelinks on page 2 for URLs that have never been on page 1 for that keyword. It seems like you can now get mini sitelinks for related searches if you rank very well and get traffic for at least one search.
literally everything has remained the same from changing theme, except for an updated sidebar (i went from left and right sidebars to just a larger right), and the footer (before it was just static text, now it is a four column footer with various internal links.
Have the file names/ structure changed, if so did you 301 the original pages ?
stefano - footer only contains internal links. and the nofollow attribute doesnt apply anymore anyway (read up!)
a bit of an update - i am now ranking again for my number one term (which dropped to 7th) which points to my homepage. it seems google has liked my updates to my homepage content.
however, i am still not ranking for the majority of my keywords that were pointing to other locations within my website. for some reason, the theme update seems to have dropped the majority of my keyword terms out of the rankings except for those pointing to my homepage.. ( and yes i am indexed for all my website pages still).
I'm starting to think there is a major problem with the way my website has its internal linkages. I've looked at the source code from my homepage, and it seems that all my internal links have a shortened domain name. i.e. for a link pointing to widget.com/category/one the source code displays this as "../category/one" - is this right? i haven't seent double dots on other URLs before? is google not picking up these internals links or am i just paranoid.
An interesting question I have is have standard html tags been replaced with styles on an external style sheet? IWO Have <strong> and <em> or <b> and <i>, etc. tags been removed and replaced with a CSS equivalent?
* ADDED:
In thinking about this, I think I might add, unless of course, G counts http://www.example.com/category/one as one link and /category/one as another for some reason, then I would expect as soon as they are parsed through the system and associated correctly as they were before, things will straighten themselves out as they seem to have on your home page. I have not read any reference to this, and have no data myself, so it's basically just a dart thrown at the 'board of possibilities' on my part. Why they would, I don't know, but it seems possible they could store the information differently or associate them differently, which could cause a disruption in your PageRank / link weight flow until they have been 're-evaluated', for lack of a better term.
In other words, is there anyway to make all my links absolute links rather than relative links for internal pages. by the way i use wordpress
To do it, I would probably look through the source code till I found something like <a href=\"../" OR <a href=\".." to find out exactly what information they have 'hard coded and what is generated by a variable, then use DreamWeaver (or even better, TextWrangler on a Mac) to find and replace all instances with <a href=\"http://www.example.com/" OR <a href=\"http://www.example.com" depending on the original structure.
Make sure if you do a 'site wide' find and replace, you back up the entire source code in case something goes wrong, and test on a single page before changing it 'site wide'... It's no fun when you get a 'site wide' find and replace wrong, but if you test and backup it shouldn't be too much of a headache and is much easier than trying to find every link in the php, which is probably what you would have to do otherwise.
i have a question for you: do you have adsense in your new template? and if so, is it exactly the same as it was in your old template?
the reason i ask this, is because, after some months i understood why G gave me the whole-site penalty.
it was me being too greedy. i had a page that ranked pretty well with adsense (around 12% CTR on average),the page had only two ads, so last march i thought that if i'd add another one i could increase my CTR even more
WRONG.
G almost banned me from the serps, and i am sure the reason was because my CTR went too high, to the level of a MFA.
almost all my keywords were gone, and i was terrified.
i tried all the possible solutions and finally after 2 weeks the site reappered where it belonged in the serps.
at the time i thought it was some kind of google glitch, but now i know better and infact if i track back all the changes i've made to the template i can see that the day after i removed the new ad everything went back to normal.
this is a really good reason to keep track of EVERY change i do to my templates, even the ones that seem useless and stupid.
i hope this can help you in sorting things out with your website.
cheers
Zorogat - your finding is intriguing to say the least! i have got google adsense, and yes i have changed it. I moved from a left and right column sidebar design to a single right column sidebar. since the update, i have indeed added another google adsense unit and yes my click through rate did increase from around 2.5% to around 4%.
Presently, at any one time on any page within my website there is a link unit in my header, ad block unit in my sidebar, and one block unit in the body. That is all.
I cannot for the life of me understand why this would impact upon my SERPS? On another note - my highest ever earnings for a single day occurred the day before my site headed south - is that too coincidental or am i clutchin at straws.... more feedback on the adsense issue please!
I still don't understand why the new adsense unit would have affected me initially, but it seems to be all sorted (fingers crossed its not for the short term).
Thanks for all the comments guys - especially Zorogat
So i guess here we have a proof that any in-site element can influence the ranking of a website, and that includes adsense, too.
Obviously there is definitively a precise relationship between Adsense, Analytics, whatever Google knows about our websites and the SERP.
So to recap - i am now back to only one link unit within the header, and one ad block unit (only within a blog post). I have removed the block unit (that appeared within a page) and a sidebar ad unit.
i'll keep you guys informed if my SERPS fluctuate once again, although i'm certainly not game enough to add additional adsense code, despite me operating well within the guidelines.
Who knows, maybe google has a relationship between traffic and adsense revenues - if there are too much earnings for a small amount of traffic, they may be penalty....
maybe google has a relationship between traffic and adsense revenues
I really doubt that. But Google does have an automated algorithm module that simulates the look of the page in a visual browser and breaks the content up into visual segments.
There was at least one case on their forum where that algorithm penalized a site by accident. It calculated "too much white space", when the site actually had an iframe in that spot. The engineers had to manually place a flag on the site to clear the penalty and trigger a manual inspection if something blew up again.
So in that way, changing something about your layout might trip a flag, and it could be a Google error.
[edited by: tedster at 7:54 am (utc) on Sep. 18, 2009]
you have actually just triggered another thought that may have contributed to my decline in rankings - the fact that my sidebar navigation was so long. when the drop occurred, i had a rather long sidebar menu that included links to every category (around 60), as well as a few other bits and pieces. This meant that even if you were to load a page with a fairly limited amount of content, the page would have a significant amount of blank white space, as the page would be at least as long as the sidebar menu!
this could also explain why various other pple have complained about a de-indexing due to a large amount of links within their navigation menu. it may not be attributed to the links, but actually the physical length that it creates when loading a page. the reason i question whether its the actual number of links, is because i have seen a wide variety of websites (particularly blogs) that have literally hundreds of links within their sidebar navigation, and they have no problems with ranking.
