Lost ranking after navigation bar change.

[errorsamac]

The other day, we made a small change to the navigation bar across the entire website. Previously, the nav bar had 5 links in it (3 internal links, 2 external). Since a lot of our content was buried, we decided to add more links to the main navigation bar across the site for a total of 10 links (all internal). Both the old and the new nav bars just used <ul> and <li> tags, and the difference between them was in CSS and the number of links. Outside of that, nothing across the site (on any page) changed.

Within 24 hours, the site went from result # 1 to result # 2, which is significant in regards to traffic in this genre. My question is - is it better to go with the new nav bar and hope that Google will forgive us for adding new links in the nav, or should we revert back to try to regain our # 1 ranking again? If we revert, does anyone know how long it might take to get the ranking back? 1-2 weeks? I think this might be a case where we're not "PR sculpting" as well now as we did before because we added more links.

[tedster]

If you made the nav bar change with real purpose, then I'd say stay with it. Sitewide changes definitely can wreak havoc with rankings for a period of time. No one can say how long - and since you fell from #1 to #2, it's not even certain that your nav bar is the cause. Rankings do shuffle around.

[errorsamac]

The nav bar change was made just to get some people to other areas of the site that were buried. However, we also added links to sections of the site that are somewhat low value, such as a privacy policy, contact us, about us, etc. Maybe it would be better if I removed links to those or just re-buried them?

Oh, and the reason why we think it was the nav bar change was because we were the # 1 result for the past 3 years without any changes to the site. Then we change the nav bar and we drop. It could just be a weird coincidence, but it just feels like it was due to our change more than anything else.

Thanks for the quick reply to this topic.