Website Redesign - Problem with ranking

[Manuel27]

Hello,
last weeek I redesigned a website and after two days page ranking disappear for main keywords.I was #2 for the most important keyword (domain address) but now its impossible to find the page.


There is only 1 important keyword still #1 which has got sitelinks.


NEW DESIGN:

The url structure is the same as before.
All page titles, descritpion and keywords are the same.
There are a changes on content (HOMEPAGE,Added more text and I removed 3 links in footer.

Two tays after the redesign I found erros like internal duplicate titles for HP (7) , missing title tags in WBT.

Now its fixed, I add new titles and blocked a few pages "missing titles" via robots.txt

With the new design there are more pages in index because I didnt blocked via robots, like members page, mostpopular,toprated pages.

The old site had about 3.000 indexed pages, now its about 10.000
because of members pages, most popular ....but they are blocked now.


WBT
Search Queries
[img181.imageshack.us...]


Crawl Stats
[img703.imageshack.us...]

Now I see from access.log that spiders are more active than in the prevous days but still its impossible to find site for popular keywords....


What do you suggest? Is this normal?

[tedster]

In recent months it has been somewhat common to see a short dip in rankings and traffic for just a few days following a change that affects many established URLs. Not always, of course, but common.

In your case, you allowed a lot of URLs to be indexed, then you backed out from that, so there are two different "structural" changes for Google to process - in addition to the content and title changes. I'd say what you are seeing is somewhat "normal" given the whole picture.

I'd say if you don't start to see a change this week, then you should dig deeper. But for the immediate moment, give Google a little space to digest your recent shifts.

[Manuel27]

Update:

Yesterday one of the main pages appear in SERP but only in one country on #4. Today is on the position #2 like before the new design, but its still only in one country. ( before 3 )
[img833.imageshack.us...]

The spiders are back in game like before.
[img7.imageshack.us...]

In the previous days there was massive traffic with Google spiders, but there is still no traffic for the most popular keyword.

OVERALL

Search Engine traffic

1/4 keywords

Today is 14 days.

tedster: Do you think that is normal?

[FranticFish]

Still sounds fairly normal to me. Spider activity has nothing to do with your 'status' in the index; you can be visited daily (or even many times a day) but it can still take weeks for that to be reflected in the index - which is made up of lots of different data centres. I also think that if you're not a high PageRank site then you're not a priority to Google.

[tedster]

The old site had about 3.000 indexed pages, now its about 10.000
because of members pages, most popular ....but they are blocked now.

Were those member pages blocked in previous version of the site?

[Manuel27]

On the old version of site I removed links profiles/memberlist on HP, and there is no option in script to see files by newest/popular/top rated.


There is no rule for spiders to block (memberlist or profiles) in robots.txt (old version)

In index there is < 3000 pages


48 hours after the Redesign:
-1000 new profiles pages in index /profile-#*$!#*$!
Before I blocked in robots.txt I cleaned up the member base and deleted about 70%, but after the spider indexed pages.


Blocked via robots.txt

-memberlist.php 30 new pages

Later : blocked via robots.txt

- toprated pages
About 90 new pages in index

Later : blocked via robots.txt

- popular pages
About 90 new pages in index

Later : blocked via robots.txt

- newest pages
About 90 new pages in index

Later : blocked via robots.txt

- reportbroken.php
With the new version there is a option where members can report the file.There is about 3000 pages in index like (reportbroken.php?f=113&#8206;)

Later : blocked via robots.txt



WMT:
URLs in web index 2,971 (In the sitemap I have only pages and category pages like before)


On the google.com
site:
About 8,460 results (0.14 seconds)

Google local country
site:
4.430 results (0,07 seconds)



Google Index .com
If I choose 100 results per page, and click on 10th page it will automaticaly choose 9th page and 890 results only.


site:domain category
About 121 results (0.06 seconds)

When I click on page number 2 (10 results per page) It will show me Page 2 of 12 results (0.06 seconds) > only 12 results and there is no category page which reappeared a few days ago on #2

I need to click "repeat the search with the omitted results included." to see that category page and others.

[aristotle]

The site operator and WMT are both unreliable and can give wrong information, so you shouldn't worry too much about what they say. The main things are the Google rankings and traffic.

[Manuel27]

There is still no ranking for main keyword and Iam getting traffic only from 1/4 keywords.

With the new design I improved bounce rate (40%->30%), and average time on site (8m->12m), but lost too much traffic and rankings.

Does anybody have any suggestions? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[edited by: tedster at 6:42 pm (utc) on Nov 26, 2010]

[tedster]

As I said above, after a redesign it is common to see a disruption in rankings and traffic for a few weeks. You have made a lot of changes and I think you should stop for a bit and let things settle for a while.

If you study this recent thread you also might find more help: Site Relaunch Checklist [webmasterworld.com]. There are some very solid and important ideas discussed in there about re-designing websites.