Mass restructuring and Google penalties

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Has anyone heard of a penalty being applied for a mass restructuring of a site? I'd expect existing rankings and pages to fall in serps as they receive less prominent places on a website, at least until the newly made prominent pages gain rank, but an actual penalty?

I noticed visitors drilling down to a particular set of pages on my site that were 3 clicks deep and decided to make them 1 click deep sitewide, essentially by switching link places between them and their review pages. It's now easier to find the product pages and harder to find the review pages and articles.

I'm expecting a massive PR change as a result, and don't suspect I'll do well in serps for a while, but is there a 'site has changed too much' penalty?

[Frost_Angel]

I did the same thing essentially. Actually the site design changed as well and I went from HTML to wordpress. Though I have submitted two reinclusion requests - nothing.

It appears I have been given a -150 penalty around April 10th (Panda time). For my main niche keyword phrases. Over night I dropped 150 spots in the SERPS.

The penalty wasn't lifted after 3 months. Hoping it's a timed penalty for 6 months. But who knows?

Trying to figure out rankings for Google right now is like trying to solve a rubik's cube for me. Impossible. LOL

[sid786]

I changed the permalinks after three long years, and there were series of things happening in between -- server DDoSed, no fresh articles, and Panda update.

I have lost 70% of the traffic, and with the new Panda rolled out yesterday, I have lost even more that I don't bother keeping a count anymore. I wish I knew what exactly went wrong.

I have asked for reconsideration thrice, and Google doesn't seem to honor my request.

[tedster]

There are many things that can go wrong when re-launching an existing website. Here's a good recent thread discussing some of the possible issues:

Site Relaunch Checklist [webmasterworld.com]