Expectations for revamped website

Decline in income? Google ranking gone?

[shallow]

I hired a web developer to revamp my website and to set it up with a content management system. The site was launched just over a month ago.

The site is several years old, had good traffic and usually generates a very nice supplemental income.

For the past 30 days, ever since the launch, it's been going steadily downhill. Traffic, which was increasing each month previous to the launch, dropped by about 10%, income from affilitate ads have dropped between 20-40% (ouch); pages in my site were previously ranked by Google between 5-6. Now they have no ranking at all. A lot of time was spent preparing redirects to frequently visited pages whose names were changed.

I am used to some site fluctuations from one month to another but all this seems out of the ordinary.

Why would redesigning a site change things so much. Is what I'm experienceing normal after most redesigns?

Thank you.

[netchicken1]

If you went from vanilla html to a cms with strange ($%#?) urls, then google may have trouble indexing the pages.

People really need to see the site to se what the problem is I think.

[lammert]

Why would redesigning a site change things so much.

My first thought is duplicate content.

• Is every page only accesible via one URL, or are there more URLs possible?
  
• Are title and meta description unique for every single page?
  
• Does a site: search in google give strange results, and does it give results at all?
  
• Are you sure you did all necessary 301 redirects from the old pages to the new to keep al the incomming pagerank? Do a linkdomain: search on yahoo to see who is linking to which pages.
  
• Do you use session IDs or other visitor-unique additions to a query string?
  
• Are you blocking Googlebot for specific parts of the site? Check your server logs for errors.
  

[shallow]

>> People really need to see the site to se what the problem is I think.

I thought you weren't allowe to put links to your own website in these forums.

[shallow]

I found some of the answers to my questions in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]