Q and A: Why has my design change had a negative impact on my Google rankings?
Dear Kalena...
I just came across your site after several weeks of cruising google and my old favorite, webmasterworld to no avail. If you have any insight to throw my way, I'd really appreciate it.
Urban Lowdown ( www.urbanlowdown.com) is about 4 years old and has gone through many growth spurts over the last year and a half as I've been making the site as optimized as possible, including changing the fundamental structure of the site, including navigation and design several times.
Every update I've made so far has, after an initial dip, has resulted in an increase in traffic (99% of which is driven by search engines, primarily google...)
Until the last update which I made a month and a half ago. I made a substantial design change, with some navigational changes, but nothing fundamental. The url structure is the same, my tags (h1 etc) are the same - there is nothing I can see that I've done which is
beyond cosmetic.
The result has been fairly disastrous. Two months ago I was 600+ unique visitors a day and 2,000 page loads. Since the last update, I am down to 150 - 200 uniques a day and holding there.
I am pretty baffled by this, although the main culprit seems to be my indexed (google) pages. I have sitemaps for all of my main sections and have several thousand pages which used to be indexed and are reflected by the sitemaps.
Over the last few weeks, my indexed pages have dropped to 200, up to 600, 900, and in the two hundreds again. Articles which used be rank in the top 5 don't even show up in the indexes any more. Urban Lowdown has been my pet project that I have done totally on my own time and money, and it's so depressing to watch what's been happening.
If you can shed any light on where exactly I may have screwed things up, I would be eternally grateful.
kind regards,
Gordon
Kalena's Answer:
Dear Gordon
It sounds like a typical case of Sandboxitis to me. Google almost always places an aging delay on newly launched sites, but sometimes existing sites that undergo a design change can trip a filter that places them in the Google Sandbox for an undisclosed period of time. While in the Sandbox, the site seems to disappear from the Google SERPs for related keywords and can sometimes only be found for the domain name or site name.
Naturally, this can cause webmasters to panic, but it usually wears off after a few months and the site re-emerges in the rankings once again. As for your site, you are showing a healthy Google Toolbar PageRank of 5 out of 10, over 11,800 pages indexed by Google and 74 backward links pointing to your site from other sites, indicating no serious damage. I think you simply have to play the waiting game for a few weeks and things will naturally revert to normal.
In the meantime, you might want to lessen your reliance on Google for traffic and start marketing your site via other channels.
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[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]
I just came across your site after several weeks of cruising google and my old favorite, webmasterworld to no avail. If you have any insight to throw my way, I'd really appreciate it.
Urban Lowdown ( www.urbanlowdown.com) is about 4 years old and has gone through many growth spurts over the last year and a half as I've been making the site as optimized as possible, including changing the fundamental structure of the site, including navigation and design several times.
Every update I've made so far has, after an initial dip, has resulted in an increase in traffic (99% of which is driven by search engines, primarily google...)
Until the last update which I made a month and a half ago. I made a substantial design change, with some navigational changes, but nothing fundamental. The url structure is the same, my tags (h1 etc) are the same - there is nothing I can see that I've done which is
beyond cosmetic.
The result has been fairly disastrous. Two months ago I was 600+ unique visitors a day and 2,000 page loads. Since the last update, I am down to 150 - 200 uniques a day and holding there.
I am pretty baffled by this, although the main culprit seems to be my indexed (google) pages. I have sitemaps for all of my main sections and have several thousand pages which used to be indexed and are reflected by the sitemaps.
Over the last few weeks, my indexed pages have dropped to 200, up to 600, 900, and in the two hundreds again. Articles which used be rank in the top 5 don't even show up in the indexes any more. Urban Lowdown has been my pet project that I have done totally on my own time and money, and it's so depressing to watch what's been happening.
If you can shed any light on where exactly I may have screwed things up, I would be eternally grateful.
kind regards,
Gordon
Kalena's Answer:
Dear Gordon
It sounds like a typical case of Sandboxitis to me. Google almost always places an aging delay on newly launched sites, but sometimes existing sites that undergo a design change can trip a filter that places them in the Google Sandbox for an undisclosed period of time. While in the Sandbox, the site seems to disappear from the Google SERPs for related keywords and can sometimes only be found for the domain name or site name.
Naturally, this can cause webmasters to panic, but it usually wears off after a few months and the site re-emerges in the rankings once again. As for your site, you are showing a healthy Google Toolbar PageRank of 5 out of 10, over 11,800 pages indexed by Google and 74 backward links pointing to your site from other sites, indicating no serious damage. I think you simply have to play the waiting game for a few weeks and things will naturally revert to normal.
In the meantime, you might want to lessen your reliance on Google for traffic and start marketing your site via other channels.
---------------------------
[If you found this post helpful, you might benefit from downloading our free Search Engine Optimization lesson]
Labels: google aging delay, google page rank, search engine optimization (seo)
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