Very strange drop in ranking....is switching hosts to blame?

[newBum76]

Seems kind of a silly question, but I've just had a very strange drop in ranking for 1 of my sites.

This site has been sitting in the top 5 spots in google for the past year and a half for 2 keywords, and now I just checked today and it dropped to #25 and #32.

I made 2 changes to the site a month ago. First, I updated from plain static HTML to wordpress, but kept all the same content. Second, I transferred the domain to a new host.

I really doubt upgrading to wordpress would hurt the site....if anything, it should improve rankings. So was switching hosts a bad move? Or did google make some big algorithm change in the past month I haven't heard about? If anybody can enlighten me here that'd be great, I'm baffled.

[guitarjosh]

Originally Posted by newBum76

Seems kind of a silly question, but I've just had a very strange drop in ranking for 1 of my sites.

This site has been sitting in the top 5 spots in google for the past year and a half for 2 keywords, and now I just checked today and it dropped to #25 and #32.

I made 2 changes to the site a month ago. First, I updated from plain static HTML to wordpress, but kept all the same content. Second, I transferred the domain to a new host.

I really doubt upgrading to wordpress would hurt the site....if anything, it should improve rankings. So was switching hosts a bad move? Or did google make some big algorithm change in the past month I haven't heard about? If anybody can enlighten me here that'd be great, I'm baffled.

Not saying it would have anything to do with it, but my strict html/css/php sites get much more love from Google than WordPress. I even tested this a few months ago. I scraped 20,000 records, threw them in a mysql database and displayed them with php. I then spun everything, threw them in a wordpress database. I released both sites at the same time and the php site got almost twice the records indexed. Unfortunately, there's probably other factors in the algo that affect a test such as this, but I can't imagine anything being faster to index than strict html so it definitely could be contributing to your problem.

Any chance you could throw the old html site back up on the new host for temporary?

And yes.. a host with slower response times could definitely affect your rankings. I just moved 71 sites to a new host just this week (pain in my A**!!) but I'm keeping the old sites up in case I experience this.. in which case I'll just change the nameservers back to the original host and test.

[faceblogger]

Switching hosts will not make the ranking change as long as the settings remain the same. I switch my hosts and never experienced ranking changes due to that.

[newBum76]

Originally Posted by guitarjosh

Not saying it would have anything to do with it, but my strict html/css/php sites get much more love from Google than WordPress. I even tested this a few months ago. I scraped 20,000 records, threw them in a mysql database and displayed them with php. I then spun everything, threw them in a wordpress database. I released both sites at the same time and the php site got almost twice the records indexed. Unfortunately, there's probably other factors in the algo that affect a test such as this, but I can't imagine anything being faster to index than strict html so it definitely could be contributing to your problem.

Any chance you could throw the old html site back up on the new host for temporary?

And yes.. a host with slower response times could definitely affect your rankings. I just moved 71 sites to a new host just this week (pain in my A**!!) but I'm keeping the old sites up in case I experience this.. in which case I'll just change the nameservers back to the original host and test.

Interesting, maybe I'll try going back to plain html. Its baffling because it goes against all the good things I've heard about wordpress and its ranking power, but I don't know what else could explain the huge drop. Thanks for the input!

[Charles Washington]

Did your URL's change? If you had some URL's change, you need to 301 those pages to the new pages and get your link juice back!

[mashaa]

IT ALL DEPENDS ON THE HOSTS YOU HAVE: IT MAY NOT CHANGE AND DROP IN OTHER INSTANCES.
its good to get trustworthy and reliable hosts

[newBum76]

Originally Posted by Charles Montgomery

Did your URL's change? If you had some URL's change, you need to 301 those pages to the new pages and get your link juice back!

Nope, same exact domain, I just moved to a new host. However, I do have another site where I did change domains and did the 301 redirect. That site was at #1 and it's now sitting at #6 for that keyword a month after I switched domains.

[newBum76]

Well I just checked again and my site is back up at #3 for both keywords........I guess just some google dancing going on, but like I said, I've held the spot for about a year and a half so it's kinda strange. I haven't added any new content or backlinks for a while though so I guess I'll work on that to make my positions more stable.

[crismanaon]

I think your competitor is very potential check his site and follow. Did you any changes like meta tag, site design etc..check your previous last 3-4 month old back links.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by newBum76

Nope, same exact domain, I just moved to a new host. However, I do have another site where I did change domains and did the 301 redirect. That site was at #1 and it's now sitting at #6 for that keyword a month after I switched domains.

Hi newBum76,

Charles did not ask if the domain changed, he asked if the URLs changed.

When switching from static HTML pages to a database driven CMS script like Wordpress there is a possibility of the URL structure being different, it all depends on how it was configured.

You need to configure your Wordpress script to use the precise URL structure as your previous static pages, or setup 301 Permanent Redirects to point backlinks to the old URLs toward the new URLs.