New blog theme caused a drop in search engines?

[Eduard]

Warriors, I really need your help on this SEO issue.

I have lot of SEO-ed articles on my blog that rank pretty well on Google and get me organic traffic.

About a week or so ago, I changed my blog theme (although I bought it from the same company), and the amount of daily traffic I get from organic search has started to drop by about 30%.

What gives? Can a new blog theme do that? Do I need to optimize it somehow?

Now that I think about it, I made another change at the same time and I don't know if it also had on impact: I removed the 'Relates Posts' section that was at the end of each post, because I want more people to click on the banners at the end of posts instead (they point to other sites).

As a result, the average time spend on my blog by a visitor dropped from 2:00 to about 1:20. Could this be a cause for my problem as well?

[Technology]

Are you kidding? Theme is one of the most important aspects of onpage optimization, of course a theme with negative aspects will kill your ranking.

[Best shared hosting]

Have you changed you sites title and desctiption? if you did this then you really dont know what you have done. You just distroyed the whole thing.
never change websites title or description otherwise google will slap your site.

[Internet Lawyer]

Alt tags, title tags, dofollow, nofollow. There are many things that separate good themes from bad ones.

[xylement]

Maybe you should check on your theme's dofollow, nofollow, alt tags, title tags, h1, h2, h3, and etc... if you can't fix it from the editor... google for another theme =)

[ziidoctor]

very scary i will check my blog theme too

[JimmyR]

There are a couple of known themes that have been causing some rank drops such as the CTR theme (if that's what you used). But as the others have said, make sure all your tags are still optimised.

[lovboa]

A major issue could be a difference in the inner linking of your pages.

[harrydenwt]

Sorry but m laughing badly now. As your question is really silly. Changing the theme of blog will never effect your user at all as user come to your blog by the domain name not by the themes. I think you should just try to promote the blog side by side it will help you in getting the user back.

[Shirlyn]

I think design doesn't make effect on your SEO activities but changes in On site optimization can hamper your ranking on search enigne and decrease in traffic.

[bdaybless]

i never thought this. like if theme can kill ur ranking..i will be very alert in future if theme is also the factor in ranking.

[Eduard]

Update: I did a search on Google for a key term that one of my posts ranks high for, and in the search engine, the format of the name is like this:

Post NameBlogName

It used to be:

Post Name | Blog Name

Now the space and the separator are gone. It's fine on Yahoo and Bing though. Can this affect my ranking as well?

[JimmyR]

Originally Posted by harrydenwt

Sorry but m laughing badly now. As your question is really silly. Changing the theme of blog will never effect your user at all as user come to your blog by the domain name not by the themes. I think you should just try to promote the blog side by side it will help you in getting the user back.

Not sure why you are laughing, cause it's completely possible. A theme can change anything to do with your onpage optimisation, from titles to headings to tags. That's a lot of influence on your potential SERP, which is what the OP is experiencing...

[David Ogden]

Changing themes and plug in in Wordpress can cause many unpredictable results, It is best to select a theme and keep it for the life of the blog. if you have some coding knowledge you can tweak the php coding.
Many people who create plugs in also put in hidden links which you may like to remove

[learnrope]

"JimmyR" in post #7 said:
"There are a couple of known themes that have been causing some rank drops such as the CTR theme (if that's what you used). But as the others have said, make sure all your tags are still optimised."

Is this Google slapping this theme as itis marketed to IM's for MFA pages?

[JamesPenn]

This happened to me when I changed my theme.

I went from 800-1,000 visitors per day from Google to about 400. This was about six weeks ago.

I've now climbed back up to 700 visitors from Google per day now and it's heading in the right direction.

One thing I will suggest...

Recently I read about a term known as Google Bounce. This is when someone makes a search, clicks on your website, and then returns to the search results.

This is not good in Google's eyes because it means the users query was not answered. Your higher bounce rate may be causing more G bounce, so I'd suggest adding the related posts back to your blog.

James

[setiyawanheri]

It could be..Based on my experience..Some themes could cause some errors like in the meta title..Just try to change the theme to the previous one and see what's the result..And..if you want to install a new theme..you'd better to choose theme that SEO optimized..

[George Curtis]

Eduard,

#1: Changing themes CAN DEFINITELY affect your SEO. There are some pretty pitifully coded WP themes out there. I cannot afford to spend any time on this here, but DEFINITELY, yes... improperly coded website DO affect SEO.

#2: It looks like (from your most recent post) that your title tags changes. YES, this probably had a major affect on things. Separators (like dashes or "pipes" or commas) are not that consequential... but using the proper keyword phrases in the right order can make a HUGE difference.

#3: Don't feel like you are locked into a theme forever (as a previous poster suggested). We have a site which ranks #1 in a highly competitive market. We have changed themes 3 times in the past 20 months and it has not affected our rankings.

#4: Once you learn the basics of SEO... you will never be afraid to experiment.

It is a lot like football in my opinion. Lots of cool offensive plays, complicated offenses and defenses, etc... but if your players do not know the basics (how to tackle, catch, throw, kick, etc.) the forget it. The BASICS always win.

Good luck.

[Mission0ps]

Originally Posted by harrydenwt

Sorry but m laughing badly now. As your question is really silly. Changing the theme of blog will never effect your user at all as user come to your blog by the domain name not by the themes. I think you should just try to promote the blog side by side it will help you in getting the user back.

Beg to differ there are plenty of documented occurrences where a theme can make a big difference to your blog. As stated in many responses above from title tags used by the theme, link structure etc. The removing the related post should not have too much of an issue .

[RevSEO]

This is why everyone should think really hard before changing themes.

More often than not the reason for changing the theme is nominal and
not really worth it in the end. Do you want to risk losing the rankings and
traffic that your website has already received?

When changing a theme you are changing the overall "layout" and navigation
of your website. That's how the bots crawl, index, and view new information.

Changing the theme can at times remove critical navigational elements that
were sending PageRank through efficiently. That page that was once ranking
well for that important keyword? Gone.

Why? Because maybe you removed the link from your homepage without knowing
it with your latest theme change. Maybe it also got removed from several highly
trusted pages on your site as well. Now it sits, dormant, without any of that linkjuice
it once had before.

It's critically important to not do drastic rethemes unless its absolutely critical to your success.

[JDAX23]

What are some examples of good themes that have good coding and are optimized well? I am starting a brand new sight and have been messing around with the free version of pagelines, where you can customize things like crazy.

Anybody know if that one is ok, or can suggest some of the best ones...free would be nice.

[Matt Baker]

I have experienced this too.. I have a blog that was ranking on 1st page rank 8 but when I decided to change its theme, my ranking was dropped so bad.