Changing your Theme = Serp Going Down

[dchen88]

Recently I changed to a theme that was easier to work with adsense, and my rankings dropped form 7 down to 33. Is this normal?

How do you prevent this from happening when you are changing themes?

[MikeWike]

That's normal.

Personally I just don't change my theme after I have started backlinking. At first, when I make the site I just try many different themes, adsense placement and so, but when I already rank on page 1, then I _NEVER_ touch the theme.

You will be back for sure (if the theme is SEO friendly). You just have to continue backlinking, however it might take some time (max. 2 months maybe?)..

[Batou]

Never knew that would happen, that's good to keep in mind

[Hamza]

don't fix it if it's not broke ; )

[yukon]

Originally Posted by dchen88

Recently I changed to a theme that was easier to work with adsense, and my rankings dropped form 7 down to 33. Is this normal?

How do you prevent this from happening when you are changing themes?

Yes it's normal to see a drop in the SERPs.

When you have a well ranked page for a competitive keyword, it's not safe to be messing with major site structure changes (changing themes).

Google is driving me crazy, please help!

[strategic seo services]

Originally Posted by dchen88

Recently I changed to a theme that was easier to work with adsense, and my rankings dropped form 7 down to 33. Is this normal?

How do you prevent this from happening when you are changing themes?

Some themes have better on page SEO than others. Switch back to your old theme, create & submit a Google site map, and see if your rankings go back to what they were.

[Russerg]

It's tricky, I've done it many times and most of the times my position would drop but then I would come back in a better position, except one of my websites...I changed it around completely and it disappeared from Google. It's been over 2 month now and it's still not there but interesting enough my page rank went from 0 to 1??? Still wondering why...

[np2012]

It's never a good idea to change your site design as you can easily lose your rankings.

[Justin Lewis]

Consider the fact that the code is changing on the entire site. If that happens, then it's valid for Google to do this.

But also consider that different themes have different load speeds, the html and css might not be optimized correctly, and search engines focus on the visitor, not your needs.

[theseoguys]

I'd argue the opposite and say it doesn't do a thing. We had a top 10 ranking, took the site ENTIRELY down, went to a whole different model / structure, stayed that way for 8 months, maintained the ranking, and then went back to the original site, and STILL maintained that ranking.

[Justin Lewis]

Originally Posted by theseoguys

I'd argue the opposite and say it doesn't do a thing. We had a top 10 ranking, took the site ENTIRELY down, went to a whole different model / structure, stayed that way for 8 months, maintained the ranking, and then went back to the original site, and STILL maintained that ranking.

It's also going to depend on what exactly you did, how dramatic it was, how often Google comes back to your site, how much competition there is, and if others are trying to compete in the market now.

To say it doesn't do a thing should be and is confusing to new marketers.

[davidtong]

It depends on how the theme is coded, if they load a bunch of stuff up top, then it may slow down the site and hinder the spider's crawling efficiency.

That's why sometimes getting a premium theme (or manually creating child themes) where the main framework is separate from the visual elements can be ideal as the backbone structure of your theme remains the same despite appearance modifications.

[theseoguys]

Originally Posted by Justin Lewis

It's also going to depend on what exactly you did, how dramatic it was, how often Google comes back to your site, how much competition there is, and if others are trying to compete in the market now.

To say it doesn't do a thing should be and is confusing to new marketers.

Let me rephrase. From my experience, which was a complete site redesign, total new content, and the only page that remained the same was the homepage, it didn't do a thing. I'd like to think that being top 10 for 'seo' that there was competition, and the fact that new posts were indexed and searched, that the site was crawled. However, results may differ for your site.