Please Help: My Website Disappeared from Google After Changing Theme Templates

[Keep Trying]

Hi I'm going to try keep this very simple.

I had a sales page website that was ranking well on the first page for two keywords on Google for. It has been there for maybe half a year.

I used this PRO theme: Linen — The Theme Foundry

However, someone suggested for me to change the design layout. So I hired a designer here. He's very popular and he designed a new template for me. You can see it here: How To Focus Better

I recall putting up the new template at the end of last week. And today my website has disappeared from the SERPS.

Why did this happen? How can I fix this problem and get my website back to its original rankings?

[dburk]

Hi Keep,

It appears that you went from a blog theme template design to a single page template design. It is impossible to tell what has changed without seeing a copy of your previous website, but if I had to guess, my first guess would be that you changed the site structure, which is typically devastating to your established rankings. Other thinks to consider would be page title(s) and font styles, particularly for headings, anchortext and other elements that may contain keywords.

[JKflipflop]

Exactly - Not possible to predict the reason for the abrupt dismissal until one reviews your original website. Google, as you may have known, does have a certain degree of favouritism(if I may say so) for a lot of elements and the change in your site structure - even if it wrongs one of them - may have done the damage.

[hannahcarol]

A significant change in a site's structure or content can cause google to drop your rankings (usually temporarily if your SEO is still good) until their robots can verify that your site is still the same trustworthy old site with the same content that it trusted before.

The BIGGEST thing to watch out for when changing your site's structure is if all of your on-page SEO is still killer. Ideally, your original site would have had perfectly optimized header tags (h1 being most important, h2 and h3 structured appropriately) as well as meta tags, optimized URLs, and alt tags for pictures. If your updated structure changed any of these or is less optimized in any way than your original theme, you need to fix it ASAP or you won't have the same rankings as before.

[Keep Trying]

Ah... I had no idea that it would have this affect. I thought a site design change was like changing a person's clothes.

Is there anything at this point I can do? How can I get the robots to verify that my site is still the same?

[kevinm777]

Although it could be coincidence Google had a pretty big shake up on Sunday / Monday lots of people with sites dropping into oblivion.Check around the forum before you do anything drastic.