Switching from Vbulletin to Wordpress - Rankings Gone
- SEO |
However, the forum wasn't working very well. It wasn't profitable and not gaining traction. So, I moved that to a /forum folder last week, and switched the main site back to a wordpress blog.
I was careful to keep things similar. The blog homepage has the same meta tags, about the same amount of content, same keyword density, but my rankings fell like a rock from #4-6 to #21 within the span of 2 days and looks to be still dropping. Ouch!
In Google Webmaster Tools basically all of the old forum pages are showing as 404 errors. On that webmaster tools 404 chart, it shot up from 0 errors to 300+. Could this be the cause? Did I maybe spook google with all the not found errors and it just needs to 'settle' before the rankings come back? Or (what I'm more afraid of) does Google simply not like my new WP blog?
I've never had experiences with anything like this and I'm wondering if anyone has advice/ideas on why this has happened and how I might be able to get back to where I was.
Thanks!
P.S. Today, after I saw all the 404s in webmaster tools, I updated my htaccess with 301 redirects for all the main forum pages. Also, I submitted sitemaps for the forum and WP blog on monday, hoping that would help Google sort things out.
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