Will a change of WordPress theme affect search engine Rankinks?

15 years ago

It may cause the site to jump around in the SERPs temporarily, but if the on-page SEO is roughly the same or better than it was previously, it should come back or get higher than it was before.

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3 replies

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JamesGw

15 years ago

Originally Posted by John Williamson

It may cause the site to jump around in the SERPs temporarily, but if the on-page SEO is roughly the same or better than it was previously, it should come back or get higher than it was before.

This, more or less.

As long as your URL structure doesn't change, you shouldn't see a big shift in rankings. Different internal link structure and different heading settings might mess with your rankings, though.

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Bulldozer

15 years ago

Originally Posted by John Williamson

It may cause the site to jump around in the SERPs temporarily, but if the on-page SEO is roughly the same or better than it was previously, it should come back or get higher than it was before.

I'm thinking of changing my WP theme.
If a temporary Google dance is the worse thing that I can expect, then I will go for it.
However, I was thinking: some WP themes are very different from one another in terms of navigation.
Two themes may offer completely different navigation options: for example, I may start using a new theme that has "Recent posts" and "Archived posts" menus in the sidebar.
These menus will add more internal linking to my site but duplicate content as well.
The search engine crawlers will see the site's structure differently, etc.

So, I believe that even if the on-page SEO of the posts/pages is the same (and it will be the same on-page SEO in my case), a new WordPress theme may actually add some additional SEO benefits but also problems to your site.

Is my assumption right, or is this not the case?

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mpchekuri

15 years ago

Originally Posted by John Williamson

It may cause the site to jump around in the SERPs temporarily, but if the on-page SEO is roughly the same or better than it was previously, it should come back or get higher than it was before.

Will this effect for only that post or for entire site? One of my site which was ranking better with some keywords and suddenly disappeared from those positions for entire site.

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dp40oz

15 years ago

I was actually just going to start a thread about this. I switched my theme and my rankings completely tanked. Ive switched back, its been a few days and the rankings still haven't come back. I haven't done anything to the site other then change the theme in weeks so I can't really think it would be anything else.

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Bulldozer

15 years ago

Originally Posted by dp40oz

I was actually just going to start a thread about this. I switched my theme and my rankings completely tanked. Ive switched back, its been a few days and the rankings still haven't come back. I haven't done anything to the site other then change the theme in weeks so I can't really think it would be anything else.

Hmmm, sounds like the rank dump that you've suffered was the result of the theme changes indeed...
Were the two themes very different from one another in terms of structure and navigation?

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dp40oz

15 years ago

No I don't think so. I changed from Slick theme to CTR Theme. I did it about 10am and at about 11pm that night every page in my site was knocked down from 1st page rankings to the 900's. Funny enough my strongest page on the site is still sitting on the 3rd page for the biggest keyword. Though it was #6 before the plummet.

I am thinking somehow the theme change made Google think the site was gone or something, I really have no idea though. The only reason I think that is that every page was hit soooo hard except the 1 page with tons of links, which they let stick around on page 3, maybe because it just has so many links Google didn't want to wipe it out just yet. Its really frustrating. It could be something else but I can't imagine what. I really haven't done anything to it except the theme change in a while.

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Bulldozer

15 years ago

Originally Posted by dp40oz

No I don't think so. I changed from Slick theme to CTR Theme. I did it about 10am and at about 11pm that night every page in my site was knocked down from 1st page rankings to the 900's. Funny enough my strongest page on the site is still sitting on the 3rd page for the biggest keyword. Though it was #6 before the plummet.

I am thinking somehow the theme change made Google think the site was gone or something, I really have no idea though. The only reason I think that is that every page was hit soooo hard except the 1 page with tons of links, which they let stick around on page 3, maybe because it just has so many links Google didn't want to wipe it out just yet. Its really frustrating. It could be something else but I can't imagine what. I really haven't done anything to it except the theme change in a while.

Damn... this sucks. How much were you making per month from this web site?
I hope it's not permanent. Gotta be temporary - hopefully, you did not break any Google rules when you changed the theme, so it must be a re-indexing thing.

I think the bottom line of this thread gotta be: don't change your WP theme!

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1 reply

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dp40oz

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Bulldozer

Damn... this sucks. How much were you making per month from this web site?
I hope it's not permanent. Gotta be temporary - hopefully, you did not break any Google rules when you changed the theme, so it must be a re-indexing thing.

I think the bottom line of this thread gotta be: don't change your WP theme!

The site made $250 in August but its an education site so it should have started making double that this month, thats why I was getting it all set with a nice new theme. The rankings will come back. Ive had enough weird Google happenings in my life to know that sites virtually always come back, but WHEN is the big thing. Sometimes it can take months. Ugghhhh.

I would like to add though... I have changed wordpress themes numerous times on many different sites and have never seen something this major before. Actually in the past I have seen opposite effects. For example I have changed themes on penalized sites and have seen the theme change pull them back to the top.

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Fernando Veloso

15 years ago

Themes are coded differently. Thus each theme has a "score" in the eyes of Google. Then you can add the "weight" each theme gives to:

Posts
Pages
Categories
Tags
etc

Some themes are coded tyo give power to posts, others to pages.

All this ^^ as major influence in your site, cause you may created your site trying to make pages stronger then posts, etc. So you need a theme that is targeted to your site - so you can get all the juice from it.

Now comes the hard part: what themes are good for my site structure?

For that you need:

A) a custom theme (coded to fit your needs, say stronger Posts...)
B) a WP expert to avail what you have, what weight your structure has, etc and advice you a proper theme.

Confusing?

Thats the way it goes if you REALLY look into themes code... and to what gets "weight".

Fernando

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wanjugu

15 years ago

Thanks,such a good revelation,mine is not living up to expectation after 2.5 months.

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JimmyRose

15 years ago

There have been a LOT of people reporting massive drops in rankings from the CTR theme! Can't be too good for their business...

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JustaWizard

15 years ago

Googlebot does not care one bit what theme you use or how it's coded - from a technical perspective, a new Wordpress theme put into place will have zero to do with how Googlebot and their ranking algorithm decides to rank your site.

Despite any horror stories you may hear, I've switched themes on dozens of sites, dozens of times, and did not lose rankings.

If you're still not sure, talk to some real, full-time developers like the ones I work with all day long at my job, they'll mostly laugh and then pose extremely unlikely instances of a theme that is going to cause a technical problem with respect to Googlebots ability to crawl.

Switch your theme to one by a reputable coder (or use your own using Artisteer), watch your Analytics, and don't listen to the tin-foil-hat crowd.

Hope that helps!
David

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2 replies

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Bulldozer

15 years ago

Originally Posted by JustaWizard

Googlebot does not care one bit what theme you use or how it's coded - from a technical perspective, a new Wordpress theme put into place will have zero to do with how Googlebot and their ranking algorithm decides to rank your site.

Despite any horror stories you may hear, I've switched themes on dozens of sites, dozens of times, and did not lose rankings.

If you're still not sure, talk to some real, full-time developers like the ones I work with all day long at my job, they'll mostly laugh and then pose extremely unlikely instances of a theme that is going to cause a technical problem with respect to Googlebots ability to crawl.

Switch your theme to one by a reputable coder (or use your own using Artisteer), watch your Analytics, and don't listen to the tin-foil-hat crowd.

Hope that helps!
David

Thank you for your post.
I learned to take everything I read on this forum with a grain of salt.
And that includes posts from allegedly reputable members.
Moving from a good WordPress theme to another good WordPress theme sure won't shuffle much your rankings.

Now, the problem that I am having with my current Artisteer-generated WordPress theme is that it's not a good one. Or at least I think it's not.
My personal experience shows that its pages get indexed way slower than the posts.

I have two 15-days-old pages that are still not indexed in Yahoo and Bing and a 3-days-old post that got indexed on every search engine, except for Yahoo, almost immediately after I published it.

I created a thread about this problem and one of the more logical-sounding conclusions was that my Artisteer WP theme just has problems getting indexed.

So I was thinking: if it is true that a theme can cause indexing problems, then themes must be an important factor for your site's indexing/ranking on search engines.

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JustaWizard

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Bulldozer

Thank you for your post.
My personal experience shows that its pages get indexed way slower than the posts.

I have two 15-days-old pages that are still not indexed in Yahoo and Bing and a 3-days-old post that got indexed on every search engine, except for Yahoo, almost immediately after I published it.

So I was thinking: if it is true that a theme can cause indexing problems, then themes must be an important factor for your site's indexing/ranking on search engines.

Correct, but only if the theme IS for sure causing a problem for Googlebot. And by the way, posts ping but pages don't which is the most likely reason for pages not getting indexed as fast. But I never, ever would worry about how fast pages are being indexed - just make sure have an XML sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, and if you must worry about indexation quickly, then get links to your page(s) and you'll be fine.

David

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Fernando Veloso

15 years ago

Originally Posted by JustaWizard

Googlebot does not care one bit what theme you use or how it's coded - from a technical perspective, a new Wordpress theme put into place will have zero to do with how Googlebot and their ranking algorithm decides to rank your site.

Thats just plain wrong.

Each theme is coded differently to give "weight" to some part of the site, and that particular balance is what works OR not with your particular SITE structure.

Question here is NOT how GBot sees the site: is how the site channels inside power (internal linking) and redistribute that power - which changes from theme to theme.

Thats why people with brains and money pay for custom themes, developed to work with THAT site structure.

But what do I know... lol

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JustaWizard

15 years ago

Originally Posted by Fernando Veloso

Thats just plain wrong.

Each theme is coded differently to give "weight" to some part of the site, and that particular balance is what works OR not with your particular SITE structure.

Question here is NOT how GBot sees the site: is how the site channels inside power (internal linking) and redistribute that power - which changes from theme to theme.

Sorry, bro, but that's NOT "just plain wrong", Googlebot does not care how your site is coded, but If a theme's nav is images then Googlebot is not going to crawl those links, so passing linkjuice via your nav and categories is an obvious necessity I didn't address. Artisteer themes do not create image-nav labels. The bottom line is that any site, Wordpress theme or otherwise, is crawled to the extent Googlebot can crawl, or is prevented from crawling, the site - if technical roadblocks are in place that prevent Googlebot from crawling at all, or the crawl budget is spent crawling pages needlessly (privacy policy pages, for example) then that's going to impact indexation, potentially, but a good xml sitemap will take care of that.

Wordpress themes don't have squat to do with rankings, despite what theme creators will tell you, unless that theme is posing technical roadblocks, and the OP stated Artisteer is their theme creator, so the OP can for sure change themes without ranking being affected, despite others who want to scare him/her into thinking it will.

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lovboa

Banned 15 years ago

I also changed themes 2 days ago and I haven't noticed any movement in the serps

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jameschoi

15 years ago

So glad to have found this thread. This has been very helpful since I am also planning planning to do the same with my new wordpress site. Thank you so much.

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Srinagarhouseboats

15 years ago

It may , because the density of you keyword may up or down because of this .

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enni

Banned 15 years ago

I don't think so that change of wordPress theme affect search engine ranking.

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seobirk

15 years ago

I would strongly disagree here. You can mess up your rankings when your theme changes your website's user-experience.

Reference - Google Panda

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JustaWizard 15 years ago

Originally Posted by seobirk

I would strongly disagree here. You can mess up your rankings when your theme changes your website's user-experience.

Reference - Google Panda

Google's documentation about Panda updates shows that UI is something they're looking at but they don't reveal how or what they're looking at or how their algorithm is making such determinations. Panda, as they've noted a number of times, is intended to weed out low quality sites like scraper sites and content farms that don't contribute to the web. The bottom line is don't code a site in a way (or use a theme) that will be detrimental to crawling.
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Tmill

15 years ago

I have been told that changing your theme is a good think. I do it every month or 2 and my rank has only been increasing

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seobirk

15 years ago

Originally Posted by JustaWizard

Google's documentation about Panda updates shows that UI is something they're looking at but they don't reveal how or what they're looking at or how their algorithm is making such determinations. Panda, as they've noted a number of times, is intended to weed out low quality sites like scraper sites and content farms that don't contribute to the web. The bottom line is don't code a site in a way (or use a theme) that will be detrimental to crawling.

What I wanted to say was -

If the theme has an affect on factors like -
Increased Loading time and Bounce rate
Site interlinking and over link juice flow. The content visibility and readability.

If the theme effects website in a positive way, then you can actually expect a SERP jump.

Originally Posted by Tmill

I have been told that changing your theme is a good think. I do it every month or 2 and my rank has only been increasing

Just from curiosity. Every time you make the change the theme you make the change for the better?

But doesn't it affect your visitors. The effect of graphical memory etc. etc.
I would be personally pretty angry if e.g WF would change its design every two months.

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conceptmarketing

12 years ago

Was following this thread before switching my theme. Would like to note after 72 hours all SERPs are the same. New content is being indexed differently with my links triggering my root/home page to appear in SERPS for new content as opposed to newly developed targeted pages themselves ranking. I am considering switching back .

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alexim

12 years ago

Has anyone switched themes from Thesis or Gensis based ones to one of the 'normal' themes? Was there an impact?

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Jasonsmith123

12 years ago

Changing the wordpress theme won't do any harm but
1) Heavy theme brings out slow loading and greater bounce rates.
2) Change in URL brings harm to search engine rankings.

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adystanley

12 years ago

I also changed my theme few days ago and i lost the rankings totally. My traffic dropped from 750 UV / day at 150 UV / day.
I switched Sahifa for Arras Wordpress Theme V2 and i got a drastically lost in rankings.
Any advice?

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yukon

Banned 12 years ago

Originally Posted by adystanley

I also changed my theme few days ago and i lost the rankings totally. My traffic dropped from 750 UV / day at 150 UV / day.
I switched Sahifa for Arras Wordpress Theme V2 and i got a drastically lost in rankings.
Any advice?

Change back to the old theme.

You've probably deleted internal links that you had on the old theme.

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adystanley 12 years ago

Originally Posted by yukon

Change back to the old theme.

You've probably deleted internal links that you had on the old theme.

I did it few days ago, but rankings are still gone.
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lucidzfl 12 years ago

Studies have shown that where a keyword/anchortext/etc resides on a cage can affect the SERPS.

Themes that move menu items or links from generalized locations on the page (top of the page vs bottom of the page) can certainly affect your serp.

Also, depending on how the theme is coded, and if it wraps things in h1, h2, or ul li, vs straight links with margins, etc, ALL greatly affects SEO.

Design for SEO is an entire industry unto itself. I should know, I work in it.
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petjelly

12 years ago

If the link structure remains the same with content on them I don't think you will see any big change. I light fluctuation maybe that too will be temporary

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AmazonGuy

12 years ago

You guys sometimes amaze me, have you ever A/B tested changing sidebars, or related post widgets or deleting /adding breadcrumbs or checked for messy plugins and code ? I highly doubt it.
Each theme is "unique" in a way and not everything works well together just because its wordpress.

1. First off you should have checked the speed your old site runs at vs the new one.
2. Does your old theme use breadcrumbs and the new one doesnt ?
3. Is the code bloated ?
4. Are the head and body tags properly implemented ?
5. Do you see any strange errors showing up in your server logs due to plugins with the new theme ?
6. Have you tested multibrowser compatibility ?

Where in the code was the navigation menu pre vs new site ? Scan your site with online tools to see how google sees the site and which links appeared first maybe they are deeper on the page with the new theme diluting power to those pages/posts.

A simple adsense code placement change or breadcrumb moved from pre title to after title makes a difference.

You need to have enough traffic to actually test all this but maybe a link you got dropped off the homepage of the other site?

Theres more to it then "just having wordpress" and a "good" theme

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lucidzfl

12 years ago

Originally Posted by AmazonGuy

You guys sometimes amaze me, have you ever A/B tested changing sidebars, or related post widgets or deleting /adding breadcrumbs or checked for messy plugins and code ? I highly doubt it.
Each theme is "unique" in a way and not everything works well together just because its wordpress.

1. First off you should have checked the speed your old site runs at vs the new one.
2. Does your old theme use breadcrumbs and the new one doesnt ?
3. Is the code bloated ?
4. Are the head and body tags properly implemented ?
5. Do you see any strange errors showing up in your server logs due to plugins with the new theme ?
6. Have you tested multibrowser compatibility ?

Where in the code was the navigation menu pre vs new site ? Scan your site with online tools to see how google sees the site and which links appeared first maybe they are deeper on the page with the new theme diluting power to those pages/posts.

A simple adsense code placement change or breadcrumb moved from pre title to after title makes a difference.

You need to have enough traffic to actually test all this but maybe a link you got dropped off the homepage of the other site?

Theres more to it then "just having wordpress" and a "good" theme

FWIW, I just did this and changed my theme on one site. Its currently on the third page but has been as high as the first page... Google still shows the old cached version of the site and I recently changed the theme so I'll know in another week or so how it affects me.

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webby0031

12 years ago

ok lets cut to the real information now the BS 'er have had there guesses.

Hello mate, if you dont change your post names, url links etc etc and just do a straight change then it doesnt make much difference, Make sure you remove the Link to the template off your footer as that will suck Juice on every page.

Make sure your pages that have good Link into them are linked in a Silo fashion to other pages.

Make sure your menu's and side bars footers etc etc are the same.

If you change them it will change the rankings..

If your happy all this is ok then wait a week or so and see where you are .

I did this 2 months ago... My traffic dropped 20% for about 2 weeks.. now I am back better than ever

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adystanley 12 years ago

Originally Posted by webby0031

I did this 2 months ago... My traffic dropped 20% for about 2 weeks.. now I am back better than ever

But my traffic dropped 90%.

Like i said in earlier post, i got back to old theme few days ago, no new changes till now.

You think i should wait more?
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steven8433

12 years ago

it won't have any changes in the long run, but you may see a little jumping around in the SERPs for the short term

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mephestic

12 years ago

sorry to dig up an old thread a bit but im facing this situation currently.

A bit of history; I started a website from scratch and have built it up to a respectable position. it was created using the basic twenty-twelve basic wordpress theme and I never really expected the website to grow this fast but it has.

Now I have a dilemma - Im working on expanding the website into other areas but the homepage is a static page I created with some videos, links to other pages.

The theme I want to change to is the Sahifa theme but it will be a blog format meaning the front-page will likely be changing continously. Im concerned that the homepage is what a lot of my linkjuice feeds to and if I change it from a static website where a lot of my links to my products and other pages are, would their ranking in searches become affected too? I'm in effect siloing my homepages juices into those and Im wondering whether changing it to a blog-format where the homepage keeps changing etc will affect this?.

I'm hoping to keep the other menu structure and permalink structure exactly the same but this concern with the homepage is worrying as I really dont want to risk losing the rankings now after the hard work I've put in.

Any advice or past experience from changing a from a static homepage to a blogroll one would be appreciated.

Thanks

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Will a change of WordPress theme affect search engine Rankinks?

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