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Site Re-Structured but now SERP Drop

by RedWaterDub
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Over the last 5 or 6 weeks I have completely re-structured my site to be more silo structured. This meant all my page urls changed and so I had to make 301 redirects for them... of course new content has always been maintained during all these changes and html errors fixed, etc...

Trouble is, just lately, the sites main kwds have been jumping back and forth in the serps, from page 2 and 3 where I expected them to stay all the way to page 80 and beyond. a few days later they appear on page 18 or so, then a day or 2 later back to page 7 or 8 and then to 82 or 72 etc... and right now they are not even in the first 900 pages... now I am worried

Is this dancing around normal considering the new structure, and how long do you think this will go on for? ..

not talking about the site in my sig...
#drop #restructured #serp #site
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    IMO it's not a good idea to do a complete site overhaul, especially messing with URLs If you have pages already ranking decent in the SERPs. Now Google bots have to relearn the entire sites link structure as If it was a new site. I know you said you did 301s but one broken link could mess up a ranked page, not saying that's the problem here, just saying it's possible considering changing an entire sites URL structure is usually a big job.
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    • Profile picture of the author RedWaterDub
      Yes it was sure a big job, hundreds of pages and about 200 new pages because of the categories and sub categories in the new structure. It does look much better now and I'm sure it will benefit in the long run, just this serps bouncing around has got me nervous.. The whole site is only nearly 1 yr old.

      G.. has indexed most pages now with the new url's but quite a few are still showing up with the old urls....

      What i am worried about is that the actual main site url has not changed so all the links pointing to that are still good but all the links pointing to the inner pages are being redirected. I am just thinking there could be complications in the process of google re positioning me in the serps... and I may need to address something I might have overlooked...?
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    Correct 301 would have been a 1 to 1 swap for each
    and every article. Is that what you did?

    I would have probably left all the stuff where it is, just do
    new and improved content. Keep linking, silo-structure-ish,
    to the old stuff. If it's indexed, it should stay there. I get
    traffic all the time to and from many orphan pages that I
    created way back when at the time I had no clue. I was smart
    enough to leave the stuff up. If all your old pages had links
    to the main page, no problem.

    You don't care if people get to them from your main page, but
    you do care that people can get to your main page from there.

    I myself have used 301 redirects very, very sparingly.

    A 301 is not a panacea, especially when restructuring the whole
    site. You cannot mess with the site structure in your ways, and
    expect everything to just stay the same.

    You really are in a sense, starting over.

    Paul
    Signature

    If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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