Fell Out Of Google After A Redesign

On Sep 20, 9:57 pm, a poster wrote:

Fell From Google Listings Completely After Redesign

I recenlty had one of my sites completly be removed from Google's > index. This happened shortly after our site that we had for over 7 > years was redesigned. I am not sure if this had something to do with > it or not. Prior to this, we have had good placement. I have > inspected our site closely to make sure that it falls within the > Google guidelines and have posted for a reconsideration submission. > If indeed we were blocked because of some sort of violation, how long > does it take to come back up? Also, how can we find out what caused > us to fall from the listings completely?

Thank you in advance for your service and for your time!

Recognition Woes

The fact that you mention that you fell out of the Google rankings after your redesign sends up a red flag for a couple of reasons. But without the current site and the old site to compare, it is nearly impossible to give you a precise answer. However, such phenomena has been knowingly caused by the types of actions explained below and offered as some of the steps you might want to take in your investigation process.

1. If your new website completely and radically differs from your old website, then the chances are pretty good that your file names changed. Since Google indexes on your unique URL that content which is associated with the URL, your new URL's will not have the presence in Google that your old URL's did. The new pages are entirely new content to the Google's of the world, so you would need to start from near scratch in rebuilding your relationships with other websites that point to both your homepage and your interior pages. Typically, however, if a site is redesigned and it changes its focus and is then dropped, the problem is beyond the issue of a change in page file names because the home page would still be indexed by Google and would upon a new crawl of your site likely be reindexed for the new focus and content.
2. In that the site fell off the edge of the earth, the first thing you may want to look at is your index file. If the index file of your website adapted a different extension when it was redesigned, then the index file that previously existed may not now exist, or it may exist in duplicate of another home page. For example, say that your site's index file was previously named index.htm; if after redesign, the website used index.html, s/he created an entirely different file. Even with an entirely different file name, browsers will still display your home because browsers seek the index file by using a particular protocol - they first look for an html file, then an htm file, then a shtml file... eventually, they will interpret the file name and display the home page all within seconds. However, the same is not true for your indexed pages in the search engines. If your site was published with a newly named index file, the search engines will not immediately recognize the change. In that instance, you will probably want to create a sitemap and submit it to the Google's of the world so that they can find your site. The other option is to save the site as it was previously saved, with the same previous extension, but be sure to delete the new page or it will produce duplicate content.
3. Next, compare all of the file names in your previous site to the file names in your new site. If the topic and focus of your new site is the same as it was for your old site, then copy the new site's pages to the old site's filenames (rename the new pages with the old file names). Delete the new file names from your server to avoid duplicate content.
4. If the file names are the same, but the file extension differ, then you need to verify if the new extensions are needed. The naming convention used for file names in your website may or may not have been used for the new site. For example, if your previous site used PHP and your new site uses ASP, even the same file name will have a different extension (a PHP application compared to an ASP application), thus creating an entirely new file. If that is the situation, then you need to know if the new extension is required for some application running on your website. If it is, you may not be able to simply change the file names. If it is not, then refer to the renaming procedure mentioned above.
5. If none of those issues seem to be the problem, then I'd suggest looking at the optimization of the site. Make sure that the site is not stuffing keywords (using keywords that are not in the content of the page or placing keywords in the content in an illogical manner so as to get them recognized by a search engine's crawl on the site). Whether the optimization of your site is incorrect, I'd suggest having a professional search engine marketing expert review your site for proper optimization before resubmitting it.
6. While there are many other factors that can affect a website, the next one that I would look to if none of the previous situations exist is how your pages are manipulated from the server to the browser. If for instance your server files contain a refresh procedure or a redirect procedure, the resulting rendering of those pages may be seen as cloaking - the process of telling the search engines that the page is about one thing, but showing the end user something else. Cloaking is a big no-no. If that is the situation, you need to address it immediately, remove any scripts that cause a false positive to the search engines or end users and resubmit the site to the search engines when you are sure it is clean.

Hope that helps!

^.com^