ranking problems with new template

[fitz92]

Hi,
We have updated our website baggotcourt.com and we are having problems on google search results. We uploaded the new site on 3rd Jan.

For instance, normally we would appear on page one for search term b&b dublin, but we don't show up any longer for this term and it's the same for other similar search terms.

We have checked in google webmaster tools and there are no error messages or any information that can help us, although it does not appear that the new website/template has been cached yet as the old pages are showing when we click the cached button.

Theres something going on and we are concerned that the new template will undo any seo work we have done in the past.

We would appreciate any information that might help. Do we need to wait for a while. At least the website does appear for our own name....

We downloaded the template from i3dtemplates and made the changes through dreamweaver.

Thank you in advance.
Fitz

 

[mneylon]

Fitz

Did you change the site's layout / pages etc., or just the visual aspect?

Michele

 

[fitz92]

Hi Michele,

All the pages i.e. text, links and page names remain the same, we added 2 new pages. There are some changes to the layout for instance we never had the menu at the side, we just had the menu/navigation across the top and we never had footers, there are 3 footers - links, social and contact?

Thanks, Fitz

 

[mneylon]

Ok so any "old" links would continue to work?

 

[fitz92]

yes, we made sure to keep all the internal links and keep the page names the same. We have no images on the page, we never had a gallery before

 

[mneylon]

I know that Google has changed their algorithms a few times in the last few weeks so you might have been impacted by one of the recent updates?

 

[fitz92]

I'm guessing then that this is not the norm for a website to disappear from search results for certain search terms when a new website is loaded. Is it possible it takes time to settle down... We are thinking about loading back the old site again, its a real concern for us.

 

[fitz92]

Hi,
Do you think its worth waiting a while to see if it appears back in the search results for the search term b&b Dublin, I really don't know what to do. My options are to wait for a few more days or to load back up the old website...

I would really appreciate any opinions.

Many thanks
Fitz

 

[mneylon]

If it was me ..
Check which search phrases are still driving traffic to your site
Check what if any changes your competitors made
The terms "b & b Dublin" are probably quite competitive, so dropping is probably inevitable if you've got a lot of heavy competition