Lost my rankings after changing theme

It is a bit complicated if we talk about SEO, and relate it to theme changing as the cause. But this problem is very common.

The main key point is in the way your site structure change (navigation menu, sidebars. layout etc). The more often you change your site structure, the more difficult for Google to recognize your site better. As an example, for some SEO reason Google “decides” to reward you Google sitelinks when someone type keywords related to your site (domain name, brand name, targeted keywords, and so on). When you change your site structure (ex: moving navigation menu from header to footer, changing theme that has significantly different site structure with the previous one), you may lose those sitelinks. This is one best example and reason why your site structure needs to be as consistent as possible.

Google needs time to recognize a site structure (onpage SEO aspects). Sometimes it takes months until Google finally decides that it knows your site well. If you often change your site structure, you will screw up the process. If you already have established recognition by Google (Good SERP rankings), and then decide to change your theme (that has very different structure with the one google has recognized), you will risk losing your rankings.

The best advice I can give is stick to your current theme and try to maintain it consistently. Or, if you have to change to a new theme, choose the one you think is better, and stick to it for a long period and try to maintain it from the scratch. In some discussions, I call this effort as “getting Google’s recognition back”.

Hope this can help. Sorry for my poor English.

Regards.

@ak.azmi

thank you for your helpful explanation…in good Englsh..

@karsten007: you’re welcome, karsten ??

@bikendra: How are you doing? Is there any progress to your site SEO?

@ak.azmi

Thank you for explaining about the cause of loss of rankings.

Well, my website doesn’t seem to be recovering… I think “patience” is the only solution or perhaps not. ??

Hi guys,

Im facing tha same problem as bikendra,

I recently changed my website theme, and lost google rankins. Also, i noticed that my traffic dropped, the bounce rate increased, and the pages per session also dropped.

I ve checked every possibility, but it seems the only explanation might be the change of the theme , wich previously was a free theme with few resources, that i have replaced for a professional one. So i guess that there were major changes on coding.

If there’s any other possiblity of solving this problem, please help?

I’m going through the same thing. Is it better to go back to the previous theme?

@tannerc: how long have you been using your latest theme?

Less than a month. I purchased it on 4/30. It’s the Enfold – Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme and the theme that I had before was Inovado – Retina Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme. I had my site hosted with a company and was ranking really well but was paying them $45.00 per month for hosting. I wanted to own my site and host it a little less expensively. They were using the Inovado theme which is why I bought that theme. I am somewhat familiar with website design but more on the intermediate level. I tried to get a couple of people to help me get the Inovado site up and running but they just weren’t that familiar with it which is why I switched over to Enfold. Even though the Inovado theme wasn’t displaying properly and wasn’t up for very long I was moving back up in the rankings and ranked 13 spots higher than I am now with this current Enfold theme. When this other company had my site I was ranking on the first page of google for my keywords. When I tried to do my own site and purchsed the Inovado I started off at #47 and had moved up to #30 when I switched to Enfold and now I am stuck at #43 and just cannot seem to budge. My site is chucktanner.com.