Seo catastrophy after theme change

It took a month for lord Google to see that my pages where responsive.

Why didn’t you try this tool after making the change?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Hi,
I forgot to mention that I did, and that all my pages were ok. Nevertheless, google has not yet noticed (and integrated in Webmaster’s Tool) that all my pages are ok.
But as I said, I don’t think it is the explanation for Google said this “Mobilegedon” update would only affect mobile search. And all searches are affected for me … ??
The subject is more :
“Why can a theme change kill your SEO ?”

Anybody else experienced something like this ?

Why can a theme change kill your SEO ?

Changes in layout, changes in tag position, changes in colours (yes, that’s taken into account sometimes too), changes in on-page elements, changes in content ordering, etc, etc, etc…

There’s possibly 1,000’s of reasons why this could have happened, and it’s pretty hard for anyone outside of Google themselves to tell you exactly why, as we’re all pretty much guessing how their ranking algorythms work the same way that you are.

Just be patient A month isn’t a long time to wait, and it coudl take a whole lot longer for Google to re-indes things, and get back to where you were before. While you’re waiting just keep on adding content and makeing the iste worth visiting. That way you’ll end up ahead in the long run.

Thanks Catacaustic for this pertinent answer,
I agree with you for everything.
One thing though :
In fact I kept the same texts, the same layout, often the same images, always the same URLs, the same meta descriptions and titles. The purpose was to get a proper responsive site.
Well, I added a slider on home page. No big deal.

So this little adventure lets me understand that the ratio :
the weight of contents
/
the weight of technical elements

… is not the one I expected. The way it is technically implemented matters a lot. Content is not king, it’s hardly a vice president .

Moreover, this is true for surgery : any intervention is a trauma. The patient has to recover to enjoy the benefits of change. It can take a lot of time. It can never happen …

And anyway, we have to deal with the fog of war … in fact Google’s fog. It is hard to admit but we don’t know what’s in the black box. I even think that Google’s algorithm can sometimes be wrong : In some cases, its evaluation of a site is simply wrong.
Like any algorithm built to react in front of a complex systems, it is made to be good globally but its behavior can be miles away from what a human expert would have done on a given situation, and much worse indeed …

Ok, now I stop relying on my site to get customers (which it has never done much anyway) … and I use the phone instead. The result is that I have more customers …
Thank you Google God.