SEO Plummeted After Revamping WordPress Site

  • Hi: We recently had a web designer revamp our site at https://stopsexistremarks.org/. In the process, we also switched ISPs. The day we went live, our Google results plummeted to almost nothing. That was a few weeks ago. We’ve been around for 5 years, so were at the top of the search rankings for the relevant terms—now we are nowhere to be found.

    I asked the designer a few days ago, and she pointed out that we had our privacy settings set to “ask search engines not to index this site.” So we switched that back on so that search engines now do index us. But that has made no difference—we’re still nowhere to be found on Google.

    I’d be most grateful if anyone has ideas about why this happened and what we can do. Apologies in advance if this isn’t the right place to ask.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Andrew Nevins

    (@anevins)

    WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support

    You are being found on Google

    As it seems you’re enquiring about an SEO issue, try using Google’s forums.

    Thread Starter syoder2

    (@syoder2)

    Thanks, but not really. Google Analytics shows that under our old site, we were getting a modest hundred hits a day directed our way from Google. Now we’re getting zero, and on searches for “sexist comments” and “sexist remarks,” which used to put us at the top of the page, now we don’t appear at all. Thanks for the suggestion about Google forums though.

    Did you re-do the theme only or did you re-work the sites URL’s as well?

    Either way, having the “ask search engines not to index this site” will cause some issues for a start. They will be over-come soon when your site gets properly indexed again, but this can take time.

    If it was just the theme, then you’ll get back up there.

    If it was the theme and changes to the URL’s then it will take longer and you’ll see a marked hit form changing URL’s sitewide in a huge group.

    But, no matter which way it happened you will be back. It may take a little while, but it won’t kill the site for good. I know that having this happen for even a week seems terrible, but it will just take time.

    One thing that I would like ot suggest though… go back to your designer and get them to properly set up the <h1> tag on your sites home page, and then try to add in one to three <h2> tags in there. Leaving these tags off your home page is going to hurt your sites SEO a lot more then changing the theme would. If the new theme was supposed to have decent SEO built into it, then the job wasn’t done properly.

    Thread Starter syoder2

    (@syoder2)

    Thanks so much. We did change the theme. As for the URLs, we didn’t change the main URL. But we had to change URLs for most of the sub-pages since we reorganized the site. Great advice on the h1 and h2 tags–we’ll do that. Appreciate it.

    You really need to set up redirects for all of the old URLs that changed. This is because they are no longer valid and Google sees the cached URLs as broken and irrelevent. I would go into your Google Analytics and find your top 100 most visited URLs and set up a 301 redirect for one of them to the new URLs.

    Thread Starter syoder2

    (@syoder2)

    Great, thank you, will do.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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