May 06 2009
SEO And Page Layout – New Theme Crashes My Rankings
Page layout and structure play an important part in the search engine optimization process. This was driven home the past couple weeks when I made a major change to this blogs layout. Prior to this change (using the format you now see) x7SEO.com consistantly showed up on the second page of Google for the searches “learn seo” and “seo techniques”.
That was not to be with the new theme. After Google crawled the site it fell to number 47 and you know what that means; traffic took a definite hit! So I have switched back to this WP theme called “Seashore”. It is a simple format and may not look as good as others, but it presents the information in a simple and clear way to the reader and it would appear is “spider” friendly.
If you opt to expirement with different layouts and themes on your WP blog, be willing to see fairly substantial flucuations in your rankings. Now I must wait until the next Google crawl to see if this blog comes back up to the second page. Then it will be time to work on moving it to the first page for the search “learn SEO’.
What have your experiences been when changing layouts? Have you seen a drop in rankings and what did you do to get back up to where you were?
[...] May 6th I posted how a theme change on the blog caused my Google ranking to drastically drop and that I intended to go back to the old theme and layout. Well I made that change and waited [...]