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Rankings disappeared after changing Wordpress theme!?!
fuzzyhead
Posts: 25
Joined: 07 Jan 09
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16 Jul 10 6:53 pm

Rankings disappeared after changing Wordpress theme!?!

Hi all,

Anyone had or heard of this?

I was finally starting to rank for 5 keywords (2 at the bottom of page 1 and 3 at the top of page 2) been stable in those positions for around the last 4 weeks but...

Yesterday I decided to change & improve my Wordpress theme, had a `Site under maintenance' up for 8 hours, didn't change any pages, text or headers, finished it last night & this morning I checked my rankings & they have disappeared.

The 2 keywords that were on page 1 have dropped to page 5 & the rest are nowhere to been seen. Checked my money pages using Traffic Travis's page analysis & they're still getting A+, also all my backlinks are still showing up, any ideas?

Surely just changing a theme shouldn't have any effect, could it be that the `under maintenance' peeved off the search bots & it's just a temporary thing!?!

I'm clueless and a bit worried, thanks for any help.
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gullsinn
Posts: 7
Joined: 04 Jul 10
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16 Jul 10 6:58 pm

 i think your new theme is not W3C validating so i recommend double check it validating with W3 validation
also check you head tags etc
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fuzzyhead
Posts: 25
Joined: 07 Jan 09
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16 Jul 10 7:13 pm

 Thanks, wow, didn't even think of that, actually first time I've heard of it, is it easy to fix?
Just did a quick search & found something called HTML Tidy, is it any good or can anyone recommend the easiest way of sorting this out?
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fuzzyhead
Posts: 25
Joined: 07 Jan 09
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16 Jul 10 9:20 pm

 Sigh...Just checked & there's a ton of errors on every page, all 85 pages!!!

One of the reasons I changed my Wordpress theme was because it was all over the place when viewing in IE, whereas the new theme is fine in IE & Firefox.

Really don't know where to start with this, don't suppose there's a W3C HTML Validator out there that checks & corrects at a push of a button? Wishful thinking I know but I'm hopeless when it comes to HTML code.
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Moderator
wollowra
Posts: 869
Joined: 14 Mar 08
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17 Jul 10 1:19 am

 Hi Fuzzy,
It is possible that because you had the Site under maintenance that Google Crawled it.
If so then that could be why.
Give it a few days and see if the rankings come back.
Google analytics will tell you when Google last crawled your site.
But having those errors won't help either.

Regards
Troy
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sonitin
Posts: 152
Joined: 26 Apr 07
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17 Jul 10 9:31 am

 Also check on the privacy tab in wordpress settings. Make sure the url's are same as old ones. Have you been doing any backlinking in between this?
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fuzzyhead
Posts: 25
Joined: 07 Jan 09
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17 Jul 10 6:34 pm

 Yay, got my rankings back, must have been the `Site down for maintenence' that peeved off the Google bots, will need to sort out my W3C validating errors tho.

Thanks again for all the help.
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