Finding the Reason Behind Massive Ranking Drops

[patagonia]

Eric,

I have converted 4 websites so far, from V1 to V3.

2 of them are doing ok, but 2 of them have vanished from the google SERPs, no where to be found. Both of these sites had the homepage, previously in position 1 in google for the main search term.

Now one is at 23 (but for a sub page) and the other 86 for a tag page!
The homepages, although still indexed according to google, have completely vanished from the rankings.

I thought it was just perhaps something would take take a day or 2 to come back, as google needed to reindex the pages. But 2 weeks later... still they are in the google graveyard.

So I am trying to analyse what went wrong and more importantly, how to fix it!

I took care to ensure the title tags, keywords and descriptions were all the same from the old datafeedr v1 to the new v3.
Both sites had some product changes, but not many.
I also took care to ensure the legacy urls for the categories, remained the same (although for both affected sites it wouldn't have mattered as they were small niche sites, only one level deep).

Things that have changed that I know of:
- all the product urls
- the image locations. I don't know how exactly they were done before, but I need to decide whether to store them locally, or have them pulled from the merchant (with this option being unmasked, since that is causing loading speed issues)
- the product titles have all changed. I had to redo them all.
- the H2 tags were previously used on the homepage when I had a product listing module. Some of those have changed to H3 or H4's to get the look right with the new stylesheet. Although one website that is doing ok, changed all its tags to H4's and it seems to be ranking ok still.

Is the drop in ranking just because google said: you had 200 pages indexed. 150 of those have now disappeared and I have found 150 new ones?

It is absolutely heartbreaking to see all my hardwork to get to number 1, go down the drain. The new datafeedr with its ability to change product urls etc, I was hoping was going to improve my sites. Not banish them to googles sandbox. So at this stage, I am not going to convert any more sites, until these two come back up the rankings. I can't afford for more losses!

Any ideas or things you can point me to look at, that might have dramatically changed the SEO of my sites?

[Eric]

Hi

I wish I knew... but I am far from an SEO expert.

Originally Posted by patagonia

Is the drop in ranking just because google said: you had 200 pages indexed. 150 of those have now disappeared and I have found 150 new ones?

It's impossible for me to say...

Originally Posted by patagonia

Any ideas or things you can point me to look at, that might have dramatically changed the SEO of my sites?

The only thing I can think is that even though Google recommends doing 301 redirects that it takes time for them to re-index the new URLs.

Like I said, I'm not the best person to ask about this as SEO is not my strong point. I guess I would ask around on SEO forums about doing 301 redirects and how Google actually deals with those.

Eric