Switched from single page to WP - Massive drop

eviltomato

eviltomato

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I had a single html page landing for a adult affiliate offer and was slowly working my way up the rank on a few terms. Decided to move over to wordpress about a week ago.

I made sure that all the meta data was the same.

This is what i got 2 days ago and its hovering around the same : (

Image1.jpg

What do ya think... wordpress change? Or did i get bitch slapped? : )

The only incoming links that i have created are from tumblr, pinterest, twitter, and facebook.
 
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If the single page was working for you why did you change?

WordPress is a cms and so by nature will be much heavier and slower.
 
I wont lie.. i am too lazy to do too much html. I have fallen in love with a few plugins over the years. One of them detects if the visitor is mobile or not and shows ads in different places depending on their platform.
 
Fair enough, I was assuming the lander was a squeeze page or funnel of sorts,

Though WordPress uses an awful lot of code for a single page.

Having a site that responds to mobile traffic is important now a days, you'll have to seo harder to make up for the speed loss.

Just my opinion of course, because the big G is playing funny buggers at the moment which could be a big part of what's going on.
 
This really shouldn't happen when you switch cms/theme or anything code related (except noindex/block), so i'm 95% sure you got slapped.

You got your link sources and anchors sorted out?
 
In no logical search engine would you receive such a slap for changing CMS, that's a clear penalty.
 
You said that only links are from social media, which are usually no-follow, so I don't know. I did saw drops when people changed the code, but not such a huge drop, wait 2-3 weeks (if you have the time) and if nothing changes....well, in that case you're slapped.
 
My guess is, Google must be storing web structure along with contents, and it doesn't like the changed website structure.
Your html website may have manually meta keywords, description, clean title headers contents, small size of css & html file.
Wordpress adds themes, plugins, javascript, that makes it look a little different website. Plus WP takes more time to load than html page, and page loading time is also considered in SEO.
 
You've to look out a couple more things other than the Metadata.

1. Is the URL structure(permalinks) the same as it was before switching to wordpress?

2. What about the page load time?

HTML pages loads ridiculously fast when compared to the Wordpress. Try installing some cache plugins like WP SuperCache/W3 Total Cache and minify the css and javascripts. It should drop down your page load time to some extent.
 
I've seen rankings drop after making a big change to the site, but they bounce back after some time.
So 2 days is probably not enough time to tell.
 
Thanks for the replies all. Yea its just a 1 page website so there isnt really a link structure to worry about. I took all of the body html from the original page and put it as a static frontpage.

Just check this morning and the ranking is still the same. I also migrated 5 other websites at the same time, but they didnt have any weird issues.

I will give it a few weeks and I will see. These are just landing pages for tumblr, so they can be recreated pretty easily with a new domain name. Am trying to make these pages just rely on social media for traffic and not google, but i figured some organic is always nice : )
 
ChrisX said:
I've seen rankings drop after making a big change to the site, but they bounce back after some time.
So 2 days is probably not enough time to tell.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was under the impression if you change your on-site significantly then this affects your rankings.

Is your new coding keeping your site exactly the same layout and everything as before or did you change how it looks?

If it's exactly the same, then I'm not sure what it is. If you changed the layout, then it's probably because of your changed on-site optimization.
 
It should not have mattered if you didnt make significant changes. However, try to make things normal again and give it more time.
 
Google is def up to something. Yesterday that site bounced way up and all the terms gained 200+ positions and were higher than they were originally. Now today back down again.
 
Although your drops are kinda huge, theoretically you should be back on track within a month or so. Try not to do any off-page SEO in the meantime.
 
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