Template change, huge drop in rankings

[echo1]

We recently changed the template of our website but we kept the same url structure, most titles are the same, the content changed a little bit, the description is the same, and the same on-page SEO. Although we have been very careful and the actual template change took less than 5 minutes, we experienced a huge drop in rankings (even more than 10 positions in Google serp).

Does anyone have any idea what could have caused such a drop? The weird thing is that Google still has the old website in cash and not the new one. We resubmitted the sitemap, made a few more redirects... but anyway... what else can we do?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[JamesNorquay]

The new template and design could have affected the way in which search engines can access the content, you also say the content has changed?

What was the old site built in? and the new site built in?

Have any url's been removed?

[echo1]

Both websites were built in Joomla. We did not remove any url's especially because we were afraid of this drop. Anyway... we did not expect such a huge difference.

The content changed a little bit but not from seo point of view. The on-page optimization is pretty much the same, but the way the content is organized... this changed a lot. We did a crawl test when we were still working on the website and the way the content was read seemed to be fine.

To increase the usability of the site, we have also added a slideshow and a rate look-up form (table style).

Thank you!

[toddmumford]

The number one issue we find with template changes is inadvertent duplicate content changes.

Do a full initial duplicate content check across the website including canonicalization of urls - especially at the homepage.

Stay closely aligned to data from the Google Webmaster Tools and use queries in Google in quotes to pull up all pages in Google cached for those terms to help investigate whether duplicate content is an issue.

[echo1]

I just discovered that the actual crawl date is Nov 16 and we change our template on the Nov 18. Google cache still shows the last template. I just don't know what to do anymore. There is no duplicate content, it must be something else.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! I'm following up on some older questions. Have the rankings recovered? Did you figure out if the template change was the cause?

[echo1]

Hi Keri, as far as I could tell, it was a combination of things : template change, content change (more than 50%), Title change, new structure/layout of page, new elements/functions added...we basically changed the website. As far as the off site optimization is concerned, I don't think it had a major impact. Our link building was on track, a couple of annual paid directories expired but none of them was so important to have caused the drop, not even combined and I did not renew them. We are now pretty much were we were before the drop but we had a couple of big press releases that I think helped us too.