How long before rankings return?

[jmacek07]

We recently had a redesign of our website and moved it from a static html site to WordPress. During the development the WordPress installation sat on a sub-domain. Our programmer and designer had the privacy setting inside WordPress checked so the search engines would not crawl the pages while being developed to avoid duplicate content.

Fast forward two weeks when new site replaces old. Guess what privacy setting was not fixed.  So about 3 days after the site is live organic traffic drops by 80%.  Do a little research and all of our great rankings are gone. Notice that our page rank is also gone...Hmm...

Upon further inspection the noindex tag is on every page of the site. It's now removed and has been 3-4 days.  I've resubmitted inside webmaster tools and I'm just curious what y'all think the likelihood is that everything will come back to how it was before.

[CaseyKluver]

One thing you didn't mention which immediately caught my attention, what are you doing with the old static html pages? Make sure if you havent done so already to properly 301 redirect the old html pages to the new pages. There is actually a WordPress plugin which can help you out on this also, Simple 301 Redirects

Its really tough to say with Google on a situation like this, my guess is once you have fixed all errors and have 301's and new sitemap setup properly within 2-4 weeks you will be back "close to" your old rankings.

[EGOL]

A couple of months ago one of my competitor's had a designer toss their redesigned site up with noindex follow on every page. BAM... they were gone from the SERPs in 48 hours.

We had a great laugh over it and checked their site daily to monitor how long it would take them to figure it out.  The site was out of the index for a couple of weeks and then they removed the noindex.  Within 48 hours they were back in the SERPs at old rankings.

The amount of time required to get back will be related to the power of your site and how many spiders are coming in.  If you have a new site with very few links it could take weeks for it to come back.  However, if the site is crawled heavily you should be back in a few days.

[jmacek07]

Thanks...It's a site that's been around since 2003 and has 50k plus links. It took the spiders about 3 days to remove it from the index from the time the new site when live to when we lost rankings. It's been 1.5 days now since I removed the tag. Hope to see it back soon

[jmacek07]

Thanks! We actually replaced the old pages so they dont need to be 301'd. The URL structure remained the exact same.

[matbennett]

The biggest factor will be how frequently Google crawls the site.  Once crawled, as EGOL says, it can be quite quick.

However, if you were moving from a .html site I'd venture a guess that it was quite static.  If that was the case Google may have dialled down the crawl rate to reflect that and not visit as frequently.  If you have access to log files you could check that.

Like with most things SEO the best approach is probably "build some links".  New links turning up on sites that are indexed more frequently serve as a good signal to Google that something is changing at a new crawl could be in order.

[jmacek07]

Thanks..I have built a couple social bookmark type links and have linked to our homepage from our /blog which is already wordpress and gets crawled quite frequently.  Here's hoping!