Vanish from google after choosing preferred domain and fixing 40 duplicate meta descriptions?

[garyislearning]

I recently followed 2 Google webmaster suggestions to clean up the on page SEO for our site.  I chose a preferred domain 2 weeks ago(to www.website.com) and fixed the duplicate meta descriptions that our CMS was setting to unique and more natural descriptions for each page.  I did that 3 days ago.  Webmaster tools still says they are duplicates because it hasn't crawled the whole site yet.

We have been fortunate enough to have some of our blog posts be covered by  yahoo.com, cnet.com, huffingtonpost.com, gizmodo.com, etc.   That is some major backlink juice and, as recently as 2 weeks ago, our website would be the #1 result when searching Google for  "ourwebsite.com exact title of very popular blog post".   Now it is on the 3rd page, and the top results are the websites that linked to our blog post.

So....what gives?  Is there a specific area I should look at?  Our should I wait for Google to fully index our whole site now that changes have been made?

It should be noted that our rankings have stayed the same in yahoo and bing.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

[farbeseo]

If you're using WordPress, make sure you don't have the site blocked in "General". If not, check your robots.txt file. Does the site come up when you hit the URL? If so, make sure you Google ".htaccess force www" and put a rule in your .htaccess file that 301 redirects non-www pages to their www brethren. All those links were to your non-www URL so depending on your system, the non-www may be throwing a 404 which would certainly get you pushed down the SERPs.

[SoleGraphics]

We've had sites drop out off the top 50 as google reevaluated such small changes as you listed in your post. I'd say give it some time and after a month start worrying. In the mean time look at webmaster tools and see if the search impressions have changed/dropped.

[Reinhart]

This could change in traffic be soooo many things without knowing your site's entire background.

There could be a Panda/Penguin penalty in play (I have no way of knowing) so read up on those and make sure you're not a victim of duplicate/thin content and/or shady link building practices (even if they occurred in the past, use OSE to take a look).

I'm not seeing the redirect from non www to www as an issue in terms of ranking but double check that you implemented that correctly.  I haven't heard of losing rankings over this tweak before but I suppose it's possible that it takes Google a some time to figure that out (though I dont see why it would hurt rankings in the interim).

Other sites outranking you for your own article is actually quite common if you're not on a strong domain otherwise.  3rd page sounds rather harsh though.  Are you engaging in any questionable link building practices?

Without knowing more it's really tough to say what your site's problem might be.  I think I can rule out the 301 redirect from www to non-www if implimented correctly.  Sean is correct in checking your robots.txt file as well.

Hope I answered your question if not solving your greater problem for you!