New URL Structure caused virtually All rankings to drop 5 to 10 positions in latest report ?.. Is this normal

[PeteC12]

Hi All,

We changed out url structure on our website to both reduce both the size of our category url structure (reduce the number of layers '/ ' )  and also to replace the underscores we originally had to hyphens... We did this during a new site design. Anyway we relaunched it a week ago.

We did the 301 redirects from old to new , new site maps etc, and the latest moz ranking report is showing most of them dropping 5 to 10 positions  i.e from 3rd to 10th etc...

Is this something to be expected , and then it should recover or should this be telling me alarm bells.

I would have expected not such a negative shift in all my rankings ?..

Anyone thoughts of this would be greatly appreciated...

thanks

Pete

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[MickEdwards]

As soon as you change URL structure you are creating new URLs.  So effectively you are giving Google a new site to work with.  The 301's and current link profile will help to pull those new URLs into shape for Google and to have a drop is expected.

I would be focusing on getting some more quality links coming in and create new content to help the recovery process and move into a stronger position.

[TimHolmes]

I know you are pinning this on the structure of the site, however, when did your structural change take place? Could you have also taken a small hit from the recent penguin / panda refresh that has seemed to have rolled out recently??

We certainly saw a little movement here.

This is a link to an article from Barry Schwartz on the rumblings. 
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-shift-panda-penguin-19437.html

[SWD.Advertising]

Generally it makes sense that this can/does happen. One thing i would say, have you re-crawled the site in webmasters?, if not google may still be crawling your site and finding 404 pages. This is something that google doesn't like and could have an adverse effect on rankings

Thanks

[PeteC12]

Hi ,

Sorry, Do you mean using Fetch or something else ?.. We have almost 10K pages so how can I re-crawl the site in Webmasters  ?..

We have submitted new maps and I can see from the stats that Google Did crawl the site last on Friday 14th .

thanks

Pete

[SWD.Advertising]

Hi yeah I meant fetch and render.