Sudden loss of half my Moz rankings

[Gavin.Atkinson]

My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this?

About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think.

My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com

[axel.loesken]

Hey there! I just had a look in your campaign and from spot checking it does seem that the drop in ranking is being reported accurately by using Rank Tracker and also doing some manual searches as well.

As far as to what impact of changing the theme and and removing indexing, I can't say for certain what impact this would have so I'll let an SEO expert answer those questions

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Stupid rookie mistake! I made all the changes in my development environment and copied the files and database to production with "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" still checked! Hopefully the damage is not long-lasting as I had been doubling my Google search traffic month on month for the past three months.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

It seems my "rookie mistake" is not the real issue. I rectified this problem three days ago, my URLs are listed in Google but I still have less than 10% of the traffic I had a week or so ago.

The decline started on 24 November, so it's hard to connect it to the Phantom 2 update on 19(?) November? Would Google collapse my traffic that fast and take this long to send me traffic again after just 4-5 days of index blocking? I wouldn't have thought so. And I think the drop occurred just before I migrated to the new site template, but not sure. Nothing in console to suggest anything is wrong except index numbers were lower than I'd expected.

Anyone else able to see anything (e.g. in code) that could be causing this? It's a real disappointment as I'd just started to get some real solid SERP traction on this site following the domain name change a year ago.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

I notice my Moz Rankings report from yesterday shows I've regained about one third of my rankings but my search traffic has not increase yet. I'm hoping it was just a glitch and it will recover in full, but I don't know. I was about to ditch my new theme (which makes the site 10-15% faster and much better mobile experience) and return to my old theme when I saw the Moz report.

Would still like to get some input from experts as I see a lot of people now complaining about this on the GWT support forum (including myself).

[Gavin.Atkinson]

No responses so I'm guessing no-one really knows what the answer is? FYI my rankings have started to recover since early December, with about half back to where they were and traffic at about 40% of pre-drop figures. Still no real understanding of why it happened or what I did (if anything) to start the recovery process.