Website Refresh - Lost Rankings

[danieldunn10]

Hi, we refreshed our website a few weeks ago, with a new design.

The structure has changed and pages do have new URLs.

But the content, meta titles, etc have stayed the same and I have put 301 redirects in for all of the new pages (using the redirection plugin in word press).

I have found that pages which ranked in the top 3 in the past are now nowhere.

The page authority also shows as 1 for all of the pages.

Is there something we should do to get the rankings and page authority back?

Many Thanks

[donford]

HI Daniel,

In theory 301 redirecting should pass the link juice directly to your new URL, but if the URL has never been indexed by Google, those 301's may take a period of time to get indexed and reflect. This is really a subject matter, I have heard 301's and site redirects working very quickly (like same day), and other times it has been a couple months. I "feel" like this has a lot to do with the sites original traffic and Google crawl rate. For example when SEOMoz became Moz, they were re-ranking relatively quickly. While sites I have worked on have in fact take several weeks to return to the SERPs.

What that really means is it can take awhile for Google to re-evaluate your new URL's, likely on their next index pass of your site.

It is also very important to note that just because your "old url" ranked in the top 3 does not mean the new URL will rank in the top 3. Google will  re-evaluate the new url and place it in the appropriate spot. It does of course consider the link juice that your old URL had, but that does not necessarily mean it will rank the same. There are a lot of factors that go into the way page ranks.

I hope this makes sense and helps,

Don

[danieldunn10]

Thanks for your reply, so it may be that it takes a while for Google and the Moz crawls to pickup.

We also added in some new web pages, as we have some new areas of services we provide.

How long will it take for those pages to start to rank better when searched for specifically?

A competitor has a similar page and is optimized like ours in the same way. Their page authority is 14 and ours is 1.

How long does it take to get from 1 to 14? is it weeks, months or years?

Many Thanks!

[LanaS]

Did you ask Google to crawl and index your new URLs? You can do it from Google Webmaster Tools. Small thing, but it could help speed up the process.