Theme influence in your SERP

[luisvestia]

Hello SeoMoz community.

I'm a new member here and i took the 30 day trial to test out your tools and to check if i find a need to them.

I've a situation that is bugging my mind for a few days and i wish i had more data to have more accurate information. I have a website that stayed on first in my SERP for a competitive term. I did it with a very few links because i focused a lot on the UX (mostly on site performance & layout) and the outcome was a good usability for my site. Since the latest panda my site dropped from first to fifth and then came the Google dance between 5th and the 15th position. Then i decided to change the theme because i saw loads of problems like the page titles, i fixed loads of 301's and 404's, gave it a more clean UX, removed some ads and fixed some of the url's making them shorter and more accrued. This stopped the Google dance completely! And now the site is on the 10th position.

I'm not complaining about the positions or panda updates or whatever happened. I just would like some comments on this situation. And i would like to ask if a theme update making the site better (better is a very complicated word in the SEO world know) can give negative feedback to the search engines?

Thank you.

[SanketPatel]

Hi Luis,

Do you know the latest full form of seo ? After latest Google update, it is search experience optimization not search engine optimization. If your latest theme makes site better for your visitor then search engine also going to like it, nothing negative in it.

Quote from Google webmaster Guideline:

Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.  Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

[MoosaHemani]

Your Question in particular is that does the theme update will make the site better? There is YES and there is NO at the same time...

YES! If you are changing the theme which is better in terms of design, load, user experience and more then yes it is correct that changing or updating a theme will give more value to website which will result in better SERPs...

NO! If you update the theme focusing on something which is shitty for instance your new theme contain more time to get load, the code is heavy and is less usability then chances are that you may lose your website rankings...

Remember at some point where on-page stabilizes the website’s position some good link building can give a positive jump in Google SERPs.

Hope this helps!

[luisvestia]

I always try to improve my designs for the users because i like to do it this way. It poses a more complicated challenge. The performance it's now my top 1 priority (Since mobile traffic came along. Damn 3g you're slow!). Guess i've to spend some time on the link building but i will try to avoid it if i can.

Thanks for the info guys