Should I reverse renaming of a page that lost value?

[dk5]

I have a site with a handful of links that are ranked. One of those links was ranking for "pantsuits for sale". The slug was mysite.com/pantsuits.  I decided to rename the slug to mysite.com/pantsuits-for-sale and used the term "pantsuits for sale" twice in the page which it had not been appearing before. I did a 301 redirect old page to new.

I then organized 5 pages below Pantsuits-for-sale in a silo. Before they were all at the same level. I ran 301s for those also.

I suddenly lost 40 spaces in rank a few days later! Clearly Google did not like these changes.

So do you think I can regain my position by reversing the silo and changing back to the old slugs? Other thoughts/ recommendations?

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

When you do any type of redirect to a ranking page (basically, it's temporary, even though momentary, removal), there is going to be natural drop, since the page, which was there doesn't exist anymore. Reversing back is not always the way to go though. Give it couple days, do fetch as google on redirect. It should go back. Unless, of course, you made other changes, which affected the rankings.

If all this doesn't work - yeah, go ahead and change it back to original. At that point there is nothing to lose, right:)

Hope this helps

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Redirects are a funny old thing, and a source of much frustration for many.

I asked John Mueller about this last year and his response was basically, "be patient". There are occasions where a reversed redirect can see an almost immediate change, then other times it seemingly never happens - in the long run, it probably will though.

Just don't go changing back and forth too quickly because this is likely to cause you extra headaches.

-Andy