Many changes carried out - Caused a rankings dip one week on?

[Whittie]

Hi all!

Last week various changes were carried out on a website which has large traffic daily.
The changes included;

• Re-structure of product meta titles ~500
• Re-structure of product meta description ~500
• Canonical link included on the majority of pages ~600

Meta details have only been changed mildly

Title has gone from
Name | Product Code | Category | Company Name
To
Name | Category | Collection | Company Name
IF the title is shorter than 62 characters, the price gets added in.
Name | Category | Collection | Price | Company Name

Descriptions have been cut shortIF description is over 156 characters the word on the limit is cut off and replaced with ...

Canonical LinksReasoning for adding a canonical link for each product was to point Google in the right direction.

• Upper and Lower case within the URL are reachable
• .aspx / .html at the end of each page
• Canonical link added in the meta directing to a lower case version of the URL.

Rankings have been reduced across various keywords, however a few have had a positive impact.

Would you say this is a dip before a mild rise, or something I've done is harming the rankings and needs to be reversed? I'd appreciate any advice given.

Many Thanks

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I wouldn't worry too much just yet. There is often a period of adjustment when lots of changes have been made and there is nothing there that would give me cause for concern.

My only suggestion would have been to try a smaller number of pages first of all before committing to all / lots of pages, but hindsight is a wonderful thing

I would wait it out for a little bit and just monitor keyword positions in the SERPs for now.

-Andy

[billhartzer]

Like Andy said, I wouldn't worry too much if it's only been about a week. I've seen various issues such as canonical tags being added to a site's pages that have taken a long time (up to two months) to be ironed out.

If you have refreshed the content, the best thing you can do is to make sure those pages are crawled quickly.  You can use social media (Twitter, Google+, etc.) to Tweet and mention those URLs and get them crawled. I would have a strategy in place to get new trusted, authority type links to those pages, as well.

[Whittie]

Thank you for your responses. Just to update you all to say after the rankings dip, they're more or less back to where they were, fingers crossed the rise continues. Regards