Changed Homepage, Drop/Weird Rankings

[Dreo]

We ran a split test for ~20 days and swapped out our homepage 5 days ago for the one that converted better.

Today around noon, our homepage dropped out of our #1 rankings for our main KWs and now some odd internal pages rank for these main KWs... Not #1 rankings, but lower rankings like #4, #11, #20, etc.

Our internal pages which have always ranked for long-tail KWs have remained unchanged and still sit at #1.

Is this standard volatility for homepage change? Will our homepage get back to #1 once Google recognizes this is the new homepage? If so, how long does that normally take?

This site is completely white-hat and should not have been impacted by Penguin 4.0.

Thoughts?

I forgot to add, while we are seeing these drops internally (desktops, mobile browsers, SERPWOO) many of our friends across the country aren't seeing these same results when they google our main KWs.

 

[Ryuzaki]

If your friends have searched your site and keywords before and clicked your results, it will effect their personalized search results.

If this homepage redesign included the addition or a removal of a solid enough amount of content, you should expect this kind of shake-up. Especially if you added or removed instances of your keyword, changed headers around and/or the title tag.

Google has to recalculate your relevancy and whatnot after enough of a restructure. They know your domain deserve to rank, which is why your inner page is ranking, but not as highly because it's likely not remotely as optimized for the terms or has as many links. It's also why the rest of your inner pages are consistently ranking still. Their on-page didn't change.

This should be fairly temporary. I'd venture to say ~48-72 hours for purely on-page changes.

 

[CCarter]

There are multiple datacenters throughout the world for Google, several within the USA alone. When a user queries a keyword in one city and another user queries the same keyword in another city at the exact same times they will get two different results since they could be hitting different datacenters.

As Google's results fluctuate throughout the day, they flux internally throughout each datacenter. It would actually be an impossible feat for Google to have ALL their databases synced perfectly across the spectrum just due to the shear volume of data they collect.

How they store data is in a three-dimensional data set, it's not only by rank and domain but also by timestamp. That's why you are able to query queries in the past using the time period search. I talk about this a bit more here:

As well Google is not reporting 100% of their index to you. It's not even possible once you realize how their database works. No single query, queries EVERY SINGLE Database - ever, it's not possible, so it queries the most freshest and probably the nearest to you, so if you do a "site:example.com" search you might see X amount of pages, then someone half way around the world will see a completely different number.

Big data is not linear at Google's level, they have to keep data in different formats, datacenters, tables, and some have timed delay and expirations (see Google's BigTable data storage system). Google doesn't use a relational database structure (key => value), it uses a multi-dimensional structure (3D mapping) with (time: [key => value]). In theory it allows for backwards querying but also it allows versioning for comparison.

Sauce: What Causes Google To Deindex Pages Of A Website?
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That's why people get different results - not factoring in personalized and localized search results.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

If you change a page significantly, regardless of whether it's the homepage, expect it to fluctuate enormously.

Google actually has some anti-testing patents to add randomization to their behaviour when you change something...

The general thinking is to leave things for a month or two after you change them to evaluate the long-term effect, but in reality you may have to be more patient than that. After all if we could make changes and get immediate, accurate feedback on what impact they had, it would be too easy to game the system, so they aren't going to make it that easy for us, ever.

 

[Stephen]

Also worth noting, Google SERPs have been fluctuating a hell of a lot this month, the most since 2012 I read somewhere.

 

[Dreo]

Thanks for all of the input.

All of our friends have been searching using incognito. As of this morning, some have reported back seeing the whacky rankings for our site. If within a few days, we don't see our homepages come back, what course of action should we take?

Swap the homepage back to the old one? Make adjustments to the current homepage and add some of the original content back in? Do nothing and wait longer?

This is our primary site and generates a lot of revenue, so you can see why timing is very critical for us.

 

[CCarter]

If within a few days, we don't see our homepages come back, what course of action should we take?

You unfortunately have to do nothing. A major change to a page, especially the home page will take a long time for adjustments and if you do change it back Google will notice that and can and WILL slap you into oblivion.

Here is more information regarding the "Fakeout Patent": The Great Google Fakeout Patent: Let’s Hoodwink The Spammers and SEO’s Too!

If you've never been through this it's scary. It's a gut-wrenching feeling, we've all been there and felt the anxiety you are going through doubting your latest moves. But if the homepage converts better in the long run it'll be better for your overall revenue, you'll just have to wait it out, 5 days is not a lot of time. It can take up to 20 to 60 days worse case scenarios. Homepages usually always come back to their old rankings unless it was something "damaging" done to the overall SEO factors. You can probably get someone to take a look at your old homepage and new and give you a diagnosis on if you "screwed yourself", but I doubt you even need that to be honest.

If people always reverted after an adjustments no homepages or website would ever change their design. The fakeout is there is scary spammers and SEOs.

Stay the course.

 

[Dreo]

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Alright, so I found the issue and it's awfully embarrassing... But "noindex" was applied to the new homepage. This occurred due to having this applied when this page was the variant in my AB test.

When I swapped homepages in WP, I forgot to uncheck the "noindex" box. FML.

So I've gone ahead and requested a new crawl. Anything else I can do besides wait and drink a beer a sadness?

 

[Calamari]

So I've gone ahead and requested a new crawl. Anything else I can do besides wait and drink a beer a sadness?

Other than wallow is misery there's nothing you can do. It will be back in no time. I wouldn't beat yourself up over it.

 

[Stephen]

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Alright, so I found the issue and it's awfully embarrassing... But "noindex" was applied to the new homepage. This occurred due to having this applied when this page was the variant in my AB test.

When I swapped homepages in WP, I forgot to uncheck the "noindex" box. FML.

So I've gone ahead and requested a new crawl. Anything else I can do besides wait and drink a beer a sadness?

You could re-submit your XML sitemap, perhaps a few tweets from well established Twitter accounts. Also maybe produce a blog post about the new homepage and submit that too.