Lost SEO/Page Rank after theme upgrade

[niceup]

I upgraded from the Agent Theme to the AgentPress Pro theme and ever since the upgrade I have lost all of my keyword rankings that took my 5 years to build. Now I do not show up in google for my keywords. I checked 10+ pages of google and do not see my site. Previously I was on the second page of Google and I hoping with the theme upgrade I would jump to page 1 with some additional tweaking.

My website is http://kylesellsbusinesses.com/ and my main keyword is "New York Business Broker"

Can someone please advise.
Thank You

http://kylesellsbusinesses.com/

[David Chu]

Hi,
I'm not sure, to be honest, I'm not a specialist in that. Your site looks great, it validates, and it looks like you have each page set up for SEO.

You do have a fairly hefty image on the homepage background, but it's not enormous. Considering that, your site loads pretty quick, so that's good.

Some of the meta descriptions are long-ish. I like to keep them at around 160 characters, but I don't think that would necessarily be a reason for docking you.

I Google searched on the phrase above, and you came up on page 3, in case that's any comfort. 🙂

Cheers, Dave

---

Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[niceup]

Thanks for your valuable input.

I will look into the homepage image and meta tag you spoke about.
Regarding the page rank, i just noticed that i am now on page 3, so may seem that google restarted to index my site. so that is goods news. Hopefully as it updates i regain my 2 page ranking.

[Badlywired]

Have to checked Google Webmaster tools?

Also I'm no expert in this but your robots.txt is show a rather strange (in my opinon) entry

http://kylesellsbusinesses.com/robots.txt

#Begin Attracta SEO Tools Sitemap. Do not remove
sitemap: http://cdn.attracta.com/sitemap/1794602.xml.gz
#End Attracta SEO Tools Sitemap. Do not remove

And that site map contains (in my limited experience) nothing of value, so I can't see that it is helping matters

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://cdn.attracta.com/sitemap/1794602/0.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2015-01-17</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

---

My techy blog WordPress and stuff badlywired.com

[niceup]

I don't understand any of this stuff.
Trying to learn on the go.

I used attrata seo from hostgator (installed on cpanel) and google sitemao generator (wp plugin).
https://www.attracta.com/

XML Sitemap Generator for Google

I am not sure if there are causing a conflict. But i used them both before with no problem.
This is a bit confusing

[Badlywired]

Fair enough. I have never heard of Attracta but then I haven't heard of a lot of things.

If you are paying them $199 per month then they should be able to answer your questions.

---

My techy blog WordPress and stuff badlywired.com

[coralseait]

Generally we stick with WordPress SEO and Local SEO (Both by Yoast) as they integrate with Genesis very well, and generate sitemaps. For us it is nice because it keeps all SEO related things in one centralised tool, and we can move site to new hosts / instances without having to deal with cPanel stuff. But I understand there's other ways to skin the cat.

Attracta optimisations at cPanel level can be very good, but they can also be conflicting with things.

A fair warning, WPSEO and Local SEO can take a lot of tuning. If you embark down that path, I recommend patience and perseverance and small changes with time to reflect in the index. Although Google crawls instantly, index updates are purposely slow to cause stability in search results. In that regard Google may just be taking time to learn your new site and markup.

As for troubleshooting:

1) Start in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), and make sure you are not having some severe crawl issues, robots.txt blocking, or other problems. GWT will warn if there are important issues.

2) Check GWT under Search Appearance -> HTML Improvements to make sure you are not having duplicate content or title issues. If Google see's dups it will start to drop what it thinks are the less important ones.

3) Decide if you want to keep Attracta optimisations or switch to an SEO plugin.

4) In GWT, make sure you've requested a full site crawl and all linked URLs so Google can understand the site has changed. This takes time to register to the index.

5) Keep in mind that SEO tuning is a long slow process, so try to be patient and make small targeted changes. Too many at one time and you won't know what is actually impacting the index. Give time for each change to reflect.

The site is very nice and clean, so if no major issues show in GWT you may just need a bit more time and full crawl to re-index.

---

Coral Sea IT

[coralseait]

Oh yeah, the Attracta sitemap contains a child site map of your pages / locs so I think it is ok. I'd have to see what Google Web Master Tools thinks, because you may be submitting overlapping sitemaps via the Attracta Map and the Google Sitemap Plugin (def could be source of duplicate content warnings if you have any). Also, you may have to let Attracta re-gen their optimisations post site theme change.

---

Coral Sea IT

[Author]

Posts