: Does sitewide html refactoring affect Google traffic? I have recently made a big structural change on my site and the very next day the number of Google impressions went from 75.000 to 3.000,

@Kristi941

Since HTML/semantic markup is a ranking factor and you've changed yours I'd say it could be a cause of your problems. You also may have inadvertently done something to your website to make the content inaccessible in some fashion to Google and/or made the content seem lower quality. I'd do a review of every change you made and what processes were used to implement this update and make sure everything seems to be on the up-and-up.

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@Alves908

I can't say what's going on with your particular website, but in case another anecdotal datapoint will help:

In early April I refactored the HTML and applied some new CSS styling to a site that has been getting moderately high and consistent traffic from Google for the last several years. No content changes, no URL changes.

Rankings dropped instantaneously and I lost about 2/3 traffic the next day. Fortunately I didn't panic and revert my changes, because on the second day traffic was back to normal.

Over the next month, Google traffic again dropped precipitously two more times, each time regaining to normal levels a few days later.

Things seem to have stabilized, and Google traffic has remained high since May.

So, presuming that your redesign is equally easily indexed by Google, I'd guess that you might see your traffic jump up again once their algorithms are sufficiently convinced that your site hasn't been hacked by spammers. For how long now has your traffic been low?

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@YK1175434

If it's true that you did not change urls and titles, according to the restructing example you provided:
www.olgatorresfoundation.org/digestive_system/introduction/
vs
www.fundacioolgatorres.org/aparell_digestiu/introduccio/
the only thing it might have affected badly the visits is that you added/removed the right side bar with the dozens of links.

It's not clear to me which one of the two example you provided generated the drop in visits:


If it's the one w/o the side bar, it migh be that pages pointed by
those links went lost and Google is not indexing them anymore
resulting in a drop of visits.
If it's the one with the side bar if might be that all the links you
added redistributed the PR in your site, in a way that has a bad
impact on visist. Maybe the pages with no side bar were ranking good
and getting many visits, once you added the sidebar the PR of those
pages flowed to other pages making all of your pages not ranking well
anymore.


Anyway it's strange that it took only one day.

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