An SEO professional was concerned about code changes they made to their site. This impacted the areas of server side rendering.
They changed from JavaScript – from server-side rendering to static HTML. It’s been four months and their search rankings are not recovering after a drop.
They are also noticing strange activity in the search results with vastly inconsistent rankings between target keywords and subtle variations.
From their perspective, it feels like Google is struggling to understand the broader context of the content, which hasn’t changed after the upgrade.
They are wondering if John is able to shed any light on this issue.
John explained that it’s really hard to say without seeing the site itself. But, he did offer some information on potential reasons.
If nothing on the site has changed and if you just moved from client-side rendering to server-side rendering, he would not expect to see any change in rankings or visibility on the website.
In this case, John would assume that one of two things are happening.
First, it may be that with the change of the SEO pro’s infrastructure, the site layout and structure has changed as well. This could include things like internal linking, maybe even URLs that are findable on the site, and those kinds of things – all of which can affect ranking.
The other thing could be that perhaps there were just changes in ranking overall that were happening.
And they just happened to coincide when they made the technical changes on the site. And this is something where John thinks they can figure out if that’s happening by running a website comparison check.
Here, you would just compare the previous site to the new site, in order to understand whether there were any significant structural changes or not.
If there are no structural changes, and you’re seeing change in rankings, then John would assume this is more of a general ranking change rather than anything specific to the infrastructure change that you’re making.
This happens at approximately the 36:23 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 36:23
The next one I have is: We’ve undertaken a substantial code change of our website to JavaScript with server-side rendering to static HTML. It’s been four months and our search rankings are not recovering after a drop. We’re also noticing strange activity in the search results with vastly inconsistent rankings between target keyword and subtle variations. It feels like Google is struggling to understand the broader context of the content, which has not changed after the upgrade. Are you able to shed any light on why this is occurring?
John (Answer) 36:55
It’s really hard to say, without seeing the website itself. But essentially, if nothing on the website has changed, if you just move from client-side rendering to server-side rendering, then I would not expect to see any change in rankings or visibility on the website.
So I would assume that either one of two things are happening. On the one hand, it might be that with the change of your infrastructure, your website layout and structure has changed as well. So that could include things like internal linking, maybe even the URLs that are findable on the website, and those kinds of things, they can affect ranking.
The other thing could be that maybe there were just changes in ranking overall, that were happening, and they just happen to coincide with when you made the technical changes on your website.
And that’s something where I think you can kind of try to figure out if that might be happening by really comparing your previous website to your current website, to figure out were there really significant structural changes or not.
If there are no structural changes, and you’re seeing a change in rankings, and I would assume this is more of a general ranking change rather than something specific to this infrastructure change that you are making.
