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I migrated my site last week from an old .aspx framework to a new site hosted via WordPress.

The domain name is the same and I am seeing no errors when I test and submit the sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. However, Google Webmaster Tools is showing that my indexed URLs dropped to ZERO the day after the switch, and it has not yet picked back up (the blue bar graph is listed at 448 URLs, there is no longer a red bar graph).

I still see my URLs in the SERPs, but much lower than before the move, and so a lot less Google traffic. How can I know for sure if something is going wrong? I can't seem to find anything to support this matter.

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    Did your url structure change?
    – Ivo van der Veeken
    Nov 22, 2013 at 14:32
  • Yes it did, but I've put in place the proper 301 redirects to handle the changes.
    – Jenna
    Nov 22, 2013 at 14:51
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    It might take Google some time to completely discover and index your new URL's. I suffered traffic loss for about 3 months after I changed my URL structure...
    – Ivo van der Veeken
    Nov 22, 2013 at 15:04
  • That sounds terrible! How many URLs did you have that migrated over to a new structure? So I shouldn't be concerned that my indexed URLS went from ~400 to zero overnight?
    – Jenna
    Nov 22, 2013 at 15:40
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    I had about 7k URL's. The bar you decribe is not the total number of URL's that are indexed by the way, just the number of URL's that were indexed from that sitemap. you changed the sitemap so it's normal that that dropped to 0. Google Index > Index Status will still have a decent number indexed and if you Google site:mysite.com, there will still be a lot of indexed pages.
    – Ivo van der Veeken
    Nov 22, 2013 at 15:58

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The bar you decribe is not the total number of URL's that are indexed, just the number of URL's that were indexed from that sitemap. you changed the sitemap so it's normal that that dropped to 0. Google Index > Index Status will still have a decent number indexed and if you Google site:mysite.com, there will still be a lot of indexed pages.

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I've had the red bar in Google Webmaster Tools show up again when I fixed these two things:

  1. I had the sitemap listed twice in the robots.txt file. I was using a robots plug-in and All-in one SEO plug-in which appended the sitemap link at the bottom of the robots.txt file. Look at your robots.txt file by going to http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt and seeing if you've got a similar problem.

  2. I had 1,800 warnings from Google from the sitemap. I looked at the examples and saw that my sitemap was serving files I was telling robots.txt to block. I re-configured my sitemap plug-in not list those files to begin with. I'm not down to zero errors yet, but nearly so.

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