Huge google impression drop after cleaning html

Posted by olgatorresfoundation on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by olgatorresfoundation
Published on 2012-06-04T00:27:21Z Indexed on 2012/06/04 4:48 UTC
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Good morning,

I am the webmaster of a non-profit organization that donates grants to colorectal cancer research projects and funds various colorectal cancer information campaigns.

We have three domains:

www.fundacioolgatorres dot org (Catalan)

www.fundacionolgatorres dot org (Spanish)

www.olgatorresfoundation dot org (English)

So what happened? I redesigned olgatorresfoundation on the 20th and the fundacionolgatorres on the 30th of May. In both cases, exactly two days later, the number of impressions on both dropped to a halt. Granted, we did not have the traffic of Microsoft, but a 90% decrease a disaster of incredible proportions for us.

My only real changes were cleaning up the old ineffective HTML to a cleaner form (mostly moving away from redundant table construction to a table-less view). Here is a before and after snapshot of what the change looks like:

Before: http://www.fundacioolgatorres.org/aparell_digestiu/introduccio/ (unchanged page in Catalan)

After: http://www.olgatorresfoundation.org/digestive_system/introduction/ (changed page in English)

Anybody has a clue to what just happened? Why should a normal, sane html improvement be punished and so dramatically? No URLs have been changed, neither have page names or descriptions.

Possible secondary question: If it is so that Google sees it as a major overhaul and decides to drop the pagerank sharply, does it come back to pre-change levels if the content "checks out" or will the page start over from scratch earning those pagerank points (which would mean that we would have to wait 6 months for the pages to recover to the level they had two weeks ago)?

(duplicated from productforums.google dot com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/YsnyX0JzOpY, hoping to reach a wider audience)

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