New Design - Failed SEO

[cameron]

I have an old skateboarding site that hadn't been updated for years but still had a few hundred visitors/day: http://www.alteredskate.com/

A couple months back I decided to update the design and integrate adsense ads. I didn't think I did a bad job with SEO, but my traffic dropped over 50%. Eventually I decided to put the old design back up. Today I noticed that the site is ranking well again and my traffic is back up.

Anyone else ever have an experience like this?

[Emancipator]

haha yeah i did that with one of my biggest sites... but i am far from an kind of seo guy :) i did what you did and put it back up.

[cameron]

Last night I just put up a new design for my current skateboarding site. Fingers crossed.

[ChrisS]

So a new design is up at alteredskate or another site?

[Slashdot]

popups...meh.. no good bad popups :(

[cameron]

www.alteredskate.com had a new design, but I switched back to the old one.
www.hdskate.com has a new design up.

Alteredskate is my only site with popups. I consider it a dead site, and I'm milking it for whatever I can get. I don't expect visitors to ever return because all that's on it are links to hdskate.