Dramatic effects of a layout change

A few days back I initially posted the article ‘Collected UAProf URLs’. The format I used for the information was one big table with the first column the brand, the second column the model and the third column the UAProf URLs, e.g.:

I almost immediately saw a spike in traffic most of it to that article resulting from people searching UAProf information for specific devices.

I didn’t really like the layout of the article so I made a small change. Instead of one huge table with everything in there, I decide to use a paragraph for each brand like this:

Asus

To my surprise traffic to this article stopped almost completely within a day. Today I changed it back to it’s previous format and … traffic is back. I never imagined that a layout change (no words added or removed, no links changed) could have such a dramatic effect on search originated traffic.