rebuilt site,Lost serp, why?

Hello everyone. I just recently rebuilt my site and changed host. Before I did this I was on the front page #8 and now I'm nowhere to be found. Does anybody know why this might be, what I can do about it and how long it will last if there is nothing I can do about it.
Thanks-Indy

 

Are your kids wearing colts jerseys? GO PAYTON!!!!!


Make sure you use 301 redirects if your URLs changed.

Also...Research your hosting company by running your domain name through www.domaintools.com

PM me with your site and i can take a deeper look

 

hmm what would change?

the ip of your site would change if you changed servers

you said you rebuilt your site but what was changed as far as code goes?

very important

 

Everything changed. 90% of the content, all internal page url's changed. I didnt even think about that. But my site has been crawled a few time since and there has been no update to placement.
I have also used the same keywords, page descriptions and titles

 

that's why...
the pages that were previously indexed in google are now gone/changed so your rankings are gone... if you changed only the css/style of the site you woulda been fine...

just keep working at it and you'll be back

 

That's the problem. I'm looking to do a total rebuild and i intend to keep all the url's the same and content the same and then just add new content/change it slowly. Hope i don't experience the same probs you had mate. Good luck in the climb back up!

 

right on. Thanks.

 

As libertygone said, your changed page structure is the culprit. Just do a 301 redirect from your old pages to the new pages and you should be back in no time.

 

A 301 should correct the problem, however I have heard of the same problem when just changing the look of a website, no content changed you anything like that.

 

I too am redesigning my site. We want to have a more keyword rich URL structure. We have noticed all of our competitors are doing this and ranking very well across all search engines. We are a retailer of designer goods. Here is an example of our current url structure we are using: [mysite.com/t/set/mf_items.html?cat=61422&cur_letter=l&gs_gen=m]

Here is the URL structure we are moving towards:
[mysite.com/t/set/cat/Ralph-Lauren/Polo/Mens-Shirt]

As you can see in the above examples the second URL is much more keyword driven. I have a couple of questions:
Is it possible to submit the new URL structure on our xml sitemap and keep the original format of the URLs (so the SEs index the 'good looking' urls)?
And besides the obvious, existing in-bound links etc., what issues might arise from this change.
Lastly, would i need to do 301 permanent re-directs?
I appreciate all the help i can get.

Thanks

 

You'd have to use mod_rewrite to rewrite the URLs to a keyword friendly format, then use 301 redirects to point the old links to the new ones. It's been a while (I mean over two years) since I've had to do anything like that, and even then when I did it, it was only once or twice.

 

I wonder if thats my problem. Most of my links are now index-1, and index-1 etc.
they used to be services.html,about_us.html
Also, they main page URL of course is the same and the keywords are the same but those keywords do not come up in search engines anymore.

 

If your site is already well established, keeping link structure while changing the page layout, etc.. is probably a good idea.

 

Your site structure is one of the most important SEO aspects of your site. As a general rule of thumb I always make sure that my URLs are readable and that a user could remember it if they had to.

 

Thanks for all the help everyone. I just looked at the search results and I'm back on the front page. Well my main page and keyword. I have checked it everyday for almost 2 weeks and It was gone. Should I change back to the old URL's for the internal pages. I used a template for the site so all the links were set up as index-1, index-2, index-3, and so on.

 

Sometimes the best thing to do during a shakeup is nothing at all. Google tests and experiments with their algorithms, and sometimes they dont like the results and roll them back. If you change your site within this time, you may lose the original ranking.

It looks like you got it back, which is good, but try not to focus your site around rankings too much. If you want to redesign your site, or change the content, by all means go for it. If it's something you're passionate about, people will be more interested in it. Let your site influence the rankings, not vice versa.

Good luck!

 

Thanks for your advice.