I recently (2 months ago) started to care about links to my oldest website. It's #1 in its little niche and has been for years so never really bothered about SEO until now when it's getting redesigned. I've manually submitted to a few hundred free directories, funny thing though, since I started doing this, the number of backlinks have been going down, not up, how can this be
This happened to us before did you change the URL's i.e did you rename the URL's in the re-design process We did this years ago with one of our sites and lost most of our backlinks
If you're checking deep page linking and you didn't 301 old pages to new pages, you might have a problem seeing those same links from older link popularity reports. The SE's won't pick them up, as they're now going to "orphan" pages. If you're checking link popularity to the homepage, well, I've seen it fluctuate all the time with my clients. Some months it will be high 5 figure links and other times low 5 figure links. As long as rankings stay consistant and links are still actively being pursued, then personally I don't worry about it.
Redesign is not complete yet, it's just in the mockup stage, so no links have been changed. That said, how should I handle all page links being changed? Since the site is going over to a database system everything will change except the mainpage.
Make sure if you're moving to a DB system, that you keep the URL's looking static. Make sure to stress that to whoever is the programmer. But to answer your question, tell your programmer to 301 old pages to new DB pages via .htaccess. That shouldn't be a problem for them.
Just feels crap when you actually start to work with link development etc you do worse than you did before. Was the same when I started to optimize adsense more, just earned less compared to when I just put it anywhere