Hi, I was wondering if anyone could help me with a Google issue. Nearly two years ago I redesigned the company website for the place I work for and things went great. The more attractive design and better content had it climbing the pageranks. Around seven or eight months ago we had to change hosts due to problems with the existing host and now we seem to have disappeared from google almost entirely. We still show up when you search very specifically, like typing in the company name, but not when you type in what we do or anything a potential customer that is unaware of us might type. There were two main changes when we moved; Firstly, we moved from blahblahblah.co.uk to blah.com (not sure if putting the real addy in would count as advertising... even though what we do has nothing to do with tech or web design) and changing blahblahblah.co.uk to forward to the new addy. However I've written this off as an reason as the first month or two we didn't move in google, and have since slowly dropped off into oblivion. Secondly the site had used server side includes (.shtml) and when we moved we changes to the php include function (.php) but all the content was the same. The only thing I can think of is that the host (fasthost) might be letting us down. A number of times I've been to the site and it's been missing for five minute spells, one time it was down for a few hours and took a while on the phone to get them to do anything. Also the site has a tendency to die for a little while after editing any php code. If anyone has any ideas or can point me in the direction of some I would be mucho greatful. Beagrie
If you changed your page/domain extensions from .shtml to .php / .co.uk to .com even with unchanged content, the SE will see them as new pages and the indexing and ranking process starts again from the beginning. Also all inbound links to the old extensions and domain have become invalid if you didn't prepare your permanent redirections on the old server well. So a drop in rankings is normal, specially for the more competetive search terms. Frequent server downs with a new site aren't helpful either to recover old rankings fast.
Yeah but the page rankings weren't really hit that hard to start with, then the new domain with the new extensions appears a few results below the old one and began to steadily drop from there and is showing no signs of turning around. Google never seemed to register sites that linked to us but we've been in contact with everyone we could find and had them change their link url to the new one. Could the server downs be that significant? Assuming they are as often as I suspect.
Server Down time is a major factor and it will hurt you. Also monfis is correct that changing the url string(s) will have a major impact. I'm assuming that the basic SEO have been done
Have you used 301 redirects to make sure your new pages get SERP-credit? Lots of information on Google about how to setup 301 redirects. 2- Also check your weblogs and/or use Google webmaster tools to find broken links. You can then manually patch them via .htaccess files and more 301 redirects.
Yep, it is like starting all over again. Google sees your new site as it is: a new website. Any credits, points, PR, backlinks, etc that you received on your old site are still going to your old site. Google does not redirect that for you. You will have to do that by yourself. It was really not a smart thing to move the site like that without going into issues first.
Yeah I did tell them that but what do I know. My job at this firm isn't web designer, I was just handed the site when they found out I knew something about it. I set it up with Google webmaster tools from the start and it reads no broken links. I'll look into the server downtime and see how serious it is and check the domain forwarding. Thanks for all the feedback.
beagrie, first, make sure you have all the redirects properly set up, and the old site is all but nuked -- all those pages should be 404'd. second, definitely look into the downtime issue. if your site is going down for extended periods of time then it will suffer in the ranks. you may even want to switch hosts, maybe your new ip is in a bad neighborhood. try: http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm and see what comes. i would also run a xenu link search on your site on the off chance it was hacked. maybe some mysterious links will surface. and lastly, try copyscape.com and see if anyone has your content. good luck.
Ok so to update: The old domain is purely forwarding to the new domain and IS 301 which is apparently "Google Friendly" according to one website. The site has been on Google webmaster tools for a while and nothing seems to show that it might have been down, the only copied content is a paragraph describing what our company does that has been copy/pasted by a magazine linking to us and there isn't any signs of a bad neighborhood. I have realized one thing that might have caused it. The image gallery on the site used to be captioned but in the haste to get the site done (as I said, the website is not my actual job there, just something I've been asked to do) the images were just thumbnails linking to the image files. There are around 100 images in that gallery, obviously all relating to the site and what we do. Do you think the lack of title tags and descriptive sentences might have impacted it? Also, while we've dropped off of Google, we show up as number 4 on Yahoo?!
Maybe try checking how many of your pages are indexed. I've seen a legitimate site dropped off of Google's index and therefore it doesn't show up in Google searches. I'm not sure why that happened though, or how to fix it.