djmick200 - 6:53 pm on May 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

My experiences with site redesign.

The site I talk here of now looks NOTHING like it did six months ago. EVERY page has changed though urls's havent changed at all.

The page structure, layout, meta tags are ALL changed. I started these changes in November and finished around a month ago.

The main focus of my site has also changed. Pre Sept 2005 it was very focused and geared towards mobile / cell phone extras, now there is zero mention of this.

When this dropped pages issue began I looked towards duplicate issues, my pages when looking at the code are VERY VERY simillar, though to the ordinary surfer they aren't. I have changed common elements to make them as unique as I can (still working on it), trying variants to diferent sections to see whats working and whats not.

The more unique I make each one the better it ranks (with other optimization also a factor)

If you read my earleir post and had a quick look at the sites mentioned there you will have seen these recurring common elements in a high % of those sites.

Again my site isnt perfect, very high ranking pages have pagerank 0 whereby 3 months back they had at least a bit of green. Not all the 1300 pages are ranking high, though that is down to me tinkering and trying new stuff out.

Google certainly has problems, of some sort but I'm not convinced its all one sided.

Just as a light hearted footnote: when this particular site was aiming at mobile phone stuff it ranked ok. just yesterday i noticed it was #2 for a pretty competative phrase, these is absolutely no mention of this on the entire site never mind my homepage which is the ranking page. Google has a memory like an elephant lol, Im guessing it will be in relation to inbound links from sites of that theme but strange none the less.