Google reindex?

Site re-done google referrers dropped.

[jribz]

I have a question, not sure if this is the right forum but perhaps someone can point me in the right direction.

I recently switched content management systems from a very old 'phpnuke' set-up to a totally different style, now using wordpress for the majority of the site. (the switch was about 2 weeks ago)

The problem is, google doesn't seem to be sending referrers any longer. Rather, the referrals have dropped to the point where they are almost not there.

I used to get well over 1000 referrals from google daily, and over the last week the number has slipped to less than 50 on most days.

Google still has about 17,000 listings in it's index for my site, but it seems they aren't really active in the search results. (even my site name when searched, doesn't come up on the first ten pages)

Unfortunately, google was the biggest source of traffic for my site, so almost everything has went down (revenue, pageviews, ctr, etc).

Any ideas, or anyone experience this in the past and have any insight on what to expect?

Thanks

[jimbeetle]

Well, in the switch from phpnuke to wordpress did the site structure or page names change? If so, you should look into using .htacess to putting in permanent 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new.

[jribz]

I actually did write a few rewrite rules, one of which was dynamic and redirected old article urls to the new ones permanantly (about 3000 of them) and the others where for other areas of the site, which were mainly redirected to different categories of the site.

I did everything possible to retain the traffic, and if I look in my google results I can see that the rewrites worked, so I can't understand why there is such a huge drop.

[jimbeetle]

Okay, then here's where you have to start digging a bit deeper. Sometimes the apparent cause turns out to be coincidence. Have you gone back to check your traffic logs to be certain that the drop happened only after you made the changeover? Or do you see any downward trend starting before that?

There have been quite a few things happening with Google over the past few months so you might also want to dig through the Google News Forum [webmasterworld.com]. Look for threads concerning pages going into the supplemental results and see if any of those trends might apply to your site.

[jribz]

I don't know, I've looked over the forums there and I see similar situations, but none recently, so I'm thinking it was definitely because of the switch.

It's really sad but the user forums on my site, which have gone unchanged and on a sub-domain of forums.domain.com have also lost all active listings.

I'm at a lost. I decided to rerun the site through a validator to see if there were any glaring errors, but there are only a few minor tag errors to be found, nothing that would affect the way google sees the site.

For a keyword where I used to be within the first 4 I can't find my site anywhere in the first 200, or beyond, I didn't check further.

I guess I'm going to have to wait it out and see if google decides to reindex (which they are according to the logs), even the listing google does have for the site:search lists some of the newer urls.

Oh, forgot to mention I use a google sitemap for both the main site and the forums, but still nothing.

Frustrated, thanks for the replies.

[the_nerd]

did you compare the html-source-code of your old/new pages? Maybe something trivial happened, like <title> omitted?

Even more trivial, capiTAL lETTers?

Google doesn't give a hoot about how you serve up your pages, they just read text files.

Take a look at TB PR - do the new pages show the same PR as the old ones used to? If not, you probably DID change the pagenames in some way.

Did you use some tool (e.g. XENU) to spider your own site and see if anything's broken?`

Just some ideas.

[jokla]

I've noticed the same problem on a site I've redesigned. After the changes were done, the site got indexed by google well, and the new content was listed in the search results aswell. Some non-existent site were redirected to the home ( well index ) site, so everything seemed to be o.k. Since about two weeks it's hard to find anything on the site. Does it take that long to reindex the site or did something go wrong?

If things won't get better then I have change back to the old stuff.