Ranking disappears on site update

Does Google quarantine on major changes?

[zigmund]

The site that I webmaster has a navigation bar of links to other pages, at the foot of every page, everybody says how well designed and easy to navigate the site is. It consistently ranks between 1 and 4 on Google as it has many quality inbound links.
My problem, every update replaces every page, and then the site disappears from Google, often for an extended period, only coming back, and sometime badly indexed (extracted material) when I notice it and do submit URL. Google help page says it may drop a site if the site changes substantially, but I can't help the substantial, every page change. The site is an educational resource, so how do I get round this problem?

[DerekH]

Welcome to Webmaster World zigmund!

Sorry no-one's picked this up before....

Google help page says it may drop a site if the site changes substantially, but I can't help the substantial, every page change.

I think you've answered your own question here.
Google says these are the rules. You say you don't adhere to them. And then you complain.

I think you have to ask yourself why EVERY page has to change. Other webmasters manage quite OK without uploading 50,000 pages every single day, and it suggests that perhaps you've taken one approach to site maintenance when another might be more fruitful.

I'm sorry that that's not a lot of help, but as you've already pointed out, you do something they advise you not to. Others don't.
Welcome to the frustrating world of trying to live by Google's rules <grin>
DerekH

[zigmund]

Thanks for the reply. Google is a pain. The reason for doing the Navigation in plain, vanilla HTML was to make the site accessible to the blind and partially sited, who use text to speech, Braille pads and other aids. Using server side includes or Java, or Iframes and the like makes the site (to my mind) messy. For instance Iframes does the job but then older versions of Netscape don't support it, not sure what Opera does. I've moved to Iframes as a trial, first thing I noticed was a big blank area until the IFrame HTML loaded. Looks like building the page on the server might cure this but Google says it doesn't like server rendered pages either. Any ideas?

[karmov]

Welcome to Webmasterworld zigmund

Just how much/often is each page changing. I imagine if you're changing all of your pages every day G would have a problem with that, but if it's only a single addition to your menu each month, then I'd look for a more likely culprit.

Using server side includes or Java, or Iframes and the like makes the site (to my mind) messy.

I use SSI on my site and don't see how it makes things "messy". It certainly help me when I need to make a menu change :)

Google says it doesn't like server rendered pages either.

That may be in reference to dynamically generated pages though I'd like to see the reference to that. As I said, I use SSI all over, other sites with PHP and have had no problems with G.

[Terabytes]

Just my 2-cents...

I recently re-did my entire site (2 weeks ago). Brand new page names were utilized, none of the old page names were kept on the new site.

Google indexed the entire site within 48 hours...the listings for the new site appeared within 3 days...

So far google comes regularly (has for the last couple years actually) looking for updates.

I'm not sure why some have issues, and some don't.

However, the only thing that I may be doing different is submitting any new pages I do to google's "add your URL" page. (complete URLS to the new pages...not just the top level domain name)

[google.com...]

this seems to trigger Google into grabbing my new pages within a few days...

hope that helps...

[zigmund]

The problem seems Google specific, AV doesn't seem to blink or notice if the whole site changes. The updates can vary from twice a week to once a month. Nice thing about same Navbar on every page is that you can jump from page to page, topic to topic, without going back to HOME every time. As you move through the site the vlinks change color (in all the navbars), so you know where you've already been. It's all very user and visually impaired friendly. Changing every pages navbar is just a case of setting a search and replace program loose. It wouldn't be so bad but for having to re-submit, with add URL, to get back to the front page, otherwise if you don't notice you can disappear totally from G for an extended period, and the number of visitors you get reflects this. G accounts for over half the hits plus many other SE's take G's results in whole or part.