Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In October of last year we completely revamped our web site; brand new pages, structure, and a new domain name. I used a 301 redirect from all the old pages to their equivalents on the new site.
Although all our new pages are indexed, our rankings have gone from top 10 to non-existant. Furthermore our inbound links have vanished in the last week or so: using link:example.com produces no results. Despite the fact that we have plenty of inbound links, all of which are indexed by Google, and many of which show up in search results when using our keywords.
Anyone have any ideas?
Ben
[edited by: tedster at 1:52 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2006]
[edit reason] no specific domains, please [/edit]
In October of last year we completely revamped our web site; brand new pages, structure, and a new domain name. I used a 301 redirect from all the old pages to their equivalents on the new site. Although all our new pages are indexed, our rankings have gone from top 10 to non-existant.
Drastic site changes have been known to trigger a "Sandbox" effect. Maybe that's what's happening, maybe not. Imho, sometimes it's best to not revamp, just stick with the old domain and spruce it up.
Furthermore our inbound links have vanished in the last week or so: using link:example.com produces no results.
Perhaps more of a concern. Have you checked into possible canonical problems, like inbound links coming in with the non-preferred URL version? That might not be at all the problem, but investigate it anyway.
I wish this post were of more help, but that's all I can think of - maybe some of the others here have more insight on your situation.
Around October, we changed our code so all of our page extentions became different. We set up the proper redirects and Google seemed fine with it until now.
If I come across a solution, I'll be sure to let you know, because this is no fun.
Is your website showing up on a domain search (i.e. site:http://www.mysite.co.nz)?
If you're still listed it's likely that you will return within a couple of months. If you have no pages listed under your site search ... you need to start writing to google. People say that it doesn't work, but I did it and got results.
You have to explain the full situation. If you have spammed in the past and have removed all traces of artificial boosting you must be honest and tell them that you've learned your lesson. If you've done nothing but change your site, tell them why and make it plain that you haven't just just bought an old site trying to get a high PR. Google keeps the site cache for a long time to track changes in sites and they will be able to check your story and if it holds water ... you will return.
I was out for 6 months ... totally missing from the serps. After about 3 emails and six months on, Google replaced my site with its original PR and things are back to normal.
All the best
Col :-)
In answer to some of your questions:
If I use the site:example.com on our domain, it shows that 80 pages are listed, which is preety much the whole site, so we've not been banned.
The the inbound links are still in the Google index, it's the link:example.com which is showing zero. I know that this is notoriously unreliable, so I am not stressing to much about that. My client's Google link popularity has collapsed from 51 to 11, but his rankings haven't changed noticeably, and his competitors have a similar - or even worse link popularity.
It does sound as if my domain has been sandboxed for being new, and that I'll just have to be patient.
Ben
> Anyone have any ideas?
No. The exact same thing has happened to me - zero inbound links whe I actually have over a hundred, all legitimate (from places like the BBC, the Register, Computer Weekly, etc.) and none bought or exchanged.
Doesn't seem to have affected my placings in the slightest.
Ben
Ben
I've tried using linkŠexample.com whicj shows that I have 135 backlinks. Does anyone know what this is, and how it differs from link:example.com?
I don't believe it's a link command. It's just showing text occurrences of the URL. You can get the same thing by searching "www.example.com"
