Recent Google Index Change Woes

[joeweb]

I work for a smallish but rapidly growing company. We recently changed our corporate website from an all flash site to an HTML/CSS site running on a new CMS. We did this because the old flash site was out of date and difficult to update with relevant content and the infrastructure wasn't able to handle the workload.

We've taken a huge hit in the last 2 or so weeks as our ranking in Google has bounced all over the place not only losing our #1 spot but dropping out of the first page.

Having worked in SEO/SEM for a while now, I get it, and know that with a big change we're going to take a short term hit, but my bosses are in a panic.

I have two questions:

1) Any thoughts on how can I calm the storm in the executive offices while we work through the recent SERP changes?

2) I noticed some chatter that Google had been doing some updates to their index and a few people have seen some slippage in their rankings. Could we be the victim of some bad timing and updating during an index?

3) We've got a long-term plan any suggestions as to what we can do to rectify the situation short-term?

Any advice you might have on the situation is greatly appreciated.

[tedster]

What do in your office goes way outside the topical area of this forum - but good luck on that.

As for updates, well Google is almost continually updating their algo these days and also running hundreds of low level experiments for just a portion of its users as well. It's something like surfing with storm coming up.

At any rate, these two threads should give you a start:

Google.com SERP Changes - August 2008 [webmasterworld.com]
Yo-Yo Effect - Observations and Understandings [webmasterworld.com]

[TerrCan123]

What does it say in WMT? I would start there as I find problems with my site in the errors.