Forum Moderators: open
I feel the largest and most important changes have been to:
* remove a lot of redundant HTML (which was only of relevance while editing the site locally) and;
* to grow the size of the site.
It is now around 5000 pages in size. Only about 15% of this is utterly unique; the rest comprises product descriptions, which while not copied "as is" from elsewhere do appear in similar form on several other sites.
Before "tidying up" we achieved a top 1-5 ranking in Google for our main keywords.
The re-spidered "tidy" site has in the last few weeks fallen to the 3rd or 4th page, with rankings for very unique pages now gone altogether.
Older pages in our sector with similar content always seem to rank best on Google -- with the oldest pages on the oldest domains coming out on top irrespective of external links.
We have many indexed, incoming one-way links using our main keyword as the anchor text on related sites, whereas the other sites in question have none visible (excluding those from unsolicted copies of search engine results posted on spam-filled sites).
We have left the original pages up, although they are no longer linked from anywhere in the new site.
I'm concerned that:
1) a large volume of very specific and one-way links is being factored in to the ranking as some kind of subversion of the algorithm's aims, and its hurting us;
2) we're not going to get anywhere until we're a lot, lot older;
3) we've triggered something undesireable by having both the old and new site on the same server at the same time;
4) our press release, hosted elsewhere, now out-ranks our site by a significant margin.
I don't have the experience, but what I hope is happening is that Google has just now decided that the whole site needs to be re-calculated, is taking its time, and that when its done, we'll have something fair to show for our efforts.
If any forum members have a similar story I'd love to hear your advice.
Prairie.
and then;
"We have left the original pages up, although they are no longer linked from anywhere in the new site."
If you do have many new pages, i.e. files, they should at least be linked to the older more established ones that hopefully have PR.
I've wondered before if a duplicate content penalty would apply only to the rankings of the duplicate (or near duplicate) pages, or extend to the site in general. I tend to think google is concerned mainly with pages, not sites? Anyone?
Yes, I changed all the file names, excluding the home page.
The site also ran about 5 sub-drectories deep, with folder naming after keywords. I've reduced it to 4 sub-directories deep. I'd have made it less deep, but it would have become too cumbersome to handle offline.
The old site pages all still link back to the home page. I figured that these would continue to rank well until the new ones took over, but I was wrong. As soon as Google got a hint of the new site, we slid the rankings slide.
The old site pages have a completely different and quite complex layout (spacer files etc.); the new ones are simply composed of a banner, a picture related to each page of content and text with the most basic HTML.
I'd like to think Google won't lower rankings for what is in effect a sort of archiving.
The medium-term damage has been done now, so I'll leave the old pages up for a few months, see what comes of the situation and report back.
Prairie.
Yes, I changed all the file names, excluding the home page.
The site also ran about 5 sub-drectories deep, with folder naming after keywords.
Try to include a simlified site map(if the site doens't contain any). You can have more than 1 site map to get all the pages indexed if the site is huge.
Concentrate on link building and forget the site for a whlile. You site will reign the rankings shortly.
I guess this is what Brett meant by having a site "flushed out" from the very beginning. Thanks Webnewton and Siteseo.
We're going to link all the old pages to their new equivalents using a simple, unique text link at the top of each page.
