Hi,

this is my second post at SEW - but I was lurking around for some time now and liked it.

I post this because I'm clueless about what happened.

Site I'm talking about is 3 years old (at least). It's about a finnish designer and his designs. Most important pages are focusing at his most important designs and are on-page optimized (white hat). No link campaigns, redirects or similar, all white.

Those pages were all at top positions (#1, #2 or #3) all the time for searches for those design objects (as: name chair, or: designername chairsname chair). A few #1's were out of 3 or 4 m results.

In january this year I migrated that web site from old ColdFusion to PHP, and to another IP. Some movement in rankings stabilized after 2 weeks, and rankings were as before - until now.

With start of the actual Google update the important pages went back to rankings between 30 and 50 for 'name chair', and 50 to 90 for 'designername chairsname chair'.

I checked my server uptimes (ok), robots.txt (ok), logfiles (pages are spidered as often as before), lurked around for stolen content or hijacking. What I found are some sites citing content snippets of different of my pages (but no 302 redirects AFAIK) and some of those search phrase spammers showing the exact meta description phrase of my pages (as was shown in Google recently).

I doubt if what I've found is the reason for my problems, but I'm not sure. Unfortunately I don't know if those sites are new or not ...

I would appreciate any help or hints, thanks.

ADH.

just an idea: make sure you have no unkown inbound links to the site by using the <linkdomain:domain.com> command in Yahoo search bar to start (use this to ensure you cover all inbounds to any page). Also, if you haven't, you may want to make sure there are no dead links by using Xenu or something similar. Otherwise wait for the dance to end before you get really concerned. We have had very similar problems with a couple sites over the past few days. This kind of stuff could certainly drive someone to "Bourbon." :p

By the way it would seem that from past expereince with the duplicate content issue, the site that first ranked for the content would receive priority over the "newer." Can't really be too certain, but if you want to IM me the info and the search terms I might be able to give you a better answer...

Thx Chris.

<linkdomain:domain.com> gives 1.150 results - not so easy to check. Because I had never any problems before with this site I'm not so aware about my inbound links. And I did not built any inbound links ... they were just growing by promotion.

I'll sent you an IM (Instant messaging I suppose).

ADH.

sure ADP just use the "send a private message" available on the page you find when you click my name...I rarely check my Yahoo IM so sorry about not being clearer. FYI forgive me if it's not until tomorrow that I reply...time to head to the strawberry festival :)

Thanks.

Have fun w/ strawberries!

ADH.

Have you looked for old pages to see if they're still indexed?

Do you have a duplicate set of pages up there with two different file extensions, or did you use a 301 redirect from the old to the new?

@glengara: some old pages apparently still in index (-asdfg = 261; -cfm = 233). And it seems their count is changing.

@marcia: all (old) cfm pages are 301'd.

ADH.

I notice a significant increase in my inbound links (Y! 1,150 at june 3, 1.410 today). That's a big difference for 4 days - or is it normal for Yahoo links to change with that magnitude?

As i never had reasons to watch those IBLs so closely i wonder if that could be normal.

I for myself did nothing to increase number of links - up until now it was truely organic growth.

I'm in doubt because i see (for example) some sites in Google SERPs with snippets of my homepage content when searching for an exact phrase - they rank better than my site even though i've published that content first.

Again, any hints would be appreciated.

ADH.

I believe Y! is also updating, which may account for the links increase.

Sort of surprised all those old cfm pages are still being shown, if you have both the php and cfm page variants indexed it could be a dupe content problem, if it's either/or, I'd guess some spidering/indexing problem with the new pages...

Glengara, my post #8 might have been misleading.

Searching site:domain.tld -asdfg gives 258
site:domain.tld cfm gives 28

So 28 pages appear to have cfm ... but:

Interestingly at least 4 of those 28 pages aren't .cfm pages, and there's no cfm at all at them.

Strange ...

ADH.