Search results

[dave pearce]

I have recently replaced an existing company website. The new site uses the same file names for pages as the old site and the hosting is unchanged.

When you search for the company on Google it comes out top. However with the old site Google also returned a number of other sites who have reciprocal links with the companys site. Although the reciprocal links are still in place these other sites are no longer returned by Google.

I would appreciate any suggestios as to what may have caused this change.

[seobook]

I would appreciate any suggestios as to what may have caused this change.
changes in the ranking algorithm maybe?

how connected were all the link partners? were they legit quality sites or were they rubbish type duplicate content or?

also have you marketed the new site or has it's name became more popular?

are you talking about a regular search for the name or a link check? most links don't show up when you use Google's link: function.

[B-Double-U]

I am assuming that the Domain name did not change...otherwise that is your answer.

but there could be a number of reasons that would affect this:

using a redirector from those pages [page driven]
301 - 302 redirects [server side]
taking the entire website down for an extended period of time.
domain name host header change
content on the new pages no longer reflects as relevant to the link provided from the linking site

possibly just a timing issue.....the change could have been imminent and just happened to show up at the same time...

[dave pearce]

Thanks for the suggestions. The links are legitimate (from the suppliers of the companys products), the domain name is unchanged and the site was only down for an hour during replacement.
The previous site was not marketed or regularly submitted and we have not been contracted to do this. We literally just changed the page design, content and navigational structure. The content has changed but is still at least as relevant as before.
This situation results from just a regular Google search for the company name. They still come out top, but they believe that with the old site a lot of their suppliers with reciprocal links came up on the first few pages as well, and now they don't (the new site was loaded several weeks ago).
I will look into the ranking algorithm, redirector and 301 - 302 redirects. Thanks again.

[Marcia]

The previous site was not marketed or regularly submitted and we have not been contracted to do thisYou don't need to submit regularly. Once the engines know about a site (from links) they come back and crawl it regularly according to their own schedules.

Does the new site have text links that can be easily crawled? How about a site map? Are the URLs search engine friendly?

BTW, a lot of people have experienced a lag time and a drop for a while when sites are completely redesigned.

[dave pearce]

Thanks Marcia
Interesting point about the text links, the new site uses pictures of company logos rather than text, I will add text links.
I think the URL's are OK but the site map could probably be improved.