Search engine rankings plummeted

Hi,

One of the things that Google looks at is the internal linking structure within a site, i.e. what links to what. It typically indexes a whole site over about a month, indexing different pages on different days, what this may well mean is that currently it has indexed half of your old pages and half of your new pages, so you may well find that this is a temporary problem which in a couple of weeks time will resolve itself. If not fully, then things should at least get better.

To help solve this problem you can do the following:

Add the following code to the head of the old html pages, to forward them to the equivalent page on the new site:

You may want to try the following module:
http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
Which automatically makes the URL match the title of a page - though you can overwrite this if necessary. I personally set it to automatically create the URL on a new page, but ignore it when I update.

Have you also used all of the modules fully? i.e. rewritten the URLs so that they're user friendly, included different keyword metatags on each page, etc.

Google pays particular attention to the home page, so make sure it contains your most important keywords (if it's just one keyword, I tend to include it once in every 40 or 50 words).

Which theme are you using? Some themes use H2 tags for the Title rather than H1 tags. If yours does, then change it to a H1 tag and then use CSS to make it look the way you want it too.

You can then use H2 tags further down the page for sub-headings, as this also helps.

And ideally H1 tags should contain the relevant keywords on multiple pages. Order is important too, e.g. if you have a holiday website on Mars, putting the title as 'Holidays on Mars - Vacations in outer space' is better than 'Mars Holiday Vacations', as in the above the Mars is in the middle, so is connected to both Holidays and Vacations.

If you'd like me to look at your site in more detail or generate new links to it (which always helps), then that's a service I offer too.

All the best,

Martin

www.1websitedesigner.com

Also, when you change a page's html teh whole algorithm Google uses to index and rank your pages now has new html to work with.

If your page titles, urls, h1 tags, body content are different even in small ways this can throw your rankings off quite a bit. Were these pages previously optimized for certain niche keywords or did you just happen upon them being good for certain keywords?