Search engine help

Hi,

I have just started up a website for a company I work for, any way my question is I have changed all the products I have on site's url's well cut them down so they were not so long, this was about 3 - 4 weeks ago and all of a sudden none on the products are being found in the search engines where as before 90% of these were on the front pages, would anyone know why now that I have narrowed down the url's that none of the products are being found?

Cheers

add the URL to your profile so we can see

Done

my ten second review

remove
<meta name="author" content="Return2fitness" />
<meta name="site URL" content="Sportlink" />
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c) 2006 Return2fitness" />

also you have 3 google verification tags, you should have one
remove two here and delete two from you google webmaster dashboard.


your old URL's no longer exist and the new ones need to be indexed. This will take some time. When making a change like this you need to redirect your old urls to the new ones. Their has be an ongoing discussion on the topic here.
http://www.searchengineforums.com/apps/searchengine.forums/action::thread/forum::seo-general/thread::1207756062/

I could not find your sitemap, you should have a link to it on your site, I prefer the bottom of the page and it should include links to your new product urls.

Your links page is a bit strange. Almost every one goes to the sportsinjuryclinic. That may have been over done. Are you running reciprical linking, that could be a problem as reciprical links are no longer a good thing.

Your issue could be everyone of these factors or none, but they are places to start looking.

Many thanks for that i will get the tags etc sorted. So do you think i should wait until the new products have been indexed by google then? If so is there a rought estimate on how long that takes? As for reciprical linking, my boss gave me a long list of links to be exchanging with, so cannot wait to rub in his face that this is no longer useful.

Thanks again for you time.

before your "rub it in your bosses face" consider this

the method of setting up a link page on site A and one on site B and having A link to B and B link to A is not a good idea.

but...

If site B is relevant to the content and purpose of Site A, then get a link, but get it in a content item, a review, a recommendation, a blog. That is the best way to do it.

So get the link from the other site in a content item, but you do not need to to get a reciprocal link. One way incoming links from a relevant quality site is what you want.

get that sitemap up so you can be crawed and do the redirect from non www to www.

Right ok, so with the redirect, i have already changed the products new url about 3 weeks ago, so how would i go about using the redirect when i have already made the changes and can no longer redirect the old url to the new? Sorry for all the questions, hopefully im not being a pain!

too late for the redirect.

google only has your main page

anyone else have time to take a look

You definitely need the 301 from www to non-www or vice versa.

As to the rest, the damage is done, and the key to the changes suggested above is that they remove hindrance - and help a little - to get the site re-indexed.

When you change things to the extent that you have, then the risk is that Google effectively sees a new site, and treats it accordingly. So you now need a 'clean' site to avoid the 'sandbox'-type purgatory for a few months.

The site map - and a Google site map - will definitely help, as will clearing up the Google verification confusion.

I agree that you need to be very careful with reciprocal links - any to non-related, and/or non-quality sites should go. Now.

Also, xenu is your friend - do check it out!

mj1256 ... why remove the Author meta tag ... is this bad?

sorry i didn't follow up. i had a long day with a new project.

its not bad, it just serves no purpose and again as stated by Quadrille, ot removes possible problems.