Page 2 - I have lost my rankings, Google has dropped me PLEASE READ BEFORE STARTING A THREAD!!

I don't worry about that stuff. It is actually irrelevant. Use a 301 redirect to move one version to the other. For instance: http://.mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com
Then you won't need to worry about changing anything in Google sitemaps. BTW if no rankings were lost forget the PR. Once a 301 is done it should fix the PR anyways but it won't effect where you rank.

thanks for the info..

Seems that the issues facing my site are a loss of backlinks and crappy site structure. I'm in the processing of moving the site to cms site, so that should definitely fix the structure issues. Now off to find more links....

Yeah but make sure your old urls are redirected to the new ones...

Great information...this needs to be pinned.

This is truly a nice post! A link to it in my sig line is going to stay for a while...

raz

this is a great post, thanks for the info

Visio thanks for the info... under the site restructuring section (#4) you stated the following:


...is that because 301 redirects are not foolproof? I want to rename many of the urls of my pages to make them simpler and include keywords (I've read many of the posts on here arguing for and against doing that), but I won't risk it if there's a chance Google might not follow the redirects and the pages would lose their juice...

Mod rewriting pages from dynamic to static html or to short urls never seems to be a problem(atleast that I have seen) - I start to see problems when redirecting irrelevant pages to other sites..

If you do go through with it expect it to take atleast a month and upto 3-5 months to take full effect.

Great post, thanks for the info!

Wow that's a long time. Potentially losing my SERP traffic for 3-5 months seems like a big incentive NOT to rename any URLs. I'd have thought Google would be quicker than that... alas!

I am also passing through a worst face of life. I have had 306000 product pages indexed in Google till July '07. From August, this month, Google started dropping our pages and the process is still continue. Currently we are left with 241000 pages only. Although, we have approx. 600,000 products in our database. Its a Price Comparison Website and the product Feeds are refreshed by their respective vendors very frequently.

Can you shed some light what should I do in current scenario.

Lastly, one of my team player has been posting product page URLs on other websites like - Bookmarking Blogs, PRs, etc.

Please help.

It can be much sooner... I just redirected my seo forums and so far I have not lost any rankings pertaining to the forums yet Google seems to have handled most of the redirects fine.

I think Google may think it is just a ton of generated content and worthless... that is just my opinion 600,000 pages which change content frequently would look fishy to me too.

If it was me I would robots exclude all products, have a page for each section and then work on having pages setup for each product, pages which do not change and which can rank for the product... this will save you from leaking value through 600K pages.

Locking this for now. If for any reason it should need reopening just send me or another mod a note why you believe it should be reopened.