search engine referrals going down rapidly

About a year ago, used to be regularly in the top 3 at Google (and high on Yahoo also) with major key words: pizza oven/s. Having revamped the site over the last year and making visual improvements, we have virtually disappeared (still 1 at yahoo, but google is the major loss - this amongst several other pages that used to come up to number 1 and often 2 or 3 on the same search, now google doesn't even recognize the pages as existing).

Advice please. http://www.pizzaovens.com

Googles algo has changed. You have very few links to your site and you need to work on that.

If possible get your keyphrase/word as the anchor text in the link.

Good luck.

Jane

For some reason, G only shows a couple of links (49 to be exact) for "www.piz...com" -site:piz...com

On the other hand, the new MSN SE Preview shows more using their "regular" link: command (link:www.pizz...com): 305 backlinks.

Try the same search for your competitors and see how many backlinks you still need to catch up. All the SEO you perform on your pages will help, but more on Y than on G. As Jane says: try to influence the anchor text on your backlinks as much as possible. If you can get people to link to you from within a natural piece of text, say an article about ovens that shows pages on your site as an example, then that would be just perfect.

BTW - great niche you are in. Sure beats car parts and web hosting ;) You should be able to rank well (again) in time.

Thank you both for taking the time to respond. I tried link:www.piz...com) but couldn't see 305 links (only about 13 or 18). I tried varying this to link:http:// and link:{space}www but still no luck. Any tips would be appreciated so I can try to see our backlinks compared to competitors' correctly.

We have started adding links within our own site all directing to the same page (we have a library of oven specifications, most in PDF, and are putting a clickable link to our home page there in the hope that (1) if a visitor finds this page at least they will be able to click on it to get to where we want them and (2) that these links may also help with ranking.

At Dec 03 we were no 4 in google with the major phrase but we made changes to our website and now are pretty much nowhere to be found. It is very frustrating particularly, if you see from our site, we definitely sell pizza ovens yet other sites that come up may not be so relevant.

Our webmaster recently changed the keywords and description to see if this would make a difference. Giving it until mid-November, but so far it appears to have just made it worse. We used to have lots of keywords in the html but weren't sure if it was spamming. Any tips on the html stuff would be great. MSN also seems to have been affected as our main se referrals were from g and m. Now, 70% of our visitors are non-referrals (I assume people who know our site name) and we only get 1-2% visitors from various search engines.