Google gave me a lump of coal for Christmas!

[siteblueprint]

Hi everyone,

Long time reader, first time poster...

I did a complete redesign of my site on Dec 14th, and Google crawled it and updated its cache of most pages on the 15th. (Good timing, or so it would seem).

Only problem is that I appear to have lost all my backlinks! I know that Google doesn't always show all backlinks, but just before the site update, I had pages of backlinks (which are still there) from 2+ years of forum posting signatures, link partners, etc.

Any ideas what happened?

Will this work itself out, or am I back to square one with my link building campaign?

The site in question is at:
http://www.siteblueprint.com

Thanks in advance!

Gary

[ADAM Web Design]

www.siteblueprint.com (fixing Gary's error).

They're not wiped out, or you wouldn't have any PageRank to begin with. You have a PR3 on your homepage. So you're not being penalized or banned for anything.

As far as backlinks go, Google only ever shows a percentage of them, which tends to vary. So don't worry if you only see a few.

[siteblueprint]

First, thanks for fixing the typo with too many w's... I've updated the post to correct it.

I understand they only show some of them, but why would they go from displaying several pages of results for links to only internal (to my site) and one external one?

Thanks for your time!

Gary

[bhartzer]

When you redesigned your site, did you change the URLs of the pages too? If so, then that's probably the issue.

[siteblueprint]

Nope... in fact, I went through each page and made a duplicate of it in my new folder on my development machine, tested and then changed over the content.

I still show the same pages/names indexed for a site: search at google, just a huge drop in the link: search.

Thanks,

Gary

[greeneagle]

IMO - Sometimes it's worth losing existing IBLs for better SERP on secondary and tertiary pages, from both short and long term perspectives. Just make sure and capture the "stragglers" with a default 401 page or action. That's just good practice for any Site.

Ken

[brian.mark]

You mentioned losing links, but you said nothing about rankings. Do you still have those? After all, those are all that really matter. The rest is just details.

Brian.

[SafariMan]

IMO - Sometimes it's worth losing existing IBLs for better SERP on secondary and tertiary pages, from both short and long term perspectives.
Ken

Hi Ken,

First time I've read that statement. I noticed the "IMO", but why would you say that? When I first started, I exchanged links with any and every site I could (sorry) and now I don't do link exchanges at all anymore. I can understand that unrelated links may do harm, but why IBLs in general?

[glengara]

IMO Siteblueprint.com may be heading for trouble, you have very heavy internal links on empty category pages showing AS.

I've seen G penalise for this before, and noticed most of those pages are already Url only....

[siteblueprint]

glengara, not sure I follow... sorry if this is silly.

I've got links to all my pages and do have more than 100 pages to the site, is that what you mean by having lots of internal links? How do you deal with that if you really have that many pages?

Thanks,

Gary