CSS Destroyed My Rankings

[pebblez]

I had used a table based design for years, and I had good rankings on all of my keywords. Recently i changed over to a pure css design including the use of h1 tags, divs instead of cells, the whole works.

When the site was finished I uploaded it to the web and waited. A week later my rankings started dropping. First they dropped in google. Then they started dropping in yahoo. Msn has been fine, but who cares.

Can anyone tell me what I've done wrong?
The new site can be seen at http://pebblez.com
One page of the old site can be seen at http://pebblez.com/index2.html

I really appreciate any advice you can give me. Thanks

[Dubbya]

Changing your site from table-based layout to pure CSS is a MAJOR change.

Google seems not to appreciate major site-wide changes as they're usually indicative of spam. If your text to code ratio has changed significantly, Google might be worried that your domain has been overtaken by yet another spammy advertiser.

Most often, they'll penalize these sites to discourage this sort of thing, so this might be what you're experiencing. Resubmit your site map and your rankings should pick up after a few weeks.

My site went AWOL for six weeks until I resubmitted my sitemap and sent an email requesting reinclusion in the Google index, so that's something else you can do.

Give it some time. It takes a few weeks to be reincluded, so use that time to fine tune your SEO efforts and get everything ship-shape.

Here's a handy article that might be of some help:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reincl...request-howto/

[incrediblehelp]

Besides the table and CSS code nothing else has changed?

1. Content?
2. URLs?
3. New competitors?

Google has been updating in the past few weeks as well.

I have changed plenty of websites over. The only time I really see major drops is when URLs switching is not handled properly.

[incrediblehelp]

As most know here I am not a big fan of text to code being that important in the overall SEO side of things. Here is recent post from WPN's Joe Lewis that discusses it more:

Can Coding Affect Your Search Ranking

[pebblez]

First thank you both for your help.

Thats whats so weird! I did not change any of the words, or pictures. The URL's are all exactly the same, and its definitely not added competition that is doing this to me, some of my keywords im losing 200 spots. I even added a few pages of content to fill out spots that were lacking

and I think my code to content ratio should be better now...although I could be analyzing it wrong

I just can't see why doing everything right, making the site more accessible, faster loading, and giving it cleaner code, should cause a significant drop in rankings. Stupid me I thought it might even help...a little

[incrediblehelp]

Do you know how much your link totals and quantity have changed in the past 6-12 months?

[Gary Golden]

It has not effected my rankings, checked your site seems alright, noticed that you do not have a site-map, I link to my site map on all pages.

> Noticed that you do link to your main page on all pages.

I have been off google for months now with-in the last several day I am back though I spent the last couple of weeks making sure that every page linked back to my main page and whola, at the top of GOOGLE again though do not know how long that will last and I also use CSS on both of my sites.

[pebblez]

IBL's? I gain about 100 a month these days according to yahoo. As far as my sites linking structure I didn't really change it, although I did make a standard nav bar for every section of my site, which has made things a little more uniform.

As far as a sitemap I have a google site map (am looking for a decent ROR sitemap generator) I also link to my homepage from every page.

I do have a theory and if someone could take a look at this I would really appreciate it. In my header I have an H1 tag around the first text on the page, and its just about the first thing that shows up in the code. At the top of the header div I have a black picture background and at the bottom I have set the background to just be white. The text in the H1 is black and would show up against that black background, but I have added margins to the H1 to move it down.

Could the search engines inability to read the css margins on my H1 cause them to think I'm hiding black text against a black picture in an H1 tag right at the top of my page? Can google even tell the picture is black?

I would really appreciate any feedback on this.

[Seopro]

This took me about 2 minutes to find your problem. Doing your website in CSS is not enough. Go to the W3C and validate your code. You have 36 errors on your front page. Fix those and I bet your rankings will improve
Don
Seopro

[incrediblehelp]

This took me about 2 minutes to find your problem.

Care to share exactly what that is? Simply saying validate code is pretty vague.