As you may know, we recently updated our Web site with a snazzy new look. Although we kept most of the site structure the same, our page suffixes changed from .html to .php. We also lost a few sections (good-bye, "About You", we hardly knew ye.) However, I set up 301 redirects on the server for each page, and in reviewing our stats, we’re doing a good job redirecting people and search engines to the new, equivalent pages. (301′s are supposed to be the search engine friendly way of redirecting traffic, as opposed to a refresh tag in the header.)

Just check out this link to our staff page at http://www.flyte.biz/about/staff.html and see.

Unfortunately, it didn’t minimize the changes as much as I would have hoped.

We’re down 20 spots from last month for "portland maine web design," down 19 for "maine web designer" and a whopping 107 spots for "maine web design."

Like I said, "ouch."

Comparing the 11 days leading up to switch to the 11 days following it, we’ve seen our Google traffic -12.68%, MSN -27.78%, and Yahoo -50.70%.

Am I worried? No. Am I bummed. Yep.

We did enough good work that once the search engines catch up, we’ll be in a better spot than we were, and the new site better represents the work we’re doing now, which is a combination of Web design and Internet marketing.

Thank goodness we have this blog. Although I don’t track it for as many keywords as my Web site (why is that, I wonder?) as of today it had a top ten placement for two keyphrases near and dear to my heart: "web marketing for small business" and "rich brooks."

Rich Brooks
Web Marketing for Small Business