Rebuilt Website and Lost Ranking. Any Suggestions?

[Supafly]

I have a client who was ranked on the first page for their primary keyword phrase and second page for another in Google. Ranked well in Yahoo and Bing as well. We rebuilt the website completely with a Wordpress theme, changed hosting accounts from Yahoo to Hostgator and now we can't be found in any of the search engines for those keywords. It's been about 3 weeks.

We come up in search only when typing in the organization name. I have installed All in One SEO as well as XML Sitemap and still nothing. The website is a PR4 and is a nonprofit (unmonetized if that has anything to do with it).

On Page SEO was never very strong, even before the change, but I continue to do enough off page SEO that it should rank very well in its niche.

Any suggestions as to what might be causing the disappearance and what I can do about it? Do you think it has anything to do with the change of hosting accounts or website?

Thanks for your advice,
Dino

[paulgl]

You rebuilt the website and changed the theme.

The whole dynamics of the site was lost. From internal
links to content. That can be a game changer. A sitemap
will do nothing, really.

Your only recourse is to step up the good things you
can do with SEO. And wait. And hope.

On-page SEO, content, etc. is more powerful than most people
think.

If the internal links were changed (read: lost) those are some
powerful links to lose.

Paul

[InternetMarketingIQ]

If you are using wordpress... you should have, and might still be able to use a REDIRECT plug in to point all your old URL's to the new destination pages.

It worked out fine for me when I rebuilt a 600 page html site for WordPress. Lots of work setting up the redirects, but it was better than sending people and search engine bots off to 404 pages.

[Abledragon]

Agree with InternetMarketingIQ - moving an established site to WordPress will result in all links to your old pages being lost, because the link structure changes.

You can set up permanent redirects (301 redirects) from each old page to each new page in your .htaccess file.

Alternatively there's a WordPress plugin called Redirection that you can use. This generally works well but it has thrown a few wobblies for me, which is why I do my re-directs through the .htaccess file.

Cheers,

Martin.

[InitialEffort]

Just be patient and start 301 redirecting all the old pages to your new pages that are related. Also make sure you aren't creating and duplicate pages from tag pages or category pages in wordpress.