I have recently taken over responsibility of webmaster for the website
of the American Council on Alcoholism, located at www.aca-usa.org  The
old pages always enjoyed a high ranking in Google, under such search
terms as "alcoholism" and "alcoholism treatment".  When I recently
updated the old web pages with a new interface, the site disappeared
from your rankings.  The only way to find it now is to search by
"American Council Alcoholism" where there are now two listings.  But
if you look in either Google Scout or Google Directory it's not
listed.  I fear that I may have inadvertently done something stupid to
cause this, and would appreciate your help in resolving the problem.

Hello Assisted Recovery,

I just performed a search on Google, using the term "alcoholism"
(without the quotation marks), and your site showed up on the first
page of results in the number 10 position (which is not too shabby out
of approximately 811,000 returns.

Using the term "alcoholism" with the quotation marks, you turned up in
the same position with a return of 808,000.

Using the term "alcoholism treatment" or "alcoholism + treatment" with
or without the quotation marks, I could not find your site in the
first 100 listings.

This could be for a number of reasons, and Google Answers Researchers
are not employees of Google and are not privy to the inner workings of
their search engine algorithms. I can, however, offer you an educated
guess.

In your site, the term "alcoholism treatment" (that is, those two
words together) is found only once.

The name of your domain is aca-usa.org and does not contain either of
those words.

While there is not as much emphasis placed on meta tags any longer,
the words are there separately, but the two-word phrase does not
appear there.

A check of Google's link Tool shows 44 links TO aca-usa.org, but there
is no page rank using Google's page rank tool.

Whereas those pages that are listed in the first pages show the
following:

The first listing's domain name is alcoholismtreatment.org.

The second is a government site in which the phrase is used
extensively throughout the page.

The third is a government information page with substance and
alcoholism abuse treatment information

The next listing, the page title uses those terms and it is mentioned
10 times within the page.

What I am trying to point out is that Google found reasons to place
those above your site for the term "alcoholism treatment" for reasons
which agree with their advice contained in Google's Design and Content
Guidelines:
 - ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

And Google's Page Rank information:
 - ://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html

If you want your page to rank higher for that term, use the term in
your title, add that term to the contents of your pages, and get
others to link to that page regarding treatment ... all of these will
help with your ranking for that term.

By the way, a first page ranking for the term alcoholism really is
very good.

Good luck in bringing up your page rank for that second term,

Serenata

Thank you for your answer.  I now realize that I really placed my
question in the wrong place, but I do think that you gave me some
ideas I can work on.  This is all very new to me, and very confusing. 
I do think that Google could make it a little easier to find the right
place to ask my question.

David