We have recently redesigned our website http://www.dorset-college.ie.
This has been a substantial redesign which has involved hosting our
website with another provider.

Before the website was upgraded we enjoyed a top 5 if not a top 10
listing for all relevant keyword searches within Ireland and were
ranked quite high internationaly.

Since upgrading we have found that while we are still listed if you
search for us by name, when you search using keywords we dont appear.
We have included keywords on each page of the website relevant to
their content and have asked for our site to be reindexed over 8 weeks
ago but to date have seen no change. Obviously we are concerned that
this is affecting our business and are quite anxious to find a
resolution. Any suggestions / fixes would be greatly appreciated.

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Request for Question Clarification by larre-ga on 06 Aug 2004 14:32 PDT

What did the design upgrade involve in terms of changing content,
navigation, and multimedia?

---larre

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Clarification of Question by daithi-ga on 07 Aug 2004 09:22 PDT

This is a new website that is using content from our old website with
updated and additional pages. The old website was writen in html and
had frames, this new website uses asp files with frames. There is also
a flash menu on the homepage.

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Request for Question Clarification by serenata-ga on 09 Aug 2004 23:02 PDT

Hello Daithi ~

What particular keywords were you concerned about?

I notice you have under your keywords metatags the following:

  "homepage, dorset, college, third-level, training, microsoft,
   corporate, student, education, further, adult, course, 
   business, computer, information, technology, humanities, 
   secretarial, childcare"

The above would either not necessarily be applicable to your site
(such as "homepage" and "third-level", etc., or are so competitive as
to be nearly impossible to gain a high ranking without a lot of time
and energy.

Before I answer, it would therefore help to understand what keywords
you're referring to and then I can formulate an answer which may be of
help.

Thanks ever so,

Serenata
Google Answers Researcher

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Clarification of Question by daithi-ga on 16 Aug 2004 02:50 PDT

Hi Serenata

The keywords and content we think are fine but we suspect that changes
we have made to the design of the website have made it difficult to
index. We have checked that keywords on every page of the site are
relevant and have included <noframes> on the homepage pointing to each
page on the website to try and improve our listings. What we really
need to know is what we need to do to our website to increase its
position. The content has not changed just been upgraded. The keywords
are the same with some changes. What we have changed is the design and
look of the website which included a new hosting provider, redesign
which includes frames, asp, flash, etc. We believe that these changes
may have caused us to dissapear from the Google listings because what
we have changed makes it difficult to index the site.

I hope this helps

Regards

Daithi

I would say there are two main reasons that your site is doing badly
with search engines.
Firstly, it uses frames which are not favoured by Google, although you
have provided altnernative content in the <noframes> tags, it's just
not as good as a plain HTML page.
Secondly, what appears to be text on the home page is actually images
and you must remember that search engines only read the text, they
cannot 'look' at the images. View the HTML source of your page to see
what the search engines are seeing.
Regards, Colin

I think a good way to stay in the top positions on Google is to have a
lot of other sites to link to your pages. The Google PageRank works on
how much a site is referred by others on a keyword.

ooops forgot to mention this: if you have changed the name of the
pages, all the sites that referred to your, are now dead link. I think
there is a time of transition in which other webmasters update the
links.