...our rankings on Google search engine slipped considerable. There must have been a reason for this surely?

Unfortunately for us our update was not as liked by the Google Algorithm update called Jagger as our old site was.

There is a blog entry about this update at the www.evancarmichael.com website. This is an article by Atul Gupta who works for Red Alkemi, who's services include SEO work. So he should (hopefully) know what he is talking about. I will come back to this later (if I remember), because it's important.

I am now of the opinion that because our old site had had a very good standing and since, in one form or another, the site had been around since before Google even existed, we had some kind of Hey, they're Old Skool, they should have high ranks sort of a thing. You know? Something left over from Google's Florida update.

So when we had these new drastic changes this all went to cock.

The first thing I really paid attention to was the fact that a lot of our URL's changed to something very cryptic. In my first SEO post I mentioned a blog entry by Ray Drainville from Ardes.com (our Rails Developers) in which he covers some stuff from a seminar we attended. One of the points he makes is

     'URL: Having a URL that reads /leather/laptopcases/yellow/ is far better than /categories/2/products/6—this is a problem that Rails developers suffer from, perhaps all the more if you’re into RESTful URLs;'

and as our site is built in Rails it suffered from the problem in the latter example.

This was som,ething that I mentioned to Ian White (again from Ardes.com) and he patched the site up very quickly to then serve URL's like

     'http://www.distinctivedoors.co.uk/categories/3-external-oak-doors/products/762-arta-oak-satin-double-glazed'

which links to one of our Oak External Doors. Hopefully you will see that this URL contains several important elements. Firstly the part '3-external-oak-doors/' is taken from the product catergory name and automatically inserted into the product URL path. The last part '762-arta-oak-satin-double-glazed' is the actual product text.

These changes are very very important. And they helped us climb back from the second Google page to third position. This was a relief but not quite good enough as we had always (as far as I can remember) been number 1 or 2.

So... what to do next?