What can i do to get google to visit my site more often

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, i am having serious problems since i upgraded my website from joomla 1.5 to 3.0

We have dropped down the rankings from page one for the word lifestyle magazine, and we have dropped down in rankings for other very important words including gastric band hypnotherapy and i am starting to regret having the site upgraded.

i am finding the google is taking its time visiting my site, i know this for two reasons, one i have checked the cache and it is showing the 2nd july and i have checked articles that we have written and they are still not showing.

example if i put this article name in word for word it does not come up,

Carnival Divert Ships In The Caribbean Due To bad Weather

this was an article that was done yesterday. in the old days before the upgrade that would have been in google now.

these problems are costing us the loss of a great deal of traffic, we are losing around 70% of our traffic since the upgrade and would be grateful if people could give me advice on how to turn things around.

we add articles all the time. each day we add a number of articles, i was considering changing the front page in the middle and having a few paragraphs of the latest story to get google to visit more often. i know this would look messy but i am running out of ideas.

any help would be great

[ClaireH-184886]

hi, i have just got a reply from my hosting company

To use the If-Modified-Since HTTP header, you need to have both mod_expires and mod_headers enabled as Apache modules on your server. I have just checked that for you and I can confirm that both of the modules are enabled and you will be able to use If-Modified-Since HTTP headers.

Gyi, how would i know use these if the hosting company does offer the service

[ClaireH-184886]

our home was number one in google for a long time and then dropped to around number four, since the upgrade we are on page nine, same as the term gastric band hypnotherapy, showbiz gossip and so on.

not sure if we should be doing more to optimize the main pages so google understand what the pages are about.

i do know our traffic has dropped by 70% since the upgrade and we need the get the traffic back. the site was updated around two months ago.

before the update, if we had a story on our site which we had just put on then within hours it would be in google but now it is taking days to show up which is causing us problems

[ClaireH-184886]

thank for this.

I have a site map in my webmaster tools and i update my content each day, we add lots of content but concerned that the home page only has links and a small intro and wondering if i should show the first two paragraphs of a new story on the home page to get google to crawl the home page more often.

i am working on the site speed at the moment, not sure if you think about our site speed at present. before we had the site updated we finally got it to load in about 1,1 sec and under but not managed that at the moment.

can you explain what this means please as i have never come across it

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.

you said about making sure all pages are reachable from a link, we have around two thousand pages so not sure this is possible

many thanks for the great help.

[Chris.Menke]

Tim,

Did this drop happen after your website update or was the update in response to a drop in your rankings?

From your other comments, I think it's only been a month so since you transitioned to your new site so you can still chalk this all up to that transition.

Due to the redesign, those previously ranking pages may now be buried deeper within your architecture, you may link to them differently, or your redesign may have overlapped with an algorithm update reduced your visibility.  Have you verified that you were not penalized?

If things don't change, you could take a look back at which pages were ranking for the keywords you specified and 2. verify that either you're using the same URL or that the old URL is 301'd to the new one (you should have done that already); 3. look at your old site (maybe using the waybackmachine) to review your internal linking to those previously-ranking pages (how many internal links, the anchor text and from what pages) and verify that the new site does the same.

edit: not being crawled often is a symptom of not having enough authority as meets your needs or architecture that leads to sporadic crawling intervals.  If those money pages are linked to from the home page, you might rule out the latter.

[Gyi]

Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites.

So:

• Build links
• Make sure all pages are reachable from a link.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header.
• Update your content often and regularly.
• Take steps to increase site speed.
• Eliminate duplicate content.
• Limit 400 errors.
• Add a sitemap.

You could also adjust the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Tools, but you shouldn't have to.