Two weeks ago, we attempted to make the URLs of ca. 12 pages more search-engine friendly. We changed three things.

1. Make URLs more SEF

from: /????-????/brandname.html (meaning: /aircon-price/daikin.html

to: /????-brandnameinenglish-brandnameinthai.html

We set up 301-redirects from the old to the new URLs. You can find an example and the link to our page here: http://bit.ly/XRoTOK There are no direct external links to the old URLs.

2. Added text to img-links from homepage to brand-pages

Before those changes, we only linked to those brands with a picture, so we added some text under the picture. You can see that here, in the left submenu: http://bit.ly/XRpfoF

3. Minor changes to Title, h1-Tags, Meta Description, etc.

Only minor changes, to better match the on-site optimization with targeted keywords. For example, before we used full brand names, after we used what was really searched for:

from: Mitsubishi Electric Mr. Slim

to: ???? Mitsubishi (means: Aircon Mitsubishi)

Three days after these changes, we noticed a heavy drop (80% loss in non-paid search traffic) in rankings and traffic for those pages, and also for all pages which are sub-categorized. Rankings for all keywords not affected by the changes stayed the same.

Any ideas, what happened, and how we can regain our old rankings? What we already did, was submitting a new sitemap.

Help much appreciated.

Best regards,

David