Help! Plummeting down Google SERPs

[dr_smith]

My site, www.chris-smith-web.com (http://www.chris-smith-web.com), uses "cheap web design" as its main key phrase.

About a month ago the site was ranking well, on the first page for this phrase. 3 weeks ago I changed the site, shifting the pages from static HTML to dynamic ASP.NET (.aspx extension). However, the content is the same and the links inbound have not changed. I have actually removed a couple of outbound links.

My site is now on the 11th or 12th SERP, in other words, dead.

Is this down to my changes, an algorithm change or something else?

Is this likely to be a temporary problem while my pages are being reindexed or am I in real trouble?

Any suggestions?

[frozen interact]

Hi,
If you changed your filenames then much of your hard work optimising the site when it was static will be lost.

For example if you have a page called cheap-web-design.html that has a page rank of 2 and 30 inbound links if your new page is called cheap-web-design.aspx then you'd have to start again creating the inbound links and telling google about the page.

You need to create a 301 redirect in an .htaccess from every old page to the new page.

If the filename is exactly the same except for the change in extension from .html to .aspx then you can probably do it with one rewrite rule.

Ideally you could tell your web server to handle .html or .htm as if they are .net files and change all your files back to the original file names but that would be a lot of work!

Chris.