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My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace.  I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host.  And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case?  And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks

Hello Everyone, We are a small, local business in a city in Canada.  We just got a new website and I am responsible for basically all of it, including the SEO. I was researching the back-links from our top-ranking competitor (another small, local business in our city).  Here is their ranking: PA  40, with 441 Links from 111 RDs DA  30, with 6,864 Links from 116 RDs Here is the second-highest guy: PA  29, with 101 Links from 10 RDs DA 15, with 1,682 Links from 11 RDs As you can see, the top-ranking competitor's PA & DA are just about double his closest competitor.  (Don't ask where we currently stand!) But, on closer examination, most of the links from our top-ranking competitor come from a local blog, where our competitor's ad appears in an advertisement on the sidebar.  Each time they make a post, which is just about every day, our competitor gets a link. They also have a lot of  links from a forum on a rock band's website.  The original post was something about finding music, but the responses all have links to unrelated websites. This seems really, really slimy to me. What's going on?