Question : Google Rank and Character Set.

Hi,

Quick question about the relationship of character sets to your ranking in google.

I just finished converting my site over from Shift_jis to Utf-8.  There were some minor changes other than this with the re arrangement of the heading but i generally took care to keep the focus on keeping the Keywords prominent and in the correct tags.

Google respidered yesterday and my long term ranking in the top 5 dissappeared and now im not visible on any page for that keyword.

Im woundering if anybody knows anything that relates to the character set affecting the page rank.

Things that have crossed my mind:
1. when the pages changed from shift_jis to utf-8 the file size increased on average by about 15-20%.
-- could this file size increase affect the keyword density?

2. Shift_jis is a japanese font set and the site is in japanese.  the keyword that is important to me is (in japanese)'natural stones'  which is contianed in the phrase 'natural stones store'.  we use this phrase for all our link text.
-- could changing the character set to UTF-8 have caused google to read the japanese text differently and now google thinks 'natural stones store' is a single word?
(we are usually #1 for 'natural stones store' and this is still the case even after the change to utf8)

3. doing 'link:sitename.com'(in google) returns that we have 12 links.....Weird...since i thought that we had about 1200.
-- I had never checked this before so i don't know if that is a result of ther change or not.


any ideas?

Cheers

Michael

Answer : Google Rank and Character Set.

It is certainly an odd situation.  I know that Google has worked at dealing with circumstances like this, but I'm not sure quite what to suggest.  There may be some benefit to contacting Google directly or posting in the appropriate Google Group to see what kind of insight you can get there.