My homepage+key pages have dropped 40+ positions after implementing redirects and canonical changes. HELP!
-
Hi SEOMozers,
I work for a web based nonprofit at www.tisbest.org. I had a professional contact recommend that we work on our redirects to our homepage because we were losing valuable rank benefit. This combined with getting sick of seeing our weekly SEOMoz crawl reports show 304 duplicate page and title errors for months. No one could seem to figure out what was happening (we think it had to do with session stuff; we were seeing several versions of each page showing the following: www.tisbest.org/default.aspx/(random character string)
My developer and I read a bunch of articles and started making changes 10 days ago:
- He setup 301 redirects from http://tisbest.org to http://www.tisbest.org. (set the canonical domain). We did a redirect from http://www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to root with "/".
- I set the canonical setting to www.tisbest.org in our webmaster tools.
- In our web config (we're running in asp.net), we changed our session detection from auto-detect then saw some session funkiness so we changed it back. Though we do think the character strings we were seeing were session GUID.
- He forced lower case URL’s to reduce duplicate page content/titles.
I got my weekly crawl report 9 days ago and we had dropped from 340 duplicate page title and page content errors went to one. We went nuts and felt like the kings of SEO.
Then, yesterday (9/28), the SEO grim reaper came knocking when I received my weekly SEOMoz ranking report. It said we had dropped 40+ spots for all of 9 of our keywords. Sure enough, I searched our keywords and our website was gone. Then I searched our company name, tisbest, and only a few of our pages show but not the homepage. I searched for our URL www.tisbest.org, and I originally got the expanded view (with 8 links to various webpages - can't remember what this view is called) but now, today (Saturday), the expanded view is gone from this search result.
Also, when I run the On Page Report card for our homepage, I get the following error message with no results: "We were unable to grade that page. The page did not load. Curl::Err::TooManyRedirectsError: Number of redirects hit maximum amount."
When I run the Open Site explorer report, I get this message at the top: Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.tisbest.org/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?" If I go to the report for the that report's page, it says that "No information is available for that URL."
Just tonight (night of 9/29), our developer added the rel="canonical" href="http://www.tisbest.org" /> to our homepage tonight to see if that would help. We did not do that originally.
In our Google Webmaster tools, I am seeing the number of URL Error - Not Followed has sky rocked. I have attached a screen capture to this thread. There are also a large number of URL Errors - Not Found errors as well.
I did some research tonight and downloaded and ran Screaming Frog SEO Crawler. I have attached a screen capture below with this report and a couple of questions I sent our developer that may be helpful to you.
Also, not sure if this is relevant, we use a master page that all of our pages inherit from so all of our pages get the same meta-data: name="keywords" content="charitable gift card, charitable gift certificate, non profit gift card, charity donation, giftcard, charity gift card, donation gift card, donation gift, charity gift, animal gift card, animal gift, environmental gift card, environmental gift, humanitarian gift card, humanitarian gift, christian gift card, christian gift, catholic gift card, catholic gift, religious gift card, religious gift" />id="ctl00_metaDescription" name="description" content="Award winning Charity Gift Card, for over 250 premier charities. A customized donation gift that makes the world better. TisBest is BBB Accredited." />name="google-site-verification" content="EfJIhN3h2SVSXdSpUbfceBVw2q6zrGX8rRQhdNZ1xY8" /><title></span><span> </span></p> <p>Can anyone help me/us identify the issue that obliterated our rankings? I am happy to give an information needed. Thank you! Chad Edwards</p> <a download="Bqcu1.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/Bqcu1.png" target="_blank">Bqcu1.png</a> <a download="ZXQ8d.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/ZXQ8d.png" target="_blank">ZXQ8d.png</a></title>
-
Hi Chad,
Sorry to see you haven't gotten any responses in the past week.
In the GWT screenshot, there's a note in red, where you show your link structure (for provided links) as www.tisbest.org/default/?pc={charitycode} Is that correct or is it possible there was a typo in that URL?
In the list of URLs that GWT returned as errors, one example shows the following /default.aspx?pc=youthcare, which would be the appropriate way to append the URL... the "/" at the end of a dynamically appended tag ("?") would present URL errors.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hey guys, for some reason my homepage has gone down in rankings though other pages on my site have not.
This is not something I have ever seen before. The site is still indexed if I search for it directly, but not in top 100 rankings for keywords even though sub-pages are ranking for the given keyword. Changes I have made recently include site transfer to wordpress, force redirect http to https removal of www by redirect and adding new property instance in Google Search Console. I have checked htaccess file and sitemap and all seem fine. ideas? Site: https://dublinSEO.co
Technical SEO | | HappyApple840 -
Why does my Google Web Cache Redirects to My Homepage?
Why does my Google Webcache appears in a short period of time and then automatically redirects to my homepage? Is there something wrong with my robots.txt? The only files that I have blocked is below: User-agent: * Disallow: /bin/ Disallow: /common/ Disallow: /css/ Disallow: /download/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /medias/ Disallow: /ClientInfo.aspx Disallow: /*affiliateId* Disallow: /*referral*
Technical SEO | | Francis.Magos0 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Does rel= canonical combine link juice for 2 pages?
If two pages are very similar, and one should rel= canonical to the other, will the page authority pass from the page with rel= canonical to the target page? Also, what happens when you a page rel=canonical's to itself?
Technical SEO | | SkinLaboratory0 -
Big on-page changes: all at once or little by little?
Hello, I have a website with bad urls (http://www.domain.com/site/page.php will become http://www.domain.com/page.php) and bad titles (keyword stuffing) and I have to fix all of them. Should I change the urls (and, yes, make the proper 301 redirects) and get crawled by the S.E., before I give a unique title for each page or viceversa? Or maybe shoud I do everything at once? What's the best practice to minimize the ranking drop and how long will it take to resume (and increase) the previous ranking?
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
301 Redirect From Dynamic Page To Static
I want to 301 redirect all "id" and "type" numbers from my page dynamic.php page (I have thousands of IDs and thousands of Types) all to a single URL. So for example the following.... www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=5 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=1&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=2&type=6 www.mysite.com/dynamic.php?id=3&type=6 ...would all be sent to: www.mysite.com/page.html How can this be done without doing a redirect for each ID/Type?
Technical SEO | | TheDude1 -
Best method of redirecting http to https on homepage
Hi everyone, I'm looking to redirect all http requests to https for a site's homepage. It only needs to be for the homepage, not site wide. What's the best method of doing this without losing pagerank or ranking? I'm using IIS7.5 so I've been looking at a URL Rewrite or possibly this ASP.Net solution; http://www.xdevsoftware.com/blog/post/Redirect-from-Http-to-Https-in-ASPNET.aspx Or is a simple 301 or 302 (for some reason Microsoft's site says to do a 302 re-direct, though I'm not sure if this is great from an SEO perspective?) re-direct from http version to the https version the best method? Also if the solution retained the URL query string that would be even better! Any help appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Did I implement the Canonical Correctly?
Hello, I am trying for the first time to implement a canonical redirect on a page and would really appreciate it if someone could tell me if this was done correctly. I am trying to do a canonical redirect: -from http://www.diamondtours.com/default.aspx -to http://www.diamondtours.com/ As you will see in the source code of the default.aspx page, the line of code written is: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.diamondtours.com" /> Is this correct? Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Jeffrey Ferraro
Technical SEO | | JeffFerraro0