Disappeared from Google with in 2 hours of webmaster tools error
-
Hey Guys
I'm trying not to panic but....we had a problem with google indexing some of our secure pages then hit those pages and browsers firing up security warning, so I asked our web dev to have at look at it
he made the below changes and within 2 hours the site has drop off the face of google
“in web master tools I asked it to remove any https://freestylextreme.com URLs” “I cancelled that before it was processed”
“I then setup the robots.txt to respond with a disallow all if the request was for an https URL” “I've now removed robots.txt completely” “and resubmitted the main site from web master tools”
I've read a couple of blog posts and all say to remain clam , test the fetch bot on webmasters tools which is all good and just wait for google to reindex
do you guys have any further advice ?
Ben
-
Thanks for the responses guys , it was picked back up in around 4 hours and lost no rank thankfully orders crashed but are back to normal now ! I'm going to investigate the two versions of the site is a bit strange
again thanks for your help
-
Hi Ben,
It's now 2 days after your original question, and it looks like your back in the SERPs, at least from what I can tell. Hopefully you've made a full recovery.
It's difficult to understand exactly what damage was done by your dev in Webmaster Tools, but it's reasonable to assume that whatever it was caused the error.
One thing I did notice is that both the https and http version of your site resolve.
http://www.freestylextreme.com/ &
https://www.freestylextreme.com/Ideally, one would redirect to the other, or at a minimum have a rel canonical tag in place so that only one version is crawled.
I'd go ahead a put your robots.txt file back in place, and check yourself with Google webmaster tools to make sure everything is okay.
Best of luck!
-
Hi Ben
I understand the panic in such a situation. I truly do. I checked your website and the fact that you do not have a robots.txt. You also do not have any kind of noindex or anything like that in your code and you look like a strong established website.
Do you have an XML sitemap in your webmaster console ? I would suggest you build one and submit it if you don't already have it.
Other then that, I would also suggest to have a robots.txt even if it's blank. Rather then a 404 redirecting to your homepage. Give me 24-48hrs and in my opinion, you should be back.
I hope this helps.
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
-
Webmaster tools showing 200 page load ok - all other testing tools show a 301
hey, on https://www.xxx.co we've setup a 301 redirect to xxx.us - > BUT in webmaster tools its still showing a 200 load ok, whereas on all other testing tools its showing a 301 redirect (screamingfrog etc) even https://dns.google.com/query?name=www.xxx.co is showing that its 301 redirected. Any ideas? as we want to trigger the change of address tool in WMT and its saying it cant as it loads the homepage still....
Technical SEO | | RobertN-London0 -
Crawl errors - 2,513 not found. Response code 404
Hi,
Technical SEO | | JamesHancocks1
I've just inherited a website that I'll be looking after. I've looked in the Search Console in the Crawl errors section and discovered thousands of urls that point to non- existent pages on Desktop. There's 1,128 on Smartphone.
Some are odd and make no sense. for example: | bdfqgnnl-z3543-qh-i39634-imbbfuceonkqrihpbptd/ | Not sure why these have are occurring but what's the best way to deal with them to improve our SEO? | northeast/ | 404 | 8/29/18 |
| | 2 | blog/2016/06/27/top-tips-for-getting-started-with-the-new-computing-curriculum/ | 404 | 8/10/18 |
| | 3 | eastmidlands | 404 | 8/21/18 |
| | 4 | eastmidlands/partner-schools/pingle-school/ | 404 | 8/27/18 |
| | 5 | z3540-hyhyxmw-i18967-fr/ | 404 | 8/19/18 |
| | 6 | northeast/jobs/maths-teacher-4/ | 404 | 8/24/18 |
| | 7 | qfscmpp-z3539-i967-mw/ | 404 | 8/29/18 |
| | 8 | manchester/jobs/history-teacher/ | 404 | 8/5/18 |
| | 9 | eastmidlands/jobs/geography-teacher-4/ | 404 | 8/30/18 |
| | 10 | resources | 404 | 8/26/18 |
| | 11 | blog/2016/03/01/world-book-day-how-can-you-get-your-pupils-involved/ | 404 | 8/31/18 |
| | 12 | onxhtltpudgjhs-z3548-i4967-mnwacunkyaduobb/ | Cheers.
Thanks in advance,
James.0 -
Google Webmaster tools Sitemap submitted vs indexed vs Index Status
I'm having an odd error I'm trying to diagnose. Our Index Status is growing and is now up to 1,115. However when I look at Sitemaps we have 763 submitted but only 134 indexed. The submitted and indexed were virtually the same around 750 until 15 days ago when the indexed dipped dramatically. Additionally when I look under HTML improvements I only find 3 duplicate pages, and I ran screaming frog on the site and got similar results, low duplicates. Our actual content should be around 950 pages counting all the category pages. What's going on here?
Technical SEO | | K-WINTER0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Webmaster Tools - Clarification of what the top directory is in a calender url
Hi all, I had an issue where it turned out a calender was used on my site historically (a couple of years ago) but the pages were still present, crawled and indexed by google to this day. I want to remove them now from the index as it really clouds my analysis and as I have been trying to clean things up e.g. by turning modules off, webmaster tools is throwing up more and more errors due to these pages. Below is an example of the url of one of the pages: http://www.example.co.uk/index.php?mact=Calendar,m1a033,default,1&m1a033year=2084&m1a033month=3&m1a033returnid=59&page=59?phpMyAdmin=xxyyzz The closest question I have found on the topic in Seomoz is: http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-issue-6 I want to remove all these pages from the index by targeting their top level folder. From the historic question above would I be right in saying that it is: http://www.example.co.uk/index.php?mact=Calendar I want to be certain before I do a directory level removal request in case it actually targets index.php instead and deindexes my whole site (or homepage at the very least). Thanks
Technical SEO | | Mitty0 -
Google Places, Google Plus, Oh my!
Ok - So I am in the position to try and clean up the current Google places nightmare for a company. Right now there is about 3 or 4 different google places listings for them that they have no control over. So here is what I did: 1. I took control of them all by verifying via phone and confirmed all of them. 2. I suspended all the listings but 1 3. I edited the one listing to be accurate and complete.
Technical SEO | | DylanPKI
Then I waited, and waited... A month later, the old listings are still up and none of the changes to the one listing have been made. Today it gets a bit more complicated. Today I created a Google+ page for the business which seems like it may end up adding yet ANOTHER Google Places listing, is that correct? They are sending a post card to verify, but I have the page all set up ready to go and plan on tying it to the website. I am not exactly sure what my specific question is, but I am looking for any advice anyone has on the best way to go about this situation. Thank you in advance!0 -
Google Webmaster Tool - Crawl Stats Query ?
Dear All, I have been looking at GWT Crawl Stats and wondering how should I be interrupting the crawl stats chart. AllI I see is 3 charts telling me a high , low and average for the below but I am wondering is there anything I really need to be looking for ?. Pages crawled per day Kilobytes downloaded per day Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) thanks Sarah
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Use webmaster tools "change of address" when doing rel=canonical
We are doing a "soft migration" of a website. (Actually it is a merger of two websites). We are doing cross site rel=canonical tags instead of 301's for the first 60-90 days. These have been done on a page by page basis for an entire site. Google states that a "change of address" should be done in webmaster tools for a site migration with 301's. Should this also be done when we are doing this soft move?
Technical SEO | | EugeneF0