Fluctuation in Ranking for the keywords

[vivekrathore]

We were ranking well for most of the keywords.These  keywords were at first page i.e mostly @ 1st and 2nd position in Google.But we have put the following tag ie no index tag for our pages by mistake and after that the ranking fluctuated &  fell down in Google search results as our pages were out of index in Google .We have removed the noindex tag after encountering the problem.Now I can see my pages are cached & indexed in Google after submitting to index in Google webmaster tool.Can I regain my ranking for the keywords and within how many days I would regain my previous ranking?

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

For the question of how long rankings will take to come back, unfortunately that's impossible to answer for sure. I had a client once mistakenly point all of their canonical tags at their home page, effectively de-indexing the whole site. The fixed the error within a day, but it took five weeks to get their rankings back. This was a very new website that had very little authority to begin with, but it was still a huge hit to take.

If your site is a little older and more established, your recover should be a lot quicker. Unfortunately it's still very hard to put a time frame on this.

[tdawson09]

Here's the instructions:

Ask Google to crawl a page or site:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. On the Dashboard, under Crawl, click Fetch as Google.
3. In the text box, type the path to the page you want to check.
4. In the dropdown list, select Web. (You can select another type of page, but currently we only accept submissions for our Web Search index.)
5. Click Fetch. Google will fetch the URL you requested. It may take up to 10 or 15 minutes for Fetch status to be updated.
6. Once you see a Fetch status of "Successful", click Submit to Index, and then click one of the following:
   • To submit the individual URL to Google's index, selectURL and click Submit. You can submit up to 500 URLs a week in this way.
   • To submit the URL and all pages linked from it, click URL and all linked pages. You can submit up to 10 of these requests a month.

[tdawson09]

At least go into the "Crawl" section in Webmaster Tools, and do a "Fetch as Google" of your domain and all pages. This will ask Google to reindex your whole site. You can also see your page the way Google sees it.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Anirban,

There is no way to guess how long this can take I'm afraid. I am sure not even Google could tell you this.

The only thing you can do really is keep an eye on your site traffic and position in the SERPs. I am sure that if Google ranked you in the past, that you will get there again.

-Andy