UK rankings disappeared after US website launch
-
Hi all,
I had a client that recently released a US version of their UK website and put it live without informing me first! Once I saw it (about 3/4 days later) I immediately asked them to include the rel=alternate tag onto both websites. However, in the meantime our UK rankings have all gone and it seems as if Google has just kicked the UK website. How long will it take for our rankings to return to normal?
Thanks for the advice,
Karl
-
I don't know.
A good decision would require me to understand the content history, SEO history, and technical history (CMS, htaccess, canonical) of both domains. I would need study the site and talk with all of the people who have done these things and compile that history as it occurred through time. I would then get technical advice from a consultant who really really knows the technical details and be willing to pay them for research and study.
That history would be only as good as what the people who did the work were willing to share and could remember. I would not be comfortable with that information, because, the people who did the work have methods and views that are very different from mine.
One thing that I can say with certainty. When I was done with this site the ecommerce pages would be reduced to product pages and a very small number of category pages. That is all.
Would that fix the problem? I don't know, because I would worry that penalties and technical problems in the history of the site still hang over it.
-
Hi Egol,
do you think it would help if we took down the US website?
-
I see that the link in my post above is not working...
If you grab almost any string of text from a product description and search for it in quotes you will get a page with about 10 search results... here is a string of text....
"Close the door to the wind and rain and brew up this all-natural, gingery, lemony brew to sweep you"
Then at the bottom of the search results page you will see....
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 8 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.If you click the link it will show you 51,000 pages that have been omitted... Click a few pages deep, most of them are from teapigs.com.
If you grab any other string of text from any other product description you will likely see another 50,000 pages... etc etc etc.
Simply eliminating these pages might not solve the problem. Somehow they are being crawled. So their must be links to them somewhere.
There
-
Thanks EGOL,
I've asked them to remove all those types of links and asked how they were being created. So, just to confirm in my mind, the rel=alternative hreflang tag is implemented correctly?
-
Here is one of those pages...
They are being indexed by google. They are not about a single product. They look like they are being produced by the software that runs the site. These pages are either an accident or they are spam. Google will view them as spam.
If this was my site they would be removed ASAP and I would get away from blubolt for making a site with thousands of pages like this with duplicate content, duplicate title tags and allowing them in the index and putting a followed sitewide link in my footer.
-
Thanks EGOL,
Really appreciate the advice. Those pages then, should I 301 them to the proper product page?
I've mentioned the link at the bottom but, surprise surprise, they seem to ignore that one!
-
There is a canonical tag on each page that points to the most authoritative version of the page.
In my opinion, pages like should be eliminated. It does not matter what type of tag is on them.
If this was my site, those pages would be gone and I would have get someone else to work on the website. Nobody should have thousands of pages like that in the google index. Those pages are dead weight. Google hates them with a vengeance. They should be blocked from the google index. I don't like the followed site-wide link to the developer in the footer.
Just saying what I would honestly do if this was my site.
-
Thanks for the reply Egol,
The problem is, there are a few ways that a user can get to the same product. There is a canonical tag on each page that points to the most authoritative version of the page.
The web company has put a geo-target redirect in place so that people from the US see the US site and people from the UK see the UK website. This isn't causing a problem is it?
-
So, when I try to visit the .uk site I am redirected to the .com.
When I visit the .com and grab sentences from the content I see results like this.... 56,800 pages with that sentence and LOTS of them with the same "All products | teapigs USA" title tag.... and some old "All products | teapigs" pages from the .uk site still surviving.
So, just from a quick look (which ain't nearly what should be done) I am thinking that this site has many thousands of pages that are simply mash-ups of products causing a huge duplicate content problem.
And, since I don't know what was on .uk in the past, if it had a penalty, if it was cross-linked... I can't say much with confidence about other deadly problems that this site could have.
If this was my site I would kill those mash-up pages and get back to the old-fashioned one page per product format.
-
In addition, do you think if we took down the US website, our UK rankings would come back quicker? Or is the damage already done and we need to wait it out.
Thanks again!
-
Hi Jane and Egol,
Still no luck in the recovery of our UK rankings
The websites in question are www.teapigs.co.uk and www.teapigs.com. I think the tags have been implemented properly but I was wondering if you would be so kind enough to have a look for me?
Thanks in advance,
Karl
-
Always good to get a blog post or case study out of things like this, at least! I also seriously hope (and suspect) that you will take less time to recover than my client did - the fact that their sites were less than six months old when they made this error will certainly not have helped their chances.
Cheers,
Jane
-
Hi Jane,
The tags have been implemented about a week ago but nothing has really improved yet. The UK website has been up for about 7 years and had quite a lot of authority so I'm surprised I haven't seen anything notable yet
That doesn't fill me with confidence! I'm hoping in the next week or 2 we'll see things improve. We've had to ramp up our email, PPC and social over the last week but it's obviously hampered organic as we ranked on the first page for 30/40 keywords and they've all gone. I think the Panda refresh hasn't helped either and it couldn't have happened at a worse time! I guess it's just a case of keeping an eye on things and praying that Google see the tags sooner rather than later.
I'll let you know when (please God let it be when and not if!!) our rankings return, might be a good YouMoz post!
-
Hi Karl,
Have the tags been implemented, and have you seen any improvement in the situation?
Not to be the bearer of bad news, but I had a client accidentally canonicalise two entire websites to those website's home pages in 2012. That is, www.site.com/page/product/123.html contained a canonical tag pointing to www.site.com, as did every other page on the website. They put this live across two ecommerce domains.
We kicked up a huge fuss, but it still took their dev team a week to fix (the fix was put into a queue... grr). The site lost all of its rankings very quickly, which wasn't surprising given that its ranking all stemmed from internal pages ranking for products. It took about six weeks for Google to properly re-index and start ranking the internal pages again, and months to return to the previous rankings. Granted, these sites were quite new when this happened so they didn't have much authority to begin with.
The short version is that it took a minute to break, six days to fix and six weeks to re-index. Every single case like this will be different, and I do not think the brand-new status of the two domains helped in this case.
-
If the websites had identical content and they were linked together that could have been the problem. Google has been killing identical websites that are linked for about ten years. One site gets killed... almost completely.
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
-
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Why is my blog disappearing from Google index?
My Google blogger blog is about 10 months old. In that time i have worked really hard with adding unique content, building relationships with other bloggers in the same niche, and done some inbound marketing. 2 weeks ago I updated the template to something cleaner, with a little more "wordpress" feel to it. This means i've messed about with the code a lot in these weeks, adding social buttons etc. The problem is that from some point late last week thurs/fri my pages started disappearing from Googles index. I have checked webmaster tools and have no manual actions. My link profile is pretty clean as its a new site, and i have manually checked every piece of content published for plagiarism etc. So what is going on? Did i break my blog? Or is something else amiss? Impressions are down 96% comparing Nov 1-5th to previous 5 days. site is here: http://bit.ly/174beVm Thanks for any help in advance.
Technical SEO | | Silkstream0 -
Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO. If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of migrating one of our retail sites over to magento. To our horror, we find out today that some pages are already being indexed by Google, and we have started receiving orders through new site. Do you have any suggestions for what may have caused this? Or similarly, what the best solution would be to de-index ourselves? We most recently excluded anything with a certain parameter from robots.txt - could this being implemented incorrectly have caused this issue? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Will same language different region (US/UK) geotargeting via subdirectory (& GWT) cause dupe content or other issues ?
If a UK hosted site on a .com, needs to target US now too but for keywords that are spelt differently in US is creating duplicate version of uk hosted .com site and putting it on a subdirectory .com/us/ and geotargeting via webmaster tools (to usa) ok ? I take it in this scenario no dupe content issues (or other issues) so long as is geotargeted via GWT ? Or are there ? Comments from anyone with experience doing similar (same language, different region geo-targeting dupe content with kw spelling being only difference, via a subdirectory or other route) much appreciated ? Many Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
I have 2 websites with the same content
Hello everyone, this is my first post here on SEOmoz and I have a questions that I cannot seem to figure out. So here is my scenario: I have 2 websites that are identical. The only difference between the 2 websites is the domain name. This was done a while back for marketing purposes, however, I am no longer needing my 2nd website. What is the best way to get rid of this second website? I still have about 1 paying customer a day convert on this 2nd website and I do not want to loose them, however, I know that I am getting penalized by the search engines because of this duplicate content. Please let me know the best way of going about this. PS: I have read about 301 redirects, canonicalizing URLs, and other methods but do not know which one to choose. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | threebiz0 -
Should I not Change the URL of Ranking Pages
My site currently ranks #1 or #2 for 2 separate pages on web design & SEO for my geographic location. The URLs are currently mysite.com/services/web-design/ and mysite.com/services/seo/ I'm redesigning my site and I'm taking out the "Services" page as I'm focusing on web design and SEO and lumping everything else into my "Internet Marketing" page. Because my pages for web design and SEO rank so well, should I keep the URL structure even though I don't have a "Services" page or should I just remove services and 301 redirect so I have mysite.com/web-design/ and mysite.com/seo/. I know doing a 301 redirect could hurt me in the short term but I'm wondering if I should just bite the bullet now and change it in favor of a better URL structure. What do you think?
Technical SEO | | JaredDetroit0 -
Has google panelized us ? If so, why ? How do I know if our website is panelized ?
We were ranked on first page among top 5 position a year ago for most of our pages. On one fine day, google decided to drop us from the results although google keeps indexing our pages. Google index our pages regularly but doesn't show them in its results. All google traffic we receive is for our own site name and its variations. I wanted to know - how do we know if google has panelized us. Why has google panelized us ? If they have panelized us, what can we do to get out of it ? Also I wanted to know if any tool will help me identify such thing. We have not done any link building. Our site page rank is 4 (it was 5 few months ago). All we did was on page optimization. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | seoidea0