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
-
Prioritizing SEO Items for a New Website Launch
Hello, a beginner SEO question I'd love to hear your perspective on. We're launching a new site and need to prioritize our SEO work. For a news site with multiple articles published daily, using RSS feeds to push stories to Google News is our top priority. Which item should we focus on next, an XML sitemap for Google, or an article directory based on our internal taxonomy that would provide backlinks for the individual posts to rank? Are XML sitemaps still relevant? Is an article directory a must-have or nice-to-have? Appreciate any suggestions you may have!
Technical SEO | | Gbtyne1 -
Website crawl error
Hi all, When I try to crawl a website, I got next error message: "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal cookie name" For the moment, I found next explanation: The errors indicate that one of the web servers within the same cookie domain as the server is setting a cookie for your domain with the name "path", as well as another cookie with the name "domain" Does anyone has experience with this problem, knows what it means and knows how to solve it? Thanks in advance! Jens
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
My website is not avaliable, will i lose ranking?
My website was not available during 12 hours and i think that i will lose ranking by that. What do you think about it? Will i lose rankings? Some URL were lost during the drop of server, what should i do? Create again? Delete on GWT? Thanks so much.
Technical SEO | | pompero990 -
Redirect to get better ranking
I have three pages of my website ranking for a keyword: landing page and two blogposts. They all rank on top of page 2 (positions 11-13).If I redirect these articles to the landing page, will it help to bring it up in rankings?
Technical SEO | | imoney0 -
How to know that i work well in my rank ?
Hi everyone, i'd like to know if i rank my keywords , how to know that i do well? every day
Technical SEO | | engmtamous0 -
Are multiple sites needed to rank one website?
My SEO guy for a mortgage website says that we should have 30 websites, with about 250 pages each on each site plus 50 blogs in order to even think of ranking for mortgage keywords. Is that correct?
Technical SEO | | simermeet0 -
Will syndicated content hurt a website's ranking potential?
I work with a number of independent insurance agencies across the United States. All of these agencies have setup their websites through one preferred insurance provider. The websites are customizable to a point, but the content for the entire website is mostly the same. Therefore, literally hundreds of agency sites have essentially the same content. The only thing that changes is a few "wildcards" in the copy where the agency fills in their city, state, services areas, company history, etc. My questions is: will this syndicated content hurt their ranking potential? I've been toying with the idea of further editing the content to make it more unique to an agency, but I would hate to waste a lot of hours doing this if it won't help anything. Would you expect this approach to be beneficial or a waste of time? Thank you for your help!
Technical SEO | | copyjack0 -
Event Landing Pages not ranking
Hi there I need to optimize the website of a club/concert venue. The site isn't bad and has authority, but the event pages don't seem to rank and I'm unsure about the reason. There is an overview page of the events: http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/ What happens currently when clicking on a specific event (on "WEITER", top right of each event) is that users get redirected to a hashtag page by jQuery. The href of "WEITER" itself links to another landing page (which is IMO the one we should see ranking for the specific event). Here is a concrete example: Look at the event "Tanz & Konzert: Andreas Vollenweider, Seven & ROKPA-KIDS" on /events by clicking on "WEITER", you get directed to http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/#2790/andreas-vollenweider the actual "WEITER" link in the source code though, points to the landing page http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/andreas-vollenweider/ This seems to be done by an AJAX load: jQuery loads a DIV with the ID "ajax-content". Apparently, this is the code responsible for it: $(„.link“, click(function() {
Technical SEO | | zeepartner
el.find('.wrapper').load(target+' #ajax-content', function() {
});
return false;
}); I know the site has good authority and should rank well. however, the event landing pages never seem to appear, but only the page /events is ranking: SERP
(Strangely, when using the site command, the event page suddenly appears above: SERP. (But I have never seen this in a "normal search query", even though we are the organisers and should at least be among the top 5). Now my question: Does Google consider this AJAX load to be some sort of cloaking? (because the href in the code is different to you actually end up by clicking "WEITER"). Will the landing pages begin to rank if we disable this AJAX load? Or should we stick to hashtags and not even create landing pages? (but then, we will have no control over title tags of specific events, right?) Thanks for your help, I'm a bit lost here as my JS knowledge is meagre... Cheers,
Phil0