If I had an issue with a friendly URL module and I lost all my rankings. Will they return now that issue is resolved next time I'm crawled by google?
-
I have 'magic seo urls' installed on my zencart site. Except for some reason no one can explain why or how the files were disabled. So my static links went back to dynamic (index.php?**********) etc. The issue was resolved with the module except in that time google must have crawled my site and I lost all my rankings. I'm nowher to be found in the top 50.
Did this really cause such an extravagant SEO issue as my web developers told me? Can I expect my rankings to return next time my site is crawled by google?
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for your reply. Your answer sounds logical and well informed. I have heard about some google changes recently but that was regarding Exact Match Domains but if that was all I should be fine.
As a little update. I have asked the developers who fixed the problem exactly what they did; details. Their reply is as follows:
"Regarding Magic SEO Issue
Whenever Magic SEO is installed in .htacess file it is activated from admin; it makes a new cache folder for its functionality.Some one have rename cache file on live server. Magic SEO needs cache folder which is in root directory not in magic SEO folder.So we have reinstalled magic SEO as we want to create a new cache file for its proper working."
You mentioned accessibility of dynamic files. That's interesting. I will take that up with technical support with my hosting provider and also if they know about why the cache file was renamed.
Many thanks again Marcus for your feedback
Pete
-
Hmmm, who knows, certainly, it is feasible that you may have had a problem on the back of none of your pages existing any longer (well, they did, but on a different URL which may have made matters worse as they could have been seen as duplicates).
Without a URL and access to analytics it is impossible to say for sure but it is certainly feasible. I would also double check against known algorithm updates to see if there are any other traffic drops on significant dates.
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
Will the ranking return?
They should do, if nothing else has changed then when those pages come back up they should. You will want to be double sure that the dynamic addresses are not accessible and that there is no potential for duplication but in theory, once everything returns and settles down, your rankings should return if this is indeed the (only) issue.
It may not happen overnight though!
Marcus
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
-
Google crawling 200 page site thousands of times/day. Why?
Hello all, I'm looking at something a bit wonky for one of the websites I manage. It's similar enough to other websites I manage (built on a template) that I'm surprised to see this issue occurring. The xml sitemap submitted shows Google there are 229 pages on the site. Starting in the beginning of December Google really ramped up their intensity in crawling the site. At its high point Google crawled 13,359 pages in a single day. I mentioned I manage other similar sites - this is a very unusual spike. There are no resources like infinite scroll that auto generates content and would cause Google some grief. So follow up questions to my "why?" is "how is this affecting my SEO efforts?" and "what do I do about it?". I've never encountered this before, but I think limiting my crawl budget would be treating the symptom instead of finding the cure. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks! *edited for grammar.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brettmandoes0 -
Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago. For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is. Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain? Thank you for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1231 -
What to do when all products are one of a kind WYSIWYG and url's are continuously changing. Lots of 404's
Hey Guys, I'm working on a website with WYSIWYG one of a kind products and the url's are continuously changing. There are allot of duplicate page titles (56 currently) but that number is always changing too. Let me give you guys a little background on the website. The site sells different types of live coral. So there may be anywhere from 20 - 150 corals of the same species. Each coral is a unique size, color etc. When the coral gets sold the site owner trashes the product creating a new 404. Sometimes the url gets indexed, other times they don't since the corals get sold within hours/days. I was thinking of optimizing each product with a keyword and re-using the url by having the client update the picture and price but that still leaves allot more products than keywords. Here is an example of the corals with the same title http://austinaquafarms.com/product-category/acans/ Thanks for the help guys. I'm not really sure what to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aronwp0 -
If i disallow unfriendly URL via robots.txt, will its friendly counterpart still be indexed?
Our not-so-lovely CMS loves to render pages regardless of the URL structure, just as long as the page name itself is correct. For example, it will render the following as the same page: example.com/123.html example.com/dumb/123.html example.com/really/dumb/duplicative/URL/123.html To help combat this, we are creating mod rewrites with friendly urls, so all of the above would simply render as example.com/123 I understand robots.txt respects the wildcard (*), so I was considering adding this to our robots.txt: Disallow: */123.html If I move forward, will this block all of the potential permutations of the directories preceding 123.html yet not block our friendly example.com/123? Oh, and yes, we do use the canonical tag religiously - we're just mucking with the robots.txt as an added safety net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrwestern0 -
How long does it take before URL's are removed from Google?
Hello, I recently changed our websites url structures removing the .html at the end. I had about 55 301's setup from the old url to the new. Within a day all the new URL's were listed in Google, but the old .html ones still have not been removed a week later. Is there something I am missing? Or will it just take time for them to get de-indexed? As well, so far the Page Authority hasn't transfered from the old pages to the new, is this typical? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeanConroy0 -
I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out why google stopped crawling.. any help is appreciated
This is going to be kind of long, simply because there is a background to the domain name that is not typical to anybody in the world really and I'm not sure if its possible that it was penalized or ranked lower because of that or not. Because of that I'm going to include it with the hopes that giving the full picture some nice soul in the world who has more knowledge in this than me see's something or knows something and can point me in the right direction. Our site has been around for a few years, at one point the domain was seized by homeland security ICE, and then they had to give it back in Dec. which sparked a lot of the SOPA PIPA stuff and we became the poster child so to speak. The site had previously been up since 2008, but due to that whole mess the site was down for 13 months on the dreaded seized server with a scary warning graphic and site title which caused quite obviously a bunch of 404 errors and who knows what else damage to anything we'd had before that as far as page rank and incoming links. we had a lot of incoming links from high quality sites. We were advised upon getting the domain back to pretty much scrap all the old content that was on the site prior and just start fresh.. which we did. Googlebot started crawling slowly, but then as we started getting back into the swing of things people started linking to us,some with high page rank, we were getting indexed quite frequently and ranking high on search results in our niche.. Then something happened on March 4th, we had arguably our best day with google traffic, we'd been linked back by places like Huff Post etc for content in our niche.. and the next day literally it was a freefall. Darn near nothing. I've attached a screen shot from webmaster tools so you can see how drastic it was. I went crazy, trying to figure out what was wrong, searching obsessively through webmaster tools looking for any indication of a problem, searched the site on google site:dajaz1.com and what comes up is page 2 page 3 page 45 page 46. It's also taken to indexing our category and tag pages and even our search pages. I've now set those all to noindex follow but when I look at where the googlebots are at on the site, they're on the categories, pages, author pages, and tags. Some of our links are still getting indexed, but doing a search just of our site name and we're ranking below many of the media sites that have written about our legal issues, when a month ago we were at least top result for our own name. I've racked my brain trying to figure out the issue. I've disabled plugins, I'm on fetch as google bot all the time making sure our stuff is at least coming out as 200 (we had 2 days where we were getting 403 errors due to a super-cache issue, but once fixed googlebot returned like it never left) I've literally watched 1000 videos, read 100 forums, added in SEO plugins, tried to optimize the site to the point I'm worried I'm over doing it.. and still they've barely begun to crawl. As you can see there is some activity in the last 2-3 days, but even submitting a new site map once I changed the theme out of desperation it's only indexed 16. I've looked for errors all through webmaster tools and I can't find anything to tell me why that happened, how to fix it, and how to get googlebot to like us again. I'm pulling my hair out here. The links we have incoming are high quality links like huffington post , spin, complex, etc. Those haven't slowed down at all, we do outgoing links to sites we trust and are high quality as well. I've got interns working on how they're writing titles and such, I've gone through and attempted to fix duplicate pages and titles.. I've been going through and re-writing meta description tags What am I missing? I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what the issue is. Eternally grateful for any help provided. jnzb6.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malady0 -
Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?
What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stats440 -
I'm facinated by SEO but the truth is, I don't have the time to do it. Who can I hire?
I'm facinated by SEO but the truth is, I don't have the time to do it. I trust the moz community more than some of those other SEO forums out there so I'm asking you all, where can I go to find a good SEO firm who's affordable enough for a small startup? The next part of the question is, what should I expect to pay for services that will really make a difference? Please don't spam this thread....I seriously just want an honest opinion as to where I can find some credible help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chaz880