Over 1000 pages de-indexed over night
-
Hello,
On my site (www.bridgman.co.uk) we had a lot of duplicate page issues as reported by the Seomoz site report tool - this was due to database driven URL strings. As a result, I sent an excel file with all the duplicate pages to my web developer who put rel canonical tags on what I assumed would be all the correct pages.
I am not sure if this is a coincidence, or a direct result of the canonical tags, but a few days after (yesterday) the amount of pages indexed by google dropped from 1,200 to under 200.
The number is still declining, and other than the canonical tags I can't work out why Google would just start de-indexing most of our pages.
If you could offer any solutions that would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Robert.
-
Canonical and duplicate content are both interresting issues, thanks for your anserws!
-
The 1st question I would ask myself as a website owner is: How many pages have duplicate content on them? Maybe try going the manual way and check for yourself. There will be pages you do not know about. Use a tool like Xenu's link sleuth to extract all links on your website(which are reachable from atleast 1 link of your website).
It may happen that google is adjusting its index for all. Worth keeping a track on whether your competitors are losing at the same or slower rate or not.
-
I would first remove the canonicals (or actually do them correctly) and wait for a re-crawl of the pages. If not, then re-submit.
Also, problems with canonicals do show up in the page grader app, so when your admin re-writes the canonical, test the page before Google sees it : )
-
It appears so
I've asked my webmaster to remove all of the canonical tags but after reading that article I feel that a lot of the damage has already been done!
Looks like I'll have to submit a reconsideration request and beg Google for forgiveness.
-
Hmm, I'd remove them.
The fact that all your individual product pages have a rel=canonical of productsdetail.asp and category level is products.asp is telling Google that all your products pages are the same!
The problem is there are a lot of parameters in your URLs, let me go have a look at how to deal with that when using the canonical tag.
EDIT - Spent half my lunch on this but couldn't find much I would guess you can get away with parameters in the canonical tag so decide which is the official URL and put that in the header for that paticular piece of content. Only really found this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
-
Could you be in a canonical loop?
-
I don't think this is a result of an algo change, I've just had a look at the crawl diagnostics and it appears that he has put the tag value of the homepage (www.bridgman.co.uk/ - where all the back links are pointed to) as www.bridgman.co.uk/default.asp !!
This has also been done to all of our product pages!! i.e.all of the duplicated product pages now have the tag value - www.bridgman.co.uk/productdetail.asp (a page which doesn't even exist on our site!!!)
Now I may be stating the obvious, but I guess this is the problem?
He did this 8 days ago, where should I go from here? Ask him to remove all rel canonical tags and pray we bounce back....?
-
First question would be do you think this may have had an effect on you? - http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071
All your content unique? Your links come from sites that may have been effected?
If not then I'd give it a few days to see if they come back (as HR128 says, may just be Google working out what's changed and what to do) and I'm doing a quick crawl of your site to see what I can see
-
It could take a couple of days before you see results, Google has to step back and reassess most likely, or your web developer has no clue what he's doin haha.
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
-
Issues with getting a web page indexed
Hello friends, I am finding it difficult to get the following page indexed on search: http://www.niyati.sg/mobile-app-cost.htm It was uploaded over two weeks back. For indexing and trouble shooting, we have already done the following activities: The page is hyperlinked from the site's inner pages and few external websites and Google+ Submitted to Google (through the Submit URL option) Used the 'Fetch and Render' and 'Submit to index' options on Search Console (WMT) Added the URL on both HTML and XML Sitemaps Checked for any crawl errors or Google penalty (page and site level) on Search Console Checked Meta tags, Robots.txt and .htaccess files for any blocking Any idea what may have gone wrong? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | RameshNair
Ramesh Nair0 -
How to Stop Google from Indexing Old Pages
We moved from a .php site to a java site on April 10th. It's almost 2 months later and Google continues to crawl old pages that no longer exist (225,430 Not Found Errors to be exact). These pages no longer exist on the site and there are no internal or external links pointing to these pages. Google has crawled the site since the go live, but continues to try and crawl these pages. What are my next steps?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Instant Indexing
I've been working on a site for a while now, methodically building content and building trust and authority. Lately I've noticed that anything I publish there appears to be instantly indexed by Google, which surprises me. I haven't had this happen before so I'm curious. I'd be interested to hear the experience of others.
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Getting More Pages Indexed
We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png
Technical SEO | | Mattchstick0 -
Will Google Continue to Index the Page with NoIndex Tag Upon Google +1 Button Impression or Click?
The FAQs for Google +1 button suggests as follows: "+1 is a public action, so you should add the button only to public, crawlable pages on your site. Once you add the button, Google may crawl or recrawl the page, and store the page title and other content, in response to a +1 button impression or click." If my page has NoIndex tag, while at the same time inserted with Google +1 button on the page, will Google recognise the NoIndex Tag on the page (and will not index the page) despite the +1 button's impression or clicks send signals to Google spiders?
Technical SEO | | globalsources.com0 -
Dynamically-generated .PDF files, instead of normal pages, indexed by and ranking in Google
Hi, I come across a tough problem. I am working on an online-store website which contains the functionlaity of viewing products details in .PDF format (by the way, the website is built on Joomla CMS), now when I search my site's name in Google, the SERP simply displays my .PDF files in the first couple positions (shown in normal .PDF files format: [PDF]...)and I cannot find the normal pages there on SERP #1 unless I search the full site domain in Google. I really don't want this! Would you please tell me how to figure the problem out and solve it. I can actually remove the corresponding component (Virtuemart) that are in charge of generating the .PDF files. Now I am trying to redirect all the .PDF pages ranking in Google to a 404 page and remove the functionality, I plan to regenerate a sitemap of my site and submit it to Google, will it be working for me? I really appreciate that if you could help solve this problem. Thanks very much. Sincerely SEOmoz Pro Member
Technical SEO | | fugu0 -
Keywords Ranking Dropped from 1st Page to Above 5th Page
Hello, My site URL is http://bit.ly/161NeE and our site was ranked first page for over hundred keywords before March, 30. But all of a sudden, all the keywords on first page dropped to 5th or 6th page. When we search for our site name without ".com", the results appeared on first page are all from other sites. And our page can only be seen on 6th page. We think we have been penalized by Google. But we don't know the exact reason. Can anyone please help? Some extra info on our site: 1. We have been building links by posting blog, articles and PR. All the articles are unique, written by the writers we hire. It has been working fine all the time. We also varied the anchor text a lot. 2. We didn't make any change to the website. But one real problem with our site is that the server is very slow recently and when google crawl our website, many errors were found, mostly 503, 404 errors. And the total number of errors have reach to over 50,000. Do you think this might be a problem for Google not displaying us on first page? Our technicals are working hard to solve server problem. And if it is solved, shall our rankings be back? Please advise. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Milanoocom0 -
Existing Pages in Google Index and Changing URLs
Hi!! I am launching a newly recoded site this week and had a another noobie question. The URL structure has changed slightly and I have installed a 301 redirect to take care of that. I am wondering how Google will handle my "old" pages? Will they just fall out of the index? Or does the 301 redirect tell Google to rewrite the URLs in the index? I am just concerned I may see an "old" page and a "new" page with the same content in the index. Just want to make sure I have covered all my bases. Thanks!! Lynn
Technical SEO | | hiphound0