Do I have to start over?
-
I have a client of which we put up an extensive responsive landing page with a blog in the backend, this was done with Worpress.
Over the new years, our web developer pushed the new site live without telling me, and left the privacy settings on (meaning: please ask search engines not to index this site).
The robots.txt I had set up was set up so that the site would be crawled weekly. The site had privacy settings on for 9 days (more than a week, ugh!). Thereby, taking away all the SEO work I had done prior and basically starting with a brand new slate.
My question: Do I need to start over with all the seo, or do I need to continue pushing forward and waiting for them to come back up? Either way, still need to do work, but I want to really know if my prior work has become moot. Thanks for your replies.
-
You are welcome. I hope all goes well.
-
Site was indexed for 3 months and ranking fairly well, and then privacy settings happened, lost all the rankings. Oh well. So keep on trucking. Thanks for the answer.
-
Appreciated, I thought along the same lines but wanted to make sure I was correct. Thanks for the answer
-
No, in my opinion, you don't need to start over. I've seen worse things happen and still have the site rank fairly quickly and well. Just adjust the settings so that google and other engines can now crawl the site and submit the sitemap via GWT. Other than a temporary bump in the road, I don't think it's going to have a long-term impact on your SEO.
Hope that helps!
Dana
-
Ugh, leaving the privacy settings on for WordPress is always frustrating.
I don't think you have to redo anything. The site will eventually be re-crawled (which you might be able to speed up with some smart link building), and I don't think you'll have lost anything when that happens. If there were links in place, they're still in place, and the SEO work you've done on-page will still retain its value.
It might just take a bit of time for the whole site to get re-indexed again (of course, if it was never indexed then you have nothing to worry about). I wouldn't worry about the robots.txt crawl rate, it gets ignored anyway.
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
-
Discussion: Ecommerce SEO - What would you recommend as high Impact tasks to start campaigns with?
Calling all those with ecommerce SEO chops! What are the high impact tasks that you would always start out your new campaigns with? I've got this far in my thinking: Identifying query classes, identifying the intent of each query class and setting up ranking indices ensuring templated META page titles match the most valuable query syntax identify any issues with crawl budget that might prevent deep product page indexing
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
???
??? Hoping this can be one of those discussion threads that is so useful people bookmark it for future reference! Many thanks!1 -
My company wants to set up some blogs - what's best practice in getting started from scratch?
My company wants to set up two or three blogs (on previously unused domains) with the idea being to disseminate good content that gets picked up in SERPs and acts as a lead generator, shows us to be authorities in our market, creates brand (or individual employee who's doing the blogging) awareness etc... From scratch, what are all the boxes that should be ticked to make this work from the outset? What are the must haves?With all the ideals in place, how long could it realistically take to make this work? What are some pitfalls to look out for? Any advice in general will be appreciated. Thanks, M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
If Penguin 2.0 targets specific pages and keywords, should I spend less SEO effort on them since will they be harder to optimize? Penalty repair is only starting at end of year.
I’m working with a company that got hit by Penguin 2.0. They’re going to switch to white-hat only for a few months and review analytics before considering repairing the penalty. In the meantime, would it make sense to focus less SEO effort (on-site optimization, link building, etc.) on any pages or keywords that were penalized or hit hardest? Or are those the pages we should work on the most? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Title tags with >70 characters but most important words at start. Is this really a problem?
Is there in fact any kind of negative impact having title tags longer than 70 characters, as long as I place the most important keywords at the start and make sure that title still is compelling when cut somewhere around 70 characters? Are the additional words after the 70 characters limit just ignored? May additional words dillute the strength of the first words or may they even be helpful ? Any experience or any studies you know about impact of longer title tags? Or any statement from google about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Bought a site with an old domain where to start?
Hi, I recently purchased the site www.forexnews.com. The domain is more than 10 years old and used to have a ton of content and traffic. A couple of years ago it was purchased by another firm who took down all the old content and made it into a news aggregation site. I am going to try and build the traffic back up by adding back original content and leveraging the domain authority that the site has retained. Besides doing some keyword research, building links, and writing original content is there any advice out there that the community can give me on what else to start with? Any resources that you can point me to which talk about this type of thing would also be appreciated. Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fxtrader19790 -
Starting Over with a new site - Do's and Don'ts?
After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website. Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake. Our original site,(call it mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the engine in the old one. We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page. There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net. Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign. All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new. We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again. We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net. My questions are: 1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go? 2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ? Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site? It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site. 3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help 4. What have I forgotten? Cheers, all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
New Website.. From where to start with a SEO Plan ?
Hi.. We have got two SEO and link builders working here in the office, putting in efforts is not a problem. And we have been doing SEO for our websites since a long time and they all rank well. Since, I have signed up for SEOMOZ, which is the one stop with all the heavy duty SEO guys, so we would like to get some suggestions from the experts. Ok here is the question. We have launched a new website this week and we have got a new SEO client, whose website is 6 months old. 1. What should be a proper SEO plan for a new website ? Got any Plan PDF or Buleprint, which you can send me ? 2. For the client website , he is ranking on 4-7th pages for his 4 keywords. Whats should be the correct way or plan to start doing SEO for them and get them to the first page ? 3. I feel like, doing competitive analysis is lacking with us and we are not good at evaluating that step. Whats the bet way to do competitive analysis ? 4. We are looking to build more and more links to the website . Whats the best way to make links ? Got any SEOMoz Blog post link, which explain this better or any forum thread which has got the tricks for this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qubesys0