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
-
Switched from and HTTPS to HTTP. My home page is facing a redirect issue from the http to https. Should I no index the HTTP or find the redirect and delete it? Thank you
Switched from and HTTPS to HTTP. My home page is facing a redirect issue from the http to https. Should I no index the HTTP or find the redirect and delete it? Thank you
Technical SEO | | LandmarkRecovery20170 -
Best practices for types of pages not to index
Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex". Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index? Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress). Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | RichHamilton_qcs0 -
Page missing from Google index
Hi all, One of our most important pages seems to be missing from the Google index. A number of our collections pages (e.g., http://perfectlinens.com/collections/size-king) are thin, so we've included a canonical reference in all of them to the main collection page (http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all). However, I don't see the main collection page in any Google search result. When I search using "info:http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all", the page displayed is our homepage. Why is this happening? The main collection page has a rel=canonical reference to itself (auto-generated by Shopify so I can't control that). Thanks! WUKeBVB
Technical SEO | | leo920 -
From page 1th to page 18th @ Google
Hello Mozzers! I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Testimonial pages
Is it better to have one long testimonial page on your site, or break it down into several smaller pages with testimonials? First time I've posted on the forum. But I'm excited! Ron
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0 -
New Domain Page 7 Google but Page 1 Bing & Yahoo
Hi just wondered what other people's experience is with a new domain. Basically have a client with a domain registered end of May this year, so less than 3 months old! The site ranks for his keyword choice (not very competitive), which is in the domain name. For me I'm not at all surprised with Google's low ranking after such a short period but quite surprsied to see it ranking page 1 on Bing and Yahoo. No seo work has been done yet and there are no inbound links. Anyone else have experience of this? Should I be surprised or is that normal in the other two search engines? Thanks in advance Trevor
Technical SEO | | TrevorJones0