How long does it take for traffic to bounce back from and accidental robots.txt disallow of root?
-
We accidentally uploaded a robots.txt disallow root for all agents last Tuesday and did not catch the error until yesterday.. so 6 days total of exposure. Organic traffic is down 20%. Google has since indexed the correct version of the robots.txt file. However, we're still seeing awful titles/descriptions in the SERPs and traffic is not coming back. GWT shows that not many pages were actually removed from the index but we're still seeing drastic rankings decreases.
Anyone been through this? Any sort of timeline for a recovery?
Much appreciated!
-
I'd give it a month before you'll see that bounce back. I wouldn't expect the same rankings as before as Google will be reevaluating your pages, but you should have a pick up in traffic.
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
-
Negative SEO & How long does it take for Google to disavow
Following on from a previous problem of this 2021 Waec Runz page completely dropping from index, we have discovered that 150+ spam, porn domains have been directed at our pages (sometime in the last 3-4 months, don't have an exact date). Does anyone have exerpeince on how long it may take Google to take noticed of a new disavow list? Any estimates would be very helpful in determining our next course of action.
Technical SEO | | sathoiue80 -
Should I add my html sitemap to Robots?
I have already added the .xml to Robots. But should I also add the html version?
Technical SEO | | Trazo0 -
No index tag robots.txt
Hi Mozzers, A client's website has a lot of internal directories defined as /node/*. I already added the rule 'Disallow: /node/*' to the robots.txt file to prevents bots from crawling these pages. However, the pages are already indexed and appear in the search results. In an article of Deepcrawl, they say you can simply add the rule 'Noindex: /node/*' to the robots.txt file, but other sources claim the only way is to add a noindex directive in the meta robots tag of every page. Can someone tell me which is the best way to prevent these pages from getting indexed? Small note: there are more than 100 pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
Robots.txt on http vs. https
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https. I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt? Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Technical SEO | | zeepartner0 -
When the Plural has more traffic, but the singular makes much more sense. What to do?
Hey everyone! This is actually the first time I ever posted a question here on MOZ! Guess I was (still am) embarrassed by being an SEO Noob! That being said, I really have to get some input on this matter and i was wondering if you guys might be able to help. I'm optimizing a page for a wedding venue in Portugal. Currently, according to google trends the Plural - Venues for weddings, scores considerably better than the Singular, Venue for weddings(this was researched in Portuguese written terms of course). Despite this, i'm leaning towards an optimization for the Singular term, because the plural seems to un-natural to fit in the content, or title. I managed to fit the Plural in the description but i've read that it hasn't influenced rank directly for a while. Currently my title tag reads: Venue for Weddings | Name of the Venue. I really can't find anyway that it makes sense to me in the Plural... and i feel like if i was a user, i would rather click on the singular term cause it just makes a lot more sense. But my opinion is most probably biased by the fact that i understand that using the plural term will be solemnly an SEO effort to rank higher for a term that has more average searches per month. My question is: In the current state of search algorithms, will an optimization for the singular term, still get me some rank on the plural key phrase? Let me know what you think about this please, and thank you in advance for your time. Most Respectfully, Martim Coutinho dos Santos
Technical SEO | | martim_santos0 -
How long does it take for Google for deindexing pages?
Hi mozzers, We just launched a mobile website(parallel) and realized that it created many duplicate content with desktop URLs. I decided to add name="robots" content="No index, No follow" /> to the entire mobile site. My only concern is that I am still seeing the mobile site indexed when it's been almost a week I added these tags. Does anyone know how long it takes google to deindex your content? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Best use of robots.txt for "garbage" links from Joomla!
I recently started out on Seomoz and is trying to make some cleanup according to the campaign report i received. One of my biggest gripes is the point of "Dublicate Page Content". Right now im having over 200 pages with dublicate page content. Now.. This is triggerede because Seomoz have snagged up auto generated links from my site. My site has a "send to freind" feature, and every time someone wants to send a article or a product to a friend via email a pop-up appears. Now it seems like the pop-up pages has been snagged by the seomoz spider,however these pages is something i would never want to index in Google. So i just want to get rid of them. Now to my question I guess the best solution is to make a general rule via robots.txt, so that these pages is not indexed and considered by google at all. But, how do i do this? what should my syntax be? A lof of the links looks like this, but has different id numbers according to the product that is being send: http://mywebshop.dk/index.php?option=com_redshop&view=send_friend&pid=39&tmpl=component&Itemid=167 I guess i need a rule that grabs the following and makes google ignore links that contains this: view=send_friend
Technical SEO | | teleman0 -
Spider Indexed Disallowed URLs
Hi there, In order to reduce the huge amount of duplicate content and titles for a cliënt, we have disallowed all spiders for some areas of the site in August via the robots.txt-file. This was followed by a huge decrease in errors in our SEOmoz crawl report, which, of course, made us satisfied. In the meanwhile, we haven't changed anything in the back-end, robots.txt-file, FTP, website or anything. But our crawl report came in this November and all of a sudden all the errors where back. We've checked the errors and noticed URLs that are definitly disallowed. The disallowment of these URLs is also verified by our Google Webmaster Tools, other robots.txt-checkers and when we search for a disallowed URL in Google, it says that it's blocked for spiders. Where did these errors came from? Was it the SEOmoz spider that broke our disallowment or something? You can see the drop and the increase in errors in the attached image. Thanks in advance. [
Technical SEO | | ooseoo](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> [
](<a href=)" target="_blank">a> LAAFj.jpg
0