Disappeared from Google with in 2 hours of webmaster tools error
-
Hey Guys
I'm trying not to panic but....we had a problem with google indexing some of our secure pages then hit those pages and browsers firing up security warning, so I asked our web dev to have at look at it
he made the below changes and within 2 hours the site has drop off the face of google
“in web master tools I asked it to remove any https://freestylextreme.com URLs” “I cancelled that before it was processed”
“I then setup the robots.txt to respond with a disallow all if the request was for an https URL” “I've now removed robots.txt completely” “and resubmitted the main site from web master tools”
I've read a couple of blog posts and all say to remain clam , test the fetch bot on webmasters tools which is all good and just wait for google to reindex
do you guys have any further advice ?
Ben
-
Thanks for the responses guys , it was picked back up in around 4 hours and lost no rank thankfully orders crashed but are back to normal now ! I'm going to investigate the two versions of the site is a bit strange
again thanks for your help
-
Hi Ben,
It's now 2 days after your original question, and it looks like your back in the SERPs, at least from what I can tell. Hopefully you've made a full recovery.
It's difficult to understand exactly what damage was done by your dev in Webmaster Tools, but it's reasonable to assume that whatever it was caused the error.
One thing I did notice is that both the https and http version of your site resolve.
http://www.freestylextreme.com/ &
https://www.freestylextreme.com/Ideally, one would redirect to the other, or at a minimum have a rel canonical tag in place so that only one version is crawled.
I'd go ahead a put your robots.txt file back in place, and check yourself with Google webmaster tools to make sure everything is okay.
Best of luck!
-
Hi Ben
I understand the panic in such a situation. I truly do. I checked your website and the fact that you do not have a robots.txt. You also do not have any kind of noindex or anything like that in your code and you look like a strong established website.
Do you have an XML sitemap in your webmaster console ? I would suggest you build one and submit it if you don't already have it.
Other then that, I would also suggest to have a robots.txt even if it's blank. Rather then a 404 redirecting to your homepage. Give me 24-48hrs and in my opinion, you should be back.
I hope this helps.
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
-
Webmaster tools Hentry showing pages that don't exist
In Webmaster Tools I have a ton of pages listed under Structured Data >> Hentry. These pages are not on my website and I don't know where they are coming from. I redid the site for someone and perhaps they are from the old site. How do I find and delete these? Thank you Rena
Technical SEO | | renalynd270 -
Webmaster tools reporting spurious errors?
For the past 3 or so months Webmaster tools has been reporting 404 errors on my pages... The odd thing is that I can't figure out what they are seeing. Here is an example of a link they claim is a 404 antiquebanknotes/nationalcurrency/rare/1895-Ten-Dollar-Bill.aspx This is strange because it's a malformed URL. It says it's linked from this page: http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/antiquebanknotes/rare/1882-twenty-dollar-bill.aspx Which is a URL that doesn't exist. The bolded portion of this URRL shouldn't be there. Can anyone give me an idea what is happening here? Kind regards, Greg
Technical SEO | | Banknotes1 -
Google Update Frequency
Hi, I recently found a large number of duplicate pages on our site that we didn't know existed (our third-party review provider was creating a separate page for each product whether it was reviewed or not - the ones not reviewed are almost identical so they have been no indexed. Question - how long do you have to typically wait for Google to pick this up On our site? Is it a normal crawl or do we need to wait for the next Panda review (if there is such a thing)? Thanks much.
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Setting a geographic target in webmaster tools
If a site is targeting traffic from around the world should I set the geographic targeting in webmaster tools under 'settings' or leave it? Any help would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SamCUK0 -
I'm getting a Duplicate Content error in my Pro Dashboard for 2 versions of my Homepage. What is the best way to handle this issue?
Hi SEOMoz,I am trying to fix the final issues in my site crawl. One that confuses me is this canonical homepage URL fix. It says I have duplicate content on the following pages:http://www.accupos.com/http://www.accupos.com/index.phpWhat would be the best way to fix this problem? (...the first URL has a higher page authority by 10 points and 100+ more inbound links).Respectfully Yours,Derek M.
Technical SEO | | DerekM880 -
Google has not been visiting my site
Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Keyword Difficulty Tool
Hi Mozzers! Randfishkin just posted yesterday a very nice important and helpfull post, about keyword difficulty. I will be happy, if you can write here the metrics from reports of keyword difficulty, to know more about position of our website on SERP, and to know more what to engage if someone is ranking higher than me, with same metrics of the report of keyword difficulty. It would be very nice, if we talk on this topic here about keyword difficulty how to's. Thanks
Technical SEO | | leadsprofi0