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
-
Why would GWT say 0 pages indexed ?
Hi Looking in GWT > Google Index > Index Status says 0 pages indexed Yes if i search manually on google for brand site is listed, and i see organic traffic from Google in analytics I take it this is likely an error in GWT and nothing to worry about ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
What is the best practice to re-index the de-indexed pages due to a bad migration
Dear Mozers, We have a Drupal site with more than 200K indexed URLs. Before 6 months a bad website migration happened without proper SEO guidelines. All the high authority URLs got rewritten by the client. Most of them are kept 404 and 302, for last 6 months. Due to this site traffic dropped more than 80%. I found today that around 40K old URLs with good PR and authority are de-indexed from Google (Most of them are 404 and 302). I need to pass all the value from old URLs to new URLs. Example URL Structure
Technical SEO | | riyas_
Before Migration (Old)
http://www.domain.com/2536987
(Page Authority: 65, HTTP Status:404, De-indexed from Google) After Migration (Current)
http://www.domain.com/new-indexed-and-live-url-version Does creating mass 301 redirects helps here without re-indexing the old URLS? Please share your thoughts. Riyas0 -
Container Page/Content Page Duplicate Content
My client has a container page on their website, they are using SiteFinity, so it is called a "group page", in which individual pages appear and can be scrolled through. When link are followed, they first lead to the group page URL, in which the first content page is shown. However, when navigating through the content pages, the URL changes. When navigating BACK to the first content page, the URL is that for the content page, but it appears to indexers as a duplicate of the group page, that is, the URL that appeared when first linking to the group page. The client updates this on the regular, so I need to find a solution that will allow them to add more pages, the new one always becoming the top page, without requiring extra coding. For instance, I had considered integrating REL=NEXT and REL=PREV, but they aren't going to keep that up to date.
Technical SEO | | SpokeHQ1 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
What to do if my site was De-indexed?
Hello fellow SEOs, I have been doing SEO for about a year now, I'm not expert, but I know enough to get the job done. I'm learning everyday about better techniques. So enough about that... Tonight I noticed that my site has, I believe, been de-indexed. Its a fairly new site, as we just launched it a few days ago and I went in and did all the title tags and meta. I still have to go in to do the h1 and h2 tags...plus add some alt tags and anchor text. Well anyways, after a couple of days after the title tags were implemented. I was propagating all over the place. Using my keyword tool here...I was number on the first page in Google for 71 or the 88 keywords. My new site was just indexed yesterday and thats when i noticed all my keywords. Well today I noticed that I am no where to be found, even if i type in my company's name. PLEASE help me out...any advice would be appreciated. Thank you. p.s. could my competitors could have done something to my site? just wondering... The website is www.eggheadconsultants.com
Technical SEO | | Jegghead1 -
How Much Authority Needed for Page with 1000 Internal Links?
Hypothetically speaking, if you wanted your homepage to have 1000 links, how much Page Rank or link authority would you need at a minimum (in order for Google to crawl all the links on the page)? Here is an example: http://www.khanacademy.org/#browse
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs0 -
Secondary Pages Indexed over Primary Page
I have 4 pages for a single product Each of the pages link to the Main page for that product Google is indexing the secondary pages above my preferred landing page How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!
My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords. All of a sudden, we completely fell off. I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50. I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools. Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is? This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Prime850