Accidental Noindex/Mis-Canonicalisation - Please help!

[robmarsden]

Hi everybody,

I was hoping somebody might be able to help as this is an issue my team and I have never come across before.

A client of ours recently migrated to a new site design. 301 redirects were properly implemented and the transition was fairly smooth.

However, we realised soon after that a sub-section of pages had either one or both of the following errors:

1. They featured a canonical tag pointing to the wrong page
2. They featured the 'meta noindex' tag

After realising this, both the canonicals and the noindex tags were immediately removed. However, Google crawled the site while these were in place and the pages subsequently dropped out of Google's index.

We re-submitted the affected pages to Google's index and used WMT to 'Fetch' the pages as Google. We have also since 'allowed' the pages in the robots.txt file as an extra measure.

We found that the pages which just had the noindex tag were immediately re-indexed, while the pages which featured the noindex tag and which were mis-canonicalised are still not being re-indexed.

Can anyone think of a reason why this might be the case? One of the pages which featured both tags was one of our most important organic landing pages, so we're eager to resolve this.

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not sure how helpful it is, in the sense of being good news, but I did something like this to one of my sites on purpose once, and wrote it up:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

A couple of tips:

(1) I think what Oleg is saying, which I agree with is that if Page A had a canonical to Page B, instead of just removing the canonical tag, put in a canonical tag pointing from Page A to Page A. Sometimes, the self-referencing canonical will help over-ride the old/bad canonical.

(2) Fetch is a good bet, but I'd also re-submit an XML sitemap with just the "bad" URLs. It's not a cure-all, but it can help nudge Google.

Unfortunately, it really can take time to sort out. Make sure your internal links are correct as well. You could temporarily build new internal links (list a few resources on your home-page, for example) to push link-juice temporarily. You could also post the proper URLs on Twitter/FB, etc., to kick them a bit. Of course, that only works for a few pages, not for hundreds.

[Unity]

Yes it may just be a waiting game as Oleg mentioned. But perhaps to help speed up the process you could link to some of those pages from a higher level page (like the homepage or a department landing page).Don't spam tho, no more than 100 links on a page (including navigation/footer etc).

I'd also recommend having an XML sitemap with all the URLs of your website on it. You'll need to upload this to Google Webmaster Tools as well.

When they do get re-indexed keep an eye out for how they have been indexed; so look at what keywords bring up that page in SERPs (Raven Tools is an easy way to track keywords and see which URL comes up). If you find that 'odd' pages are being indexed for a certain keyword search you should do some link building specific to the keyword you want ranked pointing to the page/URL you want ranked.

Good luck!

Davinia

[robmarsden]

Hi Oleg,

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately the canonical URL was another of our main organic landing pages so a redirect wouldn't be appropriate in this situation.

I agree that it's just a matter of time but it's frustrating that Google has crawled the site since we updated the pages and still hasn't re-indexed the page in question.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Can you set a canonical/redirect on the page that was incorrect pointing back to the correct page?

i.e. page1.html had wrong canonical to pgae1.html -> change pgae1.html canonical to page1.html

Overall, I think it's just a matter of time before Google is able to recrawl and fix itself... it's odd that canonical + noindex is slower than just noindex. Do whatever you can to get G to recrawl the pages.