Accidentally checked privacy setting in WP to "not to index" and dropped rank...how can I fix this?
-
I recently rebuilt a static website to a wordpress site...In the privacy settings ....the -"Ask search engines not to index this site" was checked and I didn't notice. I had a top ranking website now its completely gone off google and every where else. I have unchecked it, resubmitted a sitemap to google.....does anyone know if this is permanent damage or if there is something else I can do to help fix this......I'm freaking out
-
Happy to hear all is well. Good job on the micro data. More should use it.
Robert
-
Its ALIVE!!! ITS ALIVE!!!!.........my site is back! Thank you Robert & Daniel for the responses......I fetched as google the main pages of the site....sent a couple new links to the site...resubmitted the site map...added the some micro data for rich snippets( not sure if that did anything...I had not put that on my site before though) .......wow........That was super stressful
-
Evers, the good news first - the change is not permanent. Good move on sitemap resubmit. One thing is that it will depend somewhat on how long the noindex was on: If you had a top ranked site in a very competitive vertical and rebuild occurred a year ago it is much more problematic. If it was two weeks ago, it is much less.
One thing I would look at is the pages indexed in GWMT and see how they look pre change and post to track if you are getting back. (This way if you are not seeing reindexing, you will act faster). Depending on the size of the site, you could also "fetch as Google" for some of the important pages as a way to speed up the indexing of the more significant pages.I am assuming that if there were url changes you took care of them with 301 or canonical.
Take a breath, but keep an eye on it all.
Robert
-
I would try to send a fresh link to the domain. I think that would help your domain to be in google quicker.
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
-
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
No index
Screaming frog spider does index pages on our website like: wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/assets/js/frontend/jquery-ui-touch-punch.min.js?ver=2.3.9 wp-content/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/assets/css/checkbox.min.css?ver=2.3.2 Is it a bad/good idea to set my parameters in Webmastertools and tell Google not to crawl pages that begin with wp/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Choosing the right page for rel="canonical"
I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ? All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page. My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category. For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section : http://www.bdc.ca/EN/advice_centre/expand_your_sales/going_global_or_international_markets/Pages/RelatedArticles.aspx?PATH=/EN/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place. For this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories. If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated ! Thanks
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Rel="Follow"? What the &#@? does that mean?
I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML? I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.
Technical SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Why did I drop ranking after setting up perm redirect, sitemap, and Google places??
I have a site that was ranking in the top two for my search terms. We had a funky url (it contained hyphens) and was advised to change it for SEO, so I setup a perm redirect through my web host (before it was a temporary one I think) At the same time I installed a sitemap plugin for Wordpress and also registered for a Google Places account. I can't remember the exact order I did this -- does it matter? Anyway, within a couple days of doing the above, my ranking dropped to the bottom of the second page. I would like to fix this, but I'm not sure. I need help please!
Technical SEO | | fsvatousek0 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0 -
A huge drop in rankings since last 10 days, and not recovered yet.
Hi Mozzers, I have a serious topic to discuss and want help from the experts here. Our website has 6 PR and we have been consistency staying at the top for very competitive terms in the niche. Since last Friday (24th February, 2012) we have been facing massive fluctuation in the rankings for most of the keywords we are focusing on. After this fall, we checked the following details but didn’t find any serious/critical issue that might be contributing towards these fluctuations:- We analyzed Google webmaster tools, there’s no update/warning from Google regarding any negative activity and other things seem to be normal. We checked our website through site search (site: www.domain.com) and found that we haven’t lost any indexed pages and things appear normally as they used to. So, we are sure that we haven’t been banned or penalized. We also cross verified our link building and other promotional activities and we didn’t find anything suspicious that could lead to such a big fluctuation. The drop is really big, some keywords went to 5th or 6th page from top 3 position; some keywords are not in top 200 or 300 spots which were usually staying put between 5th to 10th position. We have analyzed a lot but haven’t come to know the reason why we are facing this fluctuation. Our website is 4 years old and this kind of fluctuation has happened for the first time. Has anyone faced this kind of issue before? I’m looking forward to your support in identifying this trouble. Thanks
Technical SEO | | ValSmith0