My homepage+key pages have dropped 40+ positions after implementing redirects and canonical changes. HELP!
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Hi SEOMozers,
I work for a web based nonprofit at www.tisbest.org. I had a professional contact recommend that we work on our redirects to our homepage because we were losing valuable rank benefit. This combined with getting sick of seeing our weekly SEOMoz crawl reports show 304 duplicate page and title errors for months. No one could seem to figure out what was happening (we think it had to do with session stuff; we were seeing several versions of each page showing the following: www.tisbest.org/default.aspx/(random character string)
My developer and I read a bunch of articles and started making changes 10 days ago:
- He setup 301 redirects from http://tisbest.org to http://www.tisbest.org. (set the canonical domain). We did a redirect from http://www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to root with "/".
- I set the canonical setting to www.tisbest.org in our webmaster tools.
- In our web config (we're running in asp.net), we changed our session detection from auto-detect then saw some session funkiness so we changed it back. Though we do think the character strings we were seeing were session GUID.
- He forced lower case URL’s to reduce duplicate page content/titles.
I got my weekly crawl report 9 days ago and we had dropped from 340 duplicate page title and page content errors went to one. We went nuts and felt like the kings of SEO.
Then, yesterday (9/28), the SEO grim reaper came knocking when I received my weekly SEOMoz ranking report. It said we had dropped 40+ spots for all of 9 of our keywords. Sure enough, I searched our keywords and our website was gone. Then I searched our company name, tisbest, and only a few of our pages show but not the homepage. I searched for our URL www.tisbest.org, and I originally got the expanded view (with 8 links to various webpages - can't remember what this view is called) but now, today (Saturday), the expanded view is gone from this search result.
Also, when I run the On Page Report card for our homepage, I get the following error message with no results: "We were unable to grade that page. The page did not load. Curl::Err::TooManyRedirectsError: Number of redirects hit maximum amount."
When I run the Open Site explorer report, I get this message at the top: Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.tisbest.org/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?" If I go to the report for the that report's page, it says that "No information is available for that URL."
Just tonight (night of 9/29), our developer added the rel="canonical" href="http://www.tisbest.org" /> to our homepage tonight to see if that would help. We did not do that originally.
In our Google Webmaster tools, I am seeing the number of URL Error - Not Followed has sky rocked. I have attached a screen capture to this thread. There are also a large number of URL Errors - Not Found errors as well.
I did some research tonight and downloaded and ran Screaming Frog SEO Crawler. I have attached a screen capture below with this report and a couple of questions I sent our developer that may be helpful to you.
Also, not sure if this is relevant, we use a master page that all of our pages inherit from so all of our pages get the same meta-data: name="keywords" content="charitable gift card, charitable gift certificate, non profit gift card, charity donation, giftcard, charity gift card, donation gift card, donation gift, charity gift, animal gift card, animal gift, environmental gift card, environmental gift, humanitarian gift card, humanitarian gift, christian gift card, christian gift, catholic gift card, catholic gift, religious gift card, religious gift" />id="ctl00_metaDescription" name="description" content="Award winning Charity Gift Card, for over 250 premier charities. A customized donation gift that makes the world better. TisBest is BBB Accredited." />name="google-site-verification" content="EfJIhN3h2SVSXdSpUbfceBVw2q6zrGX8rRQhdNZ1xY8" /><title></span><span> </span></p> <p>Can anyone help me/us identify the issue that obliterated our rankings? I am happy to give an information needed. Thank you! Chad Edwards</p> <a download="Bqcu1.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/Bqcu1.png" target="_blank">Bqcu1.png</a> <a download="ZXQ8d.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/ZXQ8d.png" target="_blank">ZXQ8d.png</a></title>
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Hi Chad,
Sorry to see you haven't gotten any responses in the past week.
In the GWT screenshot, there's a note in red, where you show your link structure (for provided links) as www.tisbest.org/default/?pc={charitycode} Is that correct or is it possible there was a typo in that URL?
In the list of URLs that GWT returned as errors, one example shows the following /default.aspx?pc=youthcare, which would be the appropriate way to append the URL... the "/" at the end of a dynamically appended tag ("?") would present URL errors.
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