Page Indexing increase when I request Google Site Link demote

[David-E-Carey]

Hi there,

Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion?

I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high.

From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument.

However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there.  However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved.

I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd.  However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks.

Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page.

Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before.

Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre.

Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause.

Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect.

Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool.

Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences.

One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact.

Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th.

Thanks

David

[David-E-Carey]

Hi Peter many thanks I will bear this in mind, sound advice.

David

[Dr-Pete]

These problems can be really tough to in down, but if you only blocked one site-link, I really doubt that was the culprit here. It is possible that the canonical tag got misapplied or impacted pages you didn't expect it to, but I can only speculate about that.

In my experience, try not add to add/delete (or comment out) canonicals in quick succession. It can cause problems. If you suspect a problem, phase them back in slowly - start with the home-page and problem areas, etc. Give it time, and measure. When you roll them out all at once, it's sometimes tough to diagnose what went wrong.

[David-E-Carey]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for replying.

My company had built another site and Google tied this domain as a site when. We had to change the domain entirely and therefore I needed this site link to be removed.

Only 2 activities at this were carried out on the site

1. The request to remove the site link In GWT

2. The introduction of a Canonical tag in the head tags of our home page. I did this to attain a  'A' rating in the SEOMOZ On page Optimization tool.

As mentioned the other day I commented this out the other day. As an update to this question, I have now seen a very bid drop in page crawl within GWT. At the same time ranking for this term jumped 15 places to 20th in the US.

I find this bizarre as no other countries experienced the same ranking fluctuations in such a dramatic manner.

If as you say you feel it is coincidence could I have employed the canonical tag incorrectly?I don't think I did but never employed this tag on our home page before, only on specific pages.

So overall still a little confused as to what caused it, glad that the ranks have returned but did my actions actually make this happen.

Best,

David

[Dr-Pete]

Just to clarify - you had expanded site-links and then blocked one in GWT, and suddenly saw crawl spikes and oddities? Wow, I can't say I've ever seen or heard that. To the best of my knowledge, the site-link blocking is entirely a cosmetic issue meant to help webmasters, and is not in any way a quality signal.

My gut reaction is that it's a coincidence. Did anything else happen that day? Did you make any tweaks in GWT while you were in there that seemed tiny at the time?

Did you block a lot of site-links, such that your site's appearance in search changed radically. Let's say I got a full 6-pack of site-links and then blocked them all and Google (for some reason) didn't replace them with new ones. That could cause an immediate CTR drop that might signal quality problems. It's just speculation, but I can imagine that happening.