Re-Launched Website: Developer Fogot to Remove noindex tags.
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Our company's website has maintained decent rankings for the last 12 years we've been in business for our primary keywords. We recently had our website rebuilt from the ground up, and the developers left the noindex tags on all of our 400+ pages when we launched it. I didn't catch the error for 6 days. During which time, I used the Fetch feature in Google, submitting a site-wide fetch, as well as manual submissions for our top 100 URLs . In addition, every page that was indexed previously had a 301 set up for it, which was pointing to a destination with a noindex.
I caught the error today, and the developer removed the tags. Does anyone have any experience with a situation similar to this? In the SERPs, we are still ranking at this moment, and it's displaying our old URLs, and they are 301 redirecting just fine. But, what happens now? For 6 full days, we told Google not to index any of our pages, while also using the Fetch feature, contradicting ourselves.
Any words of wisdom or advice as to what I can do at this point to avoid potential fall out?Thanks
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I appreciate everyone's feedback. Very helpful- thank you for taking the time to respond. Heading over to upload a sitemap now!
Thanks again,
Kristin -
One of our competitors, who ranked #1 for a good money term (we were #2) had a developer redo their entire site. He had noindex on every page when the new site went up.
When we saw the new site we sniffed the code, saw the noindex in there and laughed really hard.
A couple days later they dropped completely from the SERPs and we started getting all of their sales.
It took them a couple weeks to figure out what happened. But when they fixed it they popped right back into the SERPs at old rankings a couple days later.
We talk to these guys by phone occasionally. If they would have called us we would have told them how to fix it... but since they hired an expensive developer we didn't want to stick our noses in.
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I've dealt with similar issues with robots.txt blocks of the entire site, as well as robots meta noindex tags. You should be fine now that you've taken the noindex tag off, and the old pages are redirecting. It may take longer for Google to update their index with the new URLs, but otherwise I don't think you need to worry too much. Maybe resubmit the sitemap and do another fetch on key pages.
Good luck!
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Make sure you send in a sitemap and all should be well.
I've dealt with cases where certain pages were noindex but then removed. As long as you fixed all your errors, it should be back to normal. Think of a site going down intermittently, rankings don't get affected too much (I believe Matt Cutts confirmed this in a youtube video)
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Hi Kristin
I have no experience of this happening, but I would suggest that you create a full sitemap and submit that to Google Webmaster tools asap.
Peter
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