Ranking drop from 6 op 23 in one day - freaking out
-
Dear, Moz
We have been hard at work going some off site and on site SEO. However yesterday we got around 1600 404 errors from google, and ranking dropped from 7 in front page to 25.
What we did: I found an error in Htacces, where my partner had this (rewritebase with double // and rule with // - I quess this started creating urls for google, because twww.website.com//category-category-cateory
OK. But google says that they will not effect your rankings because 404s?
Second think i found was that we had some urls, which had canonical tag to a page called search. Now that search (duplicate of homepage) we 301 to our main homepage. Can that effect ranking? You have 404s that have canonical to a page that itselft redirects (301) to homepage.
We also removed the / splash. Nothing more.. Below is the htaccess, that had the double // error. Please comment.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase //
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.+)/$
RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.website.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://website.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond $1 ^(index.php)?$ [OR]
RewriteCond $1 .(gif|jpg|css|js|png|ico)$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.)$ - [S=1]
RewriteRule .//index.php [L]
DirectoryIndex index.php -
Hi,
im a little lost on what you mean but a 404 is essentially a none page it doesn't exists so it would need nor have a canonical unless perhaps to its self if you have a fixed 404 page. you may 301 a url that was a 404 page to a 200 page but then it wouldnt be a 404 so its a bit of a paradox!
-
Thanks Greg. I think it was. Now we back at 10th and 12th but still some way to go.
But is it then true, that if i have some page(that now is 404) which had a canonical to another one which then was 301d, this is bad and mixed signals? There should be never any 404 that have canonical to your page which is 301d to main website. Correct?
-
And to top all of that off it seems like there was an update on the 8th! it was just a regular one but i can imagine combined with all the issue you've had it was a bit of a perfect storm. Give it a few days to be re crawled and it should adjust. Hopefully this is a very good lesson on why to be very careful with Htaccess.
good luck.
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 specific do I have to be when adding keyword to the meta title which I am trying to rank for?
I am looking for some clarity on what exactly you need to spell out for google in the exact match and what google understands in terms of using keywords in your meta title which I am trying to rank for. For example if my category page is for women's top, with both printed and solid color options, would it be ok to write- "Women's Tops: Printed & Solid Shirts & Tunics" and be able to rank for women's tops, women's printed tops, women's solid shirts etc. or would I have to be more specific and use women's as the keyword modifier before each term and write- "Women's Tops, Women's Printed & Solid Shirts, Women's Tunics"?
On-Page Optimization | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Are three Adsense ads on a long page a negative for search ranking?
I've not a site whose home page that is #1 for a popular keyword. The page is 1200 words, plus comments following. It's a clean page with no popups, and has one large rectangle Adsense ad above the fold (lots of text around this ad, and a very high percentage of page ATF is text), and another large rectangle Adsense ad that is midway down the article (after you have to page twice to get there). So, it's a very low ad to text ratio and ATF looks very clean. I have room for one more Adsense ad closer to the bottom of the article, which would be about five page downs through the page. My question is, will placing another ad way down the page affect my ranking in any negative way? I'm so pleased with my #1 ranking I hesitate to add it. But the page converts in Adsense so well, and heat maps show a large number readers do read all the way down the page, so I'd like to pick up some more ad revenue.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
Sudden Drop in Rankings/Traffic/Organic Impressions Without a Penalty
Hi Moz community! I have a question about a local client in Raleigh, NC - http://paragonbuildinggroup.com This client came to us from another agency who had previously not done such a great job with the design/development of the site, or with the marketing of it, so we are somewhat limited in terms of what we can do on design, user experience, etc. But, the SEO is all still easy to tweak and we've been working on it for some time now. As of July 5th, their keyword rankings have dropped dramatically (we're talking from first page rankings to nothing, according to Authority Labs), and they've fallen completely off the map in the SERPs. Their local listing doesn't appear in search results anymore, and WMT is showing a drastic drop in impressions (from 457 on July 3rd to 92 on July 5th). There have been no manual penalties on the site, no recent major development work done, and from what I can see, no signs of hacking and no bad backlinks. The only thing I can see is that Mozcast showed an 83 degree day with some clouds and rain on July 5th, the day that our rankings dropped off, but I can't find any documentation showing what might have changed. Any insight as to what might be going on? I'm completely stumped!
On-Page Optimization | | TriMarkDigital0 -
Can we rank website without main keywords on its homepage?
For example my company website on Google Search Engine... Web Design Company & Digital Agency in Jakarta
On-Page Optimization | | Japracool
coriate.com/
Coriate is a website design & Internet marketing firm in Indonesia. We offer the best web solutions, digital advertising, and SEO Services in the industry. Can I do backlink to it, but different keywords? Like Social Media Management or Facebook Like?0 -
Two sites, one with a ccTLD domain, the other with TLD domain, same content
Hi there! I have a site which can be accessed with two different domains: one ccTLD for Spain: www.piensapiensa.es one TLD www.piensapiensa.com Should I take care of something regarding SEO? I have also a redirection from www.piensapiensa.com to piensapiensa.com. I have set up them in webmasters tools individually, with the same sitemap obviously. Thanks in advanced.
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
301 redirects from several sub-pages to one sub-page
Hi! I have 14 sub-pages i deleted earlier today. But ofcourse Google can still find them, and gives everyone that gives them a go a 404 error. I have come to the understading that this wil hurt the rest of my site, at least as long as Google have them indexed. These sub-pages lies in 3 different folders, and i want to redirect them to a sub-page in a folder number 4. I have already an htaccess file, but i just simply cant get it to work! It is the same file as i use for redirecting trafic from mydomain.no to www.mydomain.no, and i have tried every kind of variation i can think of with the sub-pages. Has anyone perhaps had the same problem before, or for any other reason has the solution, and can help me with how to compose the htaccess file? 🙂 You have to excuse me if i'm using the wrong terms, missing something i should have seen under water while wearing a blindfold, or i am misspelling anything. I am neither very experienced with anything surrounding seo or anything else that has with internet to do, nor am i from an englishspeaking country. Hope someone here can light up my path 🙂 Thats at least something you can say in norwegian...
On-Page Optimization | | MarieA1 -
Page Rank
I had just made a 301 re-direct on one of our product pages which had a PR of 4, now that Google has indexed the new page, it's now got a PR of 0, i'm struggling to understand why this could be, i know that you may see a drop of 1, which has happened in the past, but this drop just does not make sense. Any ideas of why this could be? Kind Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780 -
Home Page is Not Ranking Anymore on this ecommerce site
Hi Everyone, I work regularly on this site www.cheapsnapframes.co.uk which is a cubecart based site and upto a few months ago the home page used to rank on poster frames we were on page 1 of google now we are on page 2 but it has dropped the home page and favours a category page. I have been looking at this to try and figure out why and I have today realised I had some external links on the home page pointing to the .com which the site used to run from but has been setup as a 301 redirect so I have changed these to internal links. I have used the on page tool and get an A but its been showing an A for a long time. Is there any other reason why we have lost out on this keyword term? Thank you in advance Tracy
On-Page Optimization | | dashesndots0