Ranking drop from 6 op 23 in one day - freaking out

[advertisingcloud]

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

[GPainter]

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!

[advertisingcloud]

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?

[GPainter]

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.