Redirect and ranking issue

[rwat]

Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!

[Eric.W.Caudle]

I see this as good news. Sites break and pages go missing (according to Google's crawl) from time to time. I was concerned at first that permanent redirects were added by mistake. I would give it some time and default to Google's usual advice for fixing 404s - which is to just fix the error and monitor in search console.

[rwat]

Hi ILNA,

Thanks so much for your helpful reply. It's understandable that they've disappeared from the rankings - as I understand, this redirecting to a non-relevant page would be classed as a soft 404 error and as there was such a large volume of traffic, and thus prompts to Google, it's no wonder it's affected rankings.

These redirects were not deliberately set up for these pages, as we had no need or want to redirect blog traffic to the homepage. It appears to have been something strange that has happened with our website, and we're still looking into that. What's also odd is that I've since spotted a link to our homepage in Google search results for one of the keywords a blog article  - which was ranking in the same position as this new link - was targeted towards.

Anyway, I will take into account all your suggestions - we'll just need to look and see whether these articles start to rank again or some permanent damage has been done. Thanks again for your time!

[Eric.W.Caudle]

You can stop guessing, the redirects are likely the reason why your pages dropped from search results. How were the redirects set up. Were 301 redirects used? 302 redirects? This could make a difference in the outcome.

I know from experience that trying to fix the problem before you know the extent of the damage can be a bad idea. I know how difficult it is to wait, but that's what I would do for now.

Here are some non-evasive things you can do that could help.

• Make certain these corrections are present in your sitemap, .htaccess, etc.
• Clear your site cache
• You say you have "re-indexed" the pages you are concerned about. I would request a complete site crawl from all major search engines.