Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Everett

First of all I am sorry for the late reply, I was vacationing the last 7 days.

Thank you for your reply. I think you might be right about the "sandbox" thing. The page had a good position in the google search results, but then we made a mistake and canonicalized it to a non-existent page for 4 months. It could be that google considers it a "new page", even though they had it indexed for a year.

I appreciate your efforts, and I will wait some time, to see if it improves by itself, otherwise I will have to work some more on improving the contents of the site.

Hi Ross

Thank you a lot for all the recommendations, I will get those things done and get back on here with the result.

Though currently I have the Yoast SEO plugin, and have generated a sitemap with only the pages we want ranking, which I did already upload to GSC, but I will make sure there is a link in the footer as well.

And also I did a 301 redirect on all these "attachment" pages, but I will change that to a 410.

Hello experts

I have a problem. The main page of my homepage got deranked severely and now I am not sure how to get the rank back.

It started when I accidentally canonicalized the main page "https://kv16.dk" to a page that did not exist.

4 months later the page got deranked, and you were not able to see the "main page" in the search results at all, not even when searching for "kv16.dk".

Then we discovered the canonicalization mistake and fixed it, and were able to get the main page back in the search results when searching for "kv16.dk".

At first after we made the correction, some weeks passed by, and the ranking didn't get better.  Google search console recommended uploading a sitemap, do we did that. However in this sitemap there was a lot of "thin content sites", for all the wordpress attachments. E.g. for every image in an article. more exactly there were 91 of these attachment sites, and the rest of the page consists of only two pages "main page" and an extra landing page.

After that google begun recommending the attachment urls in some searches. We tried fixing it by redirecting all the attachments to their simple form. E.g. if it was an attachment page for an image we redirected strait to the image.

Google has not yet removed these attachment pages, so the question is if you think it will help to remove the attachments via google search console, or will that not help at all?

For example when we search "kv16" an attachment URL named "birksø" is one of the first results

Hi Robin

We canonicalised the homepage to "https://kv16.dk" instead and that corrected the issue with the page not showing up in google. I don't think the page ever worked in noscript mode, but I will look into potentially optimizing it if that helps the google rankings. However our page does not initially rank as high as it used to, but I hope time will fix this issue.

Thank you so much for your analysis, it helped us find and correct the cause of the issue and I appreciate that a lot!

Cheers, Christian

Dear experts,

We have suddenly lost all our positions on our keywords, I’m talking for example from position 2 to 35 in one huge drop .

Even when you search for our name and domain name namely “KV16”, the main page does NOT come up. (We do however still get the local business / map result on the right side!)

I have looked in google search console, but nothing to see here – no penalty. However, I need to mention, that we just now, after the issue, setup the google search console – so maybe that is why there is no information about a penalty!? (If the problem is a penalty, btw we have not been doing any link building!)

One year ago, we made a permanent redirect from our old site, www.kontoret-gammeltorv.dk, because we moved our coworking office, to a new location, and needed a new name – (because the old name is referring to a location, hence no longer made sense.) This worked flawlessly, and we got all the link juice, and the new site ranked just as good as the old one.

Aprox four months ago, we made some changes to the site, where we amongst other things, changed the title description on the frontpage, focusing more on another keyword – and doing this we unknowingly change the permalink to the frontpage (in WordPress). I have read that this can do some real damage, however its so long ago, that it seems unlikely to be the cause!?

Please help!?

Thanks a million, in advance.

Cheers, Christian

pJp4Uyx

Hi Tymen

Thanks for your response, I thought as soon as the page was cached, it would enable the rich snippet, but seems I have some waiting to do

I will wait a couple of months until I get worried then

We have a website where you can book on restaurants, and afterwards you can review the restaurant you visited.

So we have this page: https://www.r2n.dk/restauranter/restaurant-bonjour-vietnam (We have one for each restaurant). English version https://www.r2n.dk/en/restauranter/restaurant-bonjour-vietnam

The page is marked up in microData, and when I test the site in google structured data it shows no errors https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.r2n.dk%2Frestauranter%2Frestaurant-bonjour-vietnam .

But the page does not show up on google with a rich snippet (The review stars). I am thinking it might be one of the following things. Either it is because there is multiple "Restaurants" on the page, where the others appear in recommended restaurants, where we also marked them up as much as possible. Or else it could be because the reviews are hidden behind the "Anmeldelser"(Reviews) button, where they are retrieved via a ajax request, but if this was the case I don't get why this other site where the reviews does not appear is working fine: https://www.just-eat.dk/restaurants-bonjourvietnam

Also it is a week since we finaly correctly implemented the structured data on the page, so I don't know if I should wait a longer time(Though the page has been cached by google multiple times since we updated the code)

Hi Everett,

Thanks for the reply, and choices.

We just implemented choice #2, so Im pleased that you think it's a good solution.

Thanks a bunch and have a great weekend .

Cheers, Christian

Hi Guys,

I would still love an answer to this!?

Have a great day.

Cheers, Christian

Hi Federico, thanks for the reply.

I will defiantly look into this schema.org that you mention.

Regarding the "Changing URL". The URL stays the same, but the content (reviews) keeps changing URL, as more reviews comes in.

Example:

A new review comes in, let's call it “MOZ”. This gets automatically published as newest review, on the first review page:
http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser

As more new reviews come in, "MOZ" will automatically be "pushed down" to page 2. 
http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser?restaurant=-1&sort=0&page=2

As more come in “MOZ” will be pushed to page 3, and so on, and so on.

So the URL for the “MOZ” review will keep changing, and I’m worried that this solution causes indexing problems!?

Regards, Christian

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time.

We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”.

My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in.

http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser

I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all.

We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content?

Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile.

Or maybe the canonical tag can be used?

I look forward to your input.

Cheers, Christian