Accidentally blocked Googlebot for 14 days
-
Today after I noticed a huge drop in organic traffic to inner pages of my sites, I looked into the code and realized a bug in last commit cause the server to showing captcha pages to all Googlebot requests from Apr 24.
My site has more than 4,000,000 in the index. Before last code change, Googlebot are exempt from being shown the captcha requests so each inner pages are crawled and indexed perfectly with no problem.
The bug broke the whitelisting mechanism and treat requests from Google's ip addresses the same as regular users. It leads to the captcha page being crawled when Googlebot visits thousands of my site's inner pages. This makes Google thinks all my inner pages are identical to each other. Google remove all the inner pages from SERP starting from May 5th before when many of those inner pages have good rankings.
I formerly thought this was a manual or algorithm penalty but
1. I did not receive a warning message in GWT
2. The ranking for main url is good.I tried with "Fetch as Google" in GWT and realize all Googlebot saw in the past 14 days are the same captcha page for all my inner pages.
Now, I have fixed the bug and updated the production site. I just wanted to ask:
1. How long will it take for Google to remove the "duplicated content" flag on my inner pages and show them in SERP again? From my experience, Googlebot revisits urls quite often. But once a url is flagged as "contains similar content", it could be difficult to recover, is it correct?
2. Besides waiting for Google to update its index, what else can I do right now?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
-
Thanks for the info. My site has current crawl rate at 350,00 pages per day so will take 10-20 days to crawl the entire sites.
Most of organic traffic comes to 10,000 urls while others are pagination urls etc. Now all the traffic 1st inner page of each term disappeared in the results of inurl: command.
-
One of my competitors made this type of error and we figured it out right away when their site dropped from the SERPs. It took them a couple weeks to figure it out and make the change. We were hoping that they never figured it out so we could rake in lots of dough. When they fixed it they were back in the SERPs at full strength within a couple of days.... . but they had 40 indexed pages instead of 4,000,000.
I think you will recover well, but might take a while if you don't have a lot of deep links.
Good luck.
-
Pretty much all you can do is wait for Google to recrawl your entire site. You can try re-submitting your site in Webmaster Tools (Health -> Fetch As Google). Getting links from other sites will help speed up the crawling as well. Links from social sites like Twitter/Google+ can help with crawling also.
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
-
Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization?
Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization? Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization?
Technical SEO | | SalSantaCruz0 -
Some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error.
Hello I'm a seo newbie and some help from the community here would be greatly appreciated. I have submitted the sitemap of my website in google webmasters tools and now I got this warning: "When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted." How do I fix this? What should I do? Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | GoldenRanking140 -
I have a client whose shop will be down a few days. What would provide less impact to organic search program?
I have a client who is moving their warehouse, and their shop will be down for four days. I have been doing some research on the best ways to handle this and I wanted to get the communities feedback on this. One thought is to have the pages live, but people can't place an order - but this does not provide the best customer experience. Another thought is to just do temporary redirects for the shop pages, to land on the "sorry we are moving" page for customers. Another thought was to do 503 HTTP status codes on the pages and then do a temporary redirect to the landing page. Have any of you experienced this issue? If so, what did you do to minimize the impact to the organic search programs? NOTE: All of their static content will remain in tact. Only the shop/store will be down.
Technical SEO | | smulto0 -
Pages crawled is only 23 even after 8 days??
Hello all, My site www.practo.com has at least more than 500+ pages. Still seomoz says its only 23 crawled till date even after 8 -10 days of the trial period. Now most of the pages on my site are in-site search pages. They appear when you search relevant terms with combinations etc. Is that hindering the moz crawler to look for those pages? Aditya
Technical SEO | | shanky11 -
Oh no googlebot can not access my robots.txt file
I just receive a n error message from google webmaster Wonder it was something to do with Yoast plugin. Could somebody help me with troubleshooting this? Here's original message Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 189 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%. Recommended action If the site error rate is 100%: Using a web browser, attempt to access http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt. If you are able to access it from your browser, then your site may be configured to deny access to googlebot. Check the configuration of your firewall and site to ensure that you are not denying access to googlebot. If your robots.txt is a static page, verify that your web service has proper permissions to access the file. If your robots.txt is dynamically generated, verify that the scripts that generate the robots.txt are properly configured and have permission to run. Check the logs for your website to see if your scripts are failing, and if so attempt to diagnose the cause of the failure. If the site error rate is less than 100%: Using Webmaster Tools, find a day with a high error rate and examine the logs for your web server for that day. Look for errors accessing robots.txt in the logs for that day and fix the causes of those errors. The most likely explanation is that your site is overloaded. Contact your hosting provider and discuss reconfiguring your web server or adding more resources to your website. After you think you've fixed the problem, use Fetch as Google to fetch http://www.soobumimphotography.com//robots.txt to verify that Googlebot can properly access your site.
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
Block url with dynamic text in
I've just ran a report and I have a lot of duplicate page titles, most of which seem to be the review page, I use Magento and my normal url would be something like blah-blahtext.html but the review url is something like blah-blahtext/reviews/category/categoryname So I want to block the /reviews url bit as no one ever leaves reviews and it's not something I will be using in the future. Also I have a dynamic navigation which creates urls that look like product-name.html?size=2&colour=14 these are also creating duplicate urls, anyway to fix this? While I'm asking, anyone any tips for Magento?
Technical SEO | | Beermonster0 -
Should I Block Tag, Category, Author Pages
Just finished reviewing the first crawl of my first SEOmoz campaign for a site that I am working on. The site I"m working on uses Wordpress as a CMS, and most if not all of the warnings and notices have to do with author, category, and tag pages. Should I block these from being indexed? Why or why not?
Technical SEO | | Falconberg0 -
Blocking Google from Crawling Parameters
Hi guys: What is the best way to keep Google from crawling certain urls with parameters? I used the setting in Webmaster Tools, but that doesn't seem to be helping at all. Can I use robots.txt or some other method? Thanks! Some examples are: <colgroup><col width="797"></colgroup> www.mayer-johnson.com/category/assistive-technology?manufacturer=179 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/assistive-technology?manufacturer=226 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/assistive-technology?manufacturer=227 <colgroup><col width="797"></colgroup> www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?condition=212 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?condition=213 www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?condition=214 <colgroup><col width="797"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | DanaDV
| www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?roles=164 |
| www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?roles=165 |
| www.mayer-johnson.com/category/english-language-learners?roles=197 | | |0