Redesign Troubleshooting Help

[rexjoec]

We launched a redesign at the end of May and soon after, our website was de-indexed from Google. Here are the changes that I implemented so far to try to fix this issue:

1. 301 redirect chain - We changed all our URLs and implemented 301 redirects. However, these are multiple redirects meaning 1 URL redirects to a second and then a 3rd. I was told that this could confuse Google.

For example: http://cncahealth.com 301s to http://www.cncahealth.com 301s to https://www.cncahealth.com

We wrote a rule for each variation of the URL and not there is only a one to one 301 redirect and this was validated with urivalet.com.

2. Canonical tags did not match URL - We created the new website in a CMS where the CMS generated non-SEO friendly URLs. We applied 301 redirects to those CMS URLs, but when we enable canonical tags within the CMS, it uses the original CMS URL and not the URL of the page, so the canonical URL doesn't match the page. For now, I disabled canonical tags until I can figure out a way to manually insert canonical tag code in the pages without using the CMS canonical tag feature.

After doing these two fixes our website still doesn't seem like it is able to get re-indexed by Google even when I submit the sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools...the sitemap doesn't get indexed?

Questions...there are two more concerns that I am hoping can be answered in this community:

3. Cache-Control = private : I saw from URIvalet.com that our cache-control is set to private. Is this affecting us being indexed and should this be set to public?

4. Load Balancer - Our old website was not on a load balancer, but our new website is. When I look in our analytics at servers, I notice that the site is being picked up on one server and then another server at different times. Is Google seeing the same thing and is the load balancer confusing Google?

I'm not sure what else could be an issue with us not being indexed. Maybe its just a waiting game where after I implemented the 1 & 2 change I just have to wait or does 3 & 4 or other issues also need to be addressed in order to get re-indexed?

I hope someone can help me.

Thanks!

[Chris.Menke]

If you're pages are actually out of the index (homepage too?), have you looked at your robots.txt file to be sure that's not the cause of the problem?  The multiple 301s won't harm you.   Of the items you mentioned, your 2nd point could really gum up the works as far as indexing and I'd say you're better off having removed the rel=canonicals until you figure that issue out.  If that was your issue, I could certainly take a few months for google to get you back in the index. Some solid authority building  should be among your priorities at this time.

[CleverPhD]

Sounds like you canonicaled yourself out of the index in addition to confusing signals with the 301s.  You need to hire a firm with strong technical SEO to do an audit and help you work everything out.