Why are my URL's changing
-
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't.
I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing.
I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages).
This is a cached version of my site
I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache.
- Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's?
- Could this be the reason for the ranking drop?
Thanks in advance!
-
W3 Total Cache is what's adding these URL parameters, Jill. It's done so that you can expire the long-term cached version of those images quickly and automatically should the image need to be updated. (This can be controlled in W3TC's settings)
And no, in my opinion there's no way this could be the cause of a rankings drop.
There have been some major fluctuations in search rankings around 7,8,9 May. Is that about the time frame you saw the sudden drop? Many are speculating that Google applied another Panda algorithm update very recently.
Paul
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
-
Redirect 'keyword-url' to improve ranking?
I was wondering if a good url, with a keyword in it, can help you improve the position of that certain keyword by redirecting that url to your website. To make it clear: We run the website www.terello.nl, and have the possibility to let the url www.iphonereparatie.nl (translation: iphonerepair) redirect to our website. Would this help us to rank for the keyword 'iPhone reparatie'? I hope that I made myself clear this way:) Otherwise i'm more than happy to clearify myself!
Technical SEO | | Jan-Peter0 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
Duplicate title tags being caused by upper case and lower case version of urls'
Hi GWT is reporting lots of duplicate titles for a clients new site. Mainly these are due to 2x different versions of the url, one with words starting with an upper case character and the other all lower case. Clients dev saying this has something to do with windows server and is ok! Is this correct or should i be telling them to delete and then 301 redirect all upper case versions to the lower case (since lower case better practice) and that will deal with the reported dupe titles ? All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
"Standout" tag and "Original content" tags - what's the latest?
In November 2010 Google introduced the "standout tag" http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191283 I can't find any articles/blog posts/etc in google after that date, but its use was suggested in a google forum today to help with original content issues. Has anyone used them? Does anyone know what's the latest with them? Are they worth trying for SEO? Is there a possible SEO penalty for using them? Thanks, Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
What does it mean by 'blocked by Meta Robot'? How do I fix this?
When i get my crawl diagnostics, I am getting a blocked by Meta Robot, which means that my page is not being indexed in the search engines... obviously this is a major issue for organic traffic!!! What does it actually mean, and how can i fix it?
Technical SEO | | rolls1230 -
We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
Technical SEO | | jack860