Recovering from disaster
-
Short Question: What's the best way to get Google to re-index duplicate URLs?
Long Story:
We have a long ago (1997) established website with a proprietary CMS. Never paid much attention to SEO (other than creating a sitemap) until four months ago. After learning some we started modifying the engine to provide better site to google (proper HTTP codes, consistent URLs to eliminate duplicates - we had something like 15,000 duplicates - etc...)
Things went great for three and half months and we reached the first page on google for our main keyword (very, very competitive keyword). Before the SEO we were getting around 25,000 impressions and 3000 clicks on google. After our SEO efforts, we reached 70,000 daily impressions and more than 7000 daily clicks.
On Aug 30th, 2014, one of our programmers committed a change to the live server by mistake. This small change effectively changed every article's URL by adding either a dash at its end or a dash and a keyword '-test-keyword' (literally).
Nobody noticed anything until two days later as the site worked perfectly for humans. The result of this small code change is that within five days our site practically disappeared from Google's results pages except when one searched for our site's name. Our rank dropped from 8 and 10 to 80 and 100 for our main keywords.
We reverted the change as soon as we noticed the problem, but during those two days, Google's bots went on a binge crawling five times the usual number of page crawled per day.
We've been trying to recover and nothing seems to be working so far. Google's bots aren't crawling the repaired URLs to get the 301 headers back to the original URL and now we still have over 2300 duplicates as reported by the webmaster tools.
Our Google impressions and clicks dropped to way below what we had before we did any SEO, down to 5000 impressions and 1200 clicks (inclusive of our direct domain name search).
During the last 15 days (after we fixed the problem), our duplicate count went from a maximum of 3200, down to 1200, then back up to 2300 without any changes on our end.
we've redone our sitemap and resubmitted it on day 3.
So, what do we do? Do we go through the URLs with 'fetch as Google' function? (that's a bit tedious for 2300 URLs) or we wait for the bots to come around whenever they feel like it? if we do this, should we submit the bad URL, have google fetch it, get the redirect, follow it and then submit the followed URL to the index?
Or is there a better solution that I'm unaware of?
Second question: Is this something to be expected when something like this happens knowing that our inbound link rarely link to the actual articles?
-
Well, after submitting multiple temporary sitemaps and having Google index them, our duplicate counts dropped back to pre-event levels.
However, our rankings haven't improved at all. Actually, if anything, they dropped even further.
At this point it's really starting to look like this is a hit from Panda 4.1 and that we had our URLs change was merely a coincidence. From the looks of it, Google is now marking our site as a low quality site. Now that we know about such a thing, we definitely experienced a 'sinister surge' prior to disaster striking.
Since we've never engaged in any bad behavior on the site and we've always followed google's best practice advice, we're currently at a loss of what could be the reason that we're hit that way. Our content is fresh and high quality (arguably the highest quality in our domain), we have a very decent link profile according to MajesticSEO, so for now, no clue about what's going on really.
Attached is the site's impressions and clicks graph from Webmaster Tools.
-
["knowing that our inbound link rarely link to the actual articles" --> not sure I follow.]
I asked whether it's normal for all ranking to drop even for unaffected pages when pages with no inbound link have issues. For example, our top ranked page for our main keyword didn't change in anyway, not its URL, its description nor its title, yet it's rank tanked after this event.
I like the temporary sitemap idea. Thanks.
-
Once you have all the 301 redirects set up, create a sitemap with all of the old urls and submit that. Google will crawl them and see that they are now 301 redirects and process the data faster. then delete the sitemap.
You should also have a canonical tag on the article pages with the new/current link that should be indexed.
"knowing that our inbound link rarely link to the actual articles" --> not sure I follow.
In general, your rankings should bounce back once google picks up on all of the fixes.
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
-
Recover google INdexing issue after fixing malware attack.
Dear My Niche site attacked by malware on 1 st march 2018. Hacker inject a php file on my blogpage. Injected link like: mydomain.com/blog/dmy4xa.php? Then I scan My site by wordfence. Identifying all malware code.Then manually clean whole site with database. My site is completely free from malware. and remove all malware link from webmaster tools. Even Block my blog page by robots.txt . But new malware link index every week. So i need to remove those link every week. So this issue I decided to rebuild my site. Finally I rebuild my site another server. Then I flash my current server and migrate my site from those server on 10th january 2019 . I wait 1 month to deindex malware link. But new link are indexing every week. I discourage site for over 1 week and even delete site from google webmaster tools with all properties as well as verification file from server. Over 1 week , Link are showing. I feel boar to delete malware link every week. I need permanent solution. Please give me a perfect solution for this malware link index. Google index about 100 url .After that I clean my site with some tools. My site was free from malware. But Ne
Technical SEO | | Gfound1230 -
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
Recovering from Sitemap Issues with Bing
Hi all, I recently took over SEO efforts for a large e-commerce site (I would prefer not to disclose). About a month ago, I began to notice a significant drop in traffic from Bing and uncovered in Bing Webmaster Tools that three different versions of the sitemap were submitted and Bing was crawling all three. I removed the two out of date sitemaps and re-submitted the up to date version. Since then, I have yet to see Bing traffic rebound and the amount of pages indexed by Bing is still dropping daily. During this time there has been no issue with traffic from Google. Currently I have 1.3 million pages indexed by Google while Bing has dropped to 715K (it was at 755K last week and was on par with Google several months ago). I know that no major changes have been made to the site in the past year so I can't point to anything other than the sitemap issue to explain this. If this is indeed the only issue, how long should I expect to wait for Bing to re-index the pages? In the interim I have been manually submitting important pages that aren't currently in the index. Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Do people recover from an unnatural outbound links penalty?
Dear Friends I received an unnatural outbound links penalty on 4th of June 2016. I immediately acted on it, and analysed a lot of outbound links and removed most of them. I had to file reconsideration 2 times, but on 26th of June my penalty was revoked.However, traffic drop was even worse 27th June onwards and it is still dropping. Now, i dont know why the traffic is dropping. Any idea how much time it takes to come back from an unnatural outbound link penalty? PHd8BzX.png
Technical SEO | | marketing910 -
Is this a Penguin hit; how to recover?
Our site is: www.kibin.com Our organic search traffic has dropped significantly in the last few days (about 50%). Although we don't have a ton of traffic coming in via organic search, this is a huge blow. We we previously the top spot for keywords like 'edit my essay', 'fix my paper', and 'paper revision'. These kw phrases linked to smaller services pages on our site such as: kibin.com/s/edit-my-essay kibin.com/s/fix-my-paper kibin.com/s/paper-revision We no longer rank for these keywords... at all. My first question/concern is... is this a Penguin penalty? I'm not sure. Honestly, I know we have some directory links, but we've never been aggressive on the backlink front. In fact, in the last few months we've been investing quite a bit into content: kibin.com/blog If this is a Penguin penalty, how should I best go about cleaning this up? I'm not even sure what links Google would be considering spammy, and again... we really don't have that extensive of a backlink profile. Please help, this is a real blow to our business and it's got me a big freaked out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
Traffic stats disaster
Hi, We have recently moved a few old websites to an existing one and redesigned the existing website too. The visits in Analytics have fallen though the roof in the last few days. I would expect the traffic to have gone up because visitors from the old websites should now be on the redesigned one. Not sure what the problem is entirely. GA code is on the site but not before the closing head where I asked for it to be put. It's just before closing body tag. Does it make a difference? (It's a CMS site). GA code must be working because visits are being recorded (tens rather than the expected hundreds). Redirects have not been done properly - not sure what IT have done there. Would the lack of proper redirects be the sole reason for the drop? I am still hassling for 301's to be sorted. Thanks all
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
How to Recover from the Exact Match Domain Update last weekend?
Hi, Our main website a geo exact match city dot com domain which is 18 years old got all its rankings washed away from top ten to 300th to 400th position plus on Google. We are still top 10 on Yahoo and Bing for the City term. The site is Dmoz listed , has quality updated daily content and no paid advertising or links of any kind. I joined seomoz today and noticed I via the page optimiser that the main keyword for the city which is the exact match domain was over optimised but its hard to talk about events and news in a city without mentioning the citys name lol Looking at the backlinks in the open site explorer tool I noticed alot of spammy links from chinese website and weird domains that were not related and am beginning to think I was the victim of a negative seo campaign. I submitted a re-consideration request with Google and they replied in the space of a few days saying that it was not a manual penalty and that it was down to there algorithm changing or perhaps I changed cms or made changes. There was no unatural links warning either. Funny thing is the website is wordpress based and we changed to a new theme 2 weeks ago and also moved to a new server. Just wondering people views on what my next move shoud be to try and regain our rankings on Google I already toned down the use of the city keyword on the homepage. Regards Tom
Technical SEO | | glenanail0 -
Redesign an SEO-Disaster | Help with Redirects of Gray Hat Pages
Hi gang. I'm a new SEO and I'm currently working on the redesign of a website. I have just discovered a ton of hidden pages that are filled with duplicate content, basically reiterating the main keyword in a variety of different variations. Each page is titled with the variation on the keyword phrase and then has one paragraph of text very similar to the previous page, etc. Here is an example of one of the offensive pages (nice lookin' site, eh?): http://www.vasectomy-reversals.com/vasectomy_reversal_surgery.html The new site will not have any of these pages. I'm writing the 301 redirects now and want to redirect these offensive pages to the most relevant page on the new site. But, I'm afraid to redirect the offensive pages. Should I leave them alone, or can I have the former developer remove them? Help. Don't know how to handle these pages and their redirects. Thanks for your help! ~ Mills
Technical SEO | | Mills0