Severe rank drop due to overwritten robots.txt
-
Hi,
Last week we made a change to drupal core for an update to our website. We accidentally overwrote our good robots.txt that blocked hundreds of pages with the default drupal robots.txt. Several hours after that happened (and we didn't catch the mistake) our rankings dropped from mostly first, second place in Google organic to bottom and mid first page.
Basically I believe we flooded the index with very low quality pages at once and threw a red flag and we got de-ranked.
We have since fixed the robots.txt and have been re-crawled but have not seen a return in rank.
Would this be a safe assumption of what happened? I haven't seen any other sites getting hit in the retail vertical yet in regards to any Panda 2.3 type of update.
Will we see a return in our results anytime soon?
Thanks,
Justin
-
Your present approach is correct. Ensure all these pages are tagged as noindex for now. Remove the block from robots.txt and let Google and Bing crawl these pages.
I would suggest waiting until you are confident all the pages were removed from Google's index, then check Yahoo and Bing. If you decide that robots.txt is the best decision for your company, then you can replace the disallows after confirming your site is no longer affected by these pages.
I would also suggest that, going forward, you ensure any new pages on your site that you do not wish to index always include the appropriate meta tag. If this issue happens again then you will have a layer of protection in place.
-
We're pretty confident thus far that we have flooded the index with about 15,000 low rank URLs all at once. This has happened once in the past a few years back but we didn't flood their index, they were newer pages at the time in which were low quality and could have been seen as spam since there was no real content but adsense so we removed them with a disallow in robots.
We are adding the meta no-index to all of these pages. You're saying we should remove the disallow in robots.txt so googlebot can crawl these pages and see the meta-noindex?
We are a very large site and we're crawled often. We're a PR7 site and MOZrank DA is 79/100. We have dropped from 82.
We're hoping these URLs will be removed quickly, I don't think there is a way of removing 15k links in GWMT without setting off flags also.
-
There is no easy answer for how long it will take.
If your theory about the ranking drop being caused by these pages being added is correct, then as these pages are removed from Google's index, your site should improve. The timeline depends on the size of your site, your site's DA, the PA and links for these particular pages, etc.
If it was my site I would mark the calendar for August 1st to review the issue. I would check all the pages which were mistakenly indexed to be certain they were removed. After, I would check the rankings.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your response. Actually you are correct. We have found some of the pages that should be no follows still indexed. We are now going to use the noindex, follow meta tags on these pages because we can't afford to have theses pages indexed as they are particularly for clients/users only and are very low quality and have been flagged before.
Now, how long until we see our rank move back? Thats the real big question.
Thanks so much for your help.
Justin
-
That's a great answer Ryan... I wonder, just out of curiosity, if it wouldn't hurt to look at the cached version of the pages if they're indexed? I'd be curious to know if the date they were cached is right near when the robots.txt was changed? I know it wouldn't alter his course of action, but might add further confirmation that this caused the problem?
-
Justin,
Based on the information you provided it's not possible to determine if the robots.txt file was part of the issue. You need to investigate the matter further. Using Google enter a query in an attempt to find some of the previously blocked content. For example, let's assume your site is about SEO but you shared a blog article about your movie review of the latest Harry Potter movie. You may have used robots.txt to block that article because it is unrelated to your site's focus. Perform a search for "Harry Potter insite:mysite.com" replacing mysite.com with your main web address. If the search returns your article, then you know the content was indexed. Try this approach for several of your previously blocked areas of the website.
If you find this content in SERPs, then you need to have it removed. The best thing to do is add the "noindex, follow" tags to all these pages, then remove the block from your robots.txt file.
The problem is that with the block in place on your robots.txt file, Google cannot see the new meta tag and does not know to remove the content from it's index.
One last item to mention. Google does have a URL removal tool but that would not be appropriate in this instance. That tool is designed to remove a page which causes direct damage by being in the index. Trade secrets or other confidential information can be removed with this tool.
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 and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
How can I make it so that robots.txt is not ignored due to a URL re-direct?
Recently a site moved from blog.site.com to site.com/blog with an instruction like this one: /etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:94: ProxyPass /blog http://blog.site.com
Technical SEO | | rodelmo4
/etc/httpd/conf.d/site_com.conf:95: ProxyPassReverse /blog http://blog.site.com It's a Wordpress.org blog that was set as a subdomain, and now is being redirected to look like a directory. That said, the robots.txt file seems to be ignored by Google bot. There is a Disallow: /tag/ on that file to avoid "duplicate content" on the site. I have tried this before with other Wordpress subdomains and works like a charm, except for this time, in which the blog is rendered as a subdirectory. Any ideas why? Thanks!0 -
Crawl rate dropped to zero
Hello, I recently moved my site in godaddy from cpanel to managed wordpress. I bought this transfer directly from GoDaddy customer service. in this process they accidentally changed my domain from www to non www. I changed it back after the migration, but as a result of this sites craw rate from search console fell to zero and has not risen at all since then. In addition to this website does not display any other errors, i can ask google manually fetch my pages and it works as before, only the crawl rates seems to be dropped permanently. GoDaddy customer service also claims that do not see any errors but I think, however, that in some way they caused this during the migration when the url changed since the timing match perfectly. also when they accidentally removed the www, crawl rate of my sites non www version got up but fell back to zero when I changed it back to www version. Now the crawl rate of both www and non www version is zero. How do I get it to rise again? Customer service also said that the problem may be related to ftp-data of search console? But they were not able to help any more than .Would someone from here be able to help me with this in anyway please?
Technical SEO | | pok3rplay3r0 -
Keywords Ranking Dropped
Hi All, One of my website http://www.greenhomepest.com/ were ranking on Google first page for the keywords as mentioned below: pest control in Scottsdale
Technical SEO | | RuchiPardal
pest control in Mesa
pest control in Gilbert
pest control in Tempe
pest control in Peoria
pest control in Queen Creek
pest control in Glendale
pest control phoenix
pest control arizona
pest control az
pest control phoenix az
Pest Control in Chandler But some days before all keywords are disappeared from top 100.I tried to find out the reason but not succeed. Can you please help me to find out the exact reason behind this??0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Robots.txt question
I want to block spiders from specific specific part of website (say abc folder). In robots.txt, i have to write - User-agent: * Disallow: /abc/ Shall i have to insert the last slash. or will this do User-agent: * Disallow: /abc
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Is blocking RSS Feeds with robots.txt necessary?
Is it necessary to block an rss feed with robots.txt? It seems they are automatically not indexed (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/taking-feeds-out-of-our-web-search.html) And, google says here that it's important not to block RSS feeds (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/using-rssatom-feeds-to-discover-new.html) I'm just checking!
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Keywords Ranking Dropped from 1st Page to Above 5th Page
Hello, My site URL is http://bit.ly/161NeE and our site was ranked first page for over hundred keywords before March, 30. But all of a sudden, all the keywords on first page dropped to 5th or 6th page. When we search for our site name without ".com", the results appeared on first page are all from other sites. And our page can only be seen on 6th page. We think we have been penalized by Google. But we don't know the exact reason. Can anyone please help? Some extra info on our site: 1. We have been building links by posting blog, articles and PR. All the articles are unique, written by the writers we hire. It has been working fine all the time. We also varied the anchor text a lot. 2. We didn't make any change to the website. But one real problem with our site is that the server is very slow recently and when google crawl our website, many errors were found, mostly 503, 404 errors. And the total number of errors have reach to over 50,000. Do you think this might be a problem for Google not displaying us on first page? Our technicals are working hard to solve server problem. And if it is solved, shall our rankings be back? Please advise. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Milanoocom0