Accidently blocked our site for an evening?
-
Yesterday at about 5pm I switched our site to a new server and accidentally blocked our site from google for the evening. our domain is posnation.com and we are ranked in the top 3 in almost all pos related keywords. When i got in this morning i realized the mistake and went to google web tools and noticed the site was blocked so i went to fetch as google bot and corrected that. Now the message says:
Check to see that your robots.txt is working as expected. (Any changes you make to the robots.txt content below will not be saved.)
robots.txt file Downloaded Status
http://www.posnation.com/robots.txt 1 hours ago 200 (Success)When you go to google and type "pos systems" we are still #2 so i assume all is still ok. My question is will this potentially hurt our rankings and should i be worried and is there anything else I can do.
-
If you have any sort of caching installed, you could try refreshing it and resubmitting the sitemap.
I checked your robots.txt file at http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml and it flagged the allow line. I don't think that would cause a problem, but you could try removing the "Allow: /" line and see if that helps.
-
Hey Nick thanks for your response...i did the first part but the sitemap on resubmit of the sitemap.xmp it wont take due to this error
URL restricted by robots.txt
but my sitemap file is here http://posnation.com/sitemap.xml
and is not blocking it...any ideas on what to do next
-
No you're ok. It used to be that if your site went down for even a few hours and the spiders came around that you could get deindexed. Now I guess they understand that stuff happens and you have a pretty long grace period before you get deindexed thankfully.
Good suggestions by Nick, also you can increase the googlebot crawl rate on your site in GWMT to get Google to come around again quicker.
-
If it was just blocked overnight you should be OK. Site's do go down for extended periods of time occasionally and I would assume Google won't de-index based on a relatively short outage.
To be safe, or at least make yourself feel like you have done what you can - resubmit your xml sitemap in webmaster tools. Also go to the "Fetch as GoogleBot" section and fetch your home page. Once it is fetched, click on the submit link and tell it to submit the page and all linked pages. You are probably OK without doing that, but it couldn't hurt to resubmit.
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
-
Do you think profanity in the content can harm a site's rankings?
In my early 20's I authored an ebook that provides men with natural ways to improve their ahem... "bedroom performance". I'm now in my mid 30s, and while it's not such an enthralling topic, the thing makes me 80 or so bucks a day on good days, and it actually works. I update the blog from time to time and build links to it on occasion from good sources. I've carried my SEO knowledge to a more "reputable" business, but this project is still interesting to me, because it's fully mine. I am more interested in getting it to rank and convert than anything, but following the same techniques that are working to grow the other business, this one continues to tank. Disavow bad links, prune thin content.. no difference. However, one thing I just noticed now are my search queries in the reports. When I first started blogging on this, I was real loose with my tongue, and spoke quite frankly (and dirty to various degrees). I'm much more refined and professional in how I write now. However, the queries I'm ranking for... a lot of d words, c words (in the sex sense)... sounds almost pornographic. Think Google may be seeing this, and putting me lower in rankings or in some sort of lower level category because of it? Heard anything about google penalizing for profanity? I guess in this time of authority and trust, that can hurt both of those... but I wonder if anyone's heard any actual confirmation of this or has any experience with this? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | DavidCapital0 -
Duplicate Product Pages On Niche Site
I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site. The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details: The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category. The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda. When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site. Questions: Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any? Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source? Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301? Would you 301 if this was your site? Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
Using a sites custom code for multiple websites: good or bad?
Is it bad to utilize a custom codebase for multiple websites? Does that play a factor within Google? Also, what about hosting sites with the same custom codebase on the same dedicated server?
Algorithm Updates | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Any red flags associated with this site?
Hey gang, My client's keywords have recently taken a header... We've owned the top 3 spots in the SERPs for several keyword phrases for several years. In the past 3 months we've watched all those keywords and local results fade... Examples of the types of terms we were consistently ranking for included things like: Indianapolis injury lawyer Indiana accident attorneys personal injury lawyers in Indianapolis semi-truck injury attorneys and several other similar keyword phrases. Was hoping someone would be kind enough to give me a second opinion about what the cause(s) may be. The site: http://www.2keller.com/ Love and peace to all of you! 🙂 Wayne
Algorithm Updates | | Wayne760 -
Google indexing my website's Search Results pages. Should I block this?
After running the SEOmoz crawl test, i have a spreadsheet of 11,000 urls of which 6381 urls are search results pages from our website that have been indexed. I know I've read that /search should be blocked from the engines, but can't seem to find that information at this point. Does anyone have facts behind why they should be blocked? Or not blocked?
Algorithm Updates | | Jenny10 -
What to do with eCommerce site with color variations of the same product?
On our eCommerce website we sell products that each have about 20 color variations. When the site was built each color variation was added individually instead as a single product with a configurable color option. Would it be best to combine the different variations into a single product with a configurable drop down menu for color or to leave as is? I am worried the search engines see the individual product pages for each color as duplicate content. What are your thoughts on how Zappos handles color variations? On the category page they display each color variation as an individual product but when the product is clicked it goes to a single product page with the different configurable color variations. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jchosler1 -
Why is this site ranking 1st?
I'm a relative SEO newbie, so please go easy on me. I've been an SEOMOZ pro user for a few months and have used it to dramatically improve my organic rankings. However, for the life of me, I cannot determine why the site that currently ranks number one, does so. For the factors I can determine, they shouldn't be ranking where they are, but reality is different. Could someone please offer me some ideas? My target keyword is "photography classes edmonton" My site is www.bsop.ca and I'm targetting the Google Canada engine. Any and all assistance is appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | pburwell0