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Hello Mozers, this is probably (as per) a naive question, but, is the 'Latest from ***.com' element in SERPs an extract of Google News? I've added an example of what appears for 'Moz' in SERPs.

MYn7Kh2

Hello Deacyde

Could I ask you another question related to this issue?

The web developer has now added a rel canonical (I'm assuming to the root of our site).

My question is, is it good practice to add a rel canonical to a site which has a development (preview) site, where there will potentially be two urls for each page (the development page and the live page) within serps?

I was told by the web developer that this was not an issue and that it was unimportant.

Is this the case or have they simply forgotten to do it and are now dismissing it as non issue?

That's my question - I hope you don't mind me following up with you - it's just you know the story from the start.

Kind regards

Catherine (work with Zoe)!

Hello Deacyde

I'm writing to thank you again for you help.  I asked our web design agency to remove the 92 offending urls yesterday.  They did as requested but I got a curt email a close of play last evening telling me that the remove process would not be immediate and the preview site urls where not the reason for the drop in ranking.

Today, I checked and all the urls for the preview site have disappeared.  Our visibility has risen 45% and we are now ranking #2 for our main keyword phrase (we had dipped down to 10 last week).

So thank you very much for you advice and constructive help

Kind regards

Catherine Joyce

Hello Deacyde

When I'm talking about the preview site, I'm referring to the site we build our site in.  When we are happy we then build live.  However I have noticed that we now have both the preview url and the live url (with the same content) appearing in serps.  When I pointed it out the the web design agency who sold us the software and manage the site they told me that they had set up the redirect yesterday (the same day I told them about the rankings drop)!

I have been running around in small circles trying to work out why, after a year of careful SEO my companies site has suddenly dropped for all it's main keywords out of the first page to the second or third in our weekly report.

One theory was that five backlinks with a spam rating of 10 might have had an impact - these have been removed, but I have been advised that these may not have been the cause.

Our crawl diagnostics remain squeaky clean.

I add one, carefully checked and optimized (as per Moz recommendations) blog posts once a week and nothing has been changed other than that.

We have slowly and carefully built up a good backlink profile, but as well as the drop in rankings our weekly report also showed that we lost 109 backlinks from the previous week.

I have not been able to find out what I could possibly have done wrong!

I've checked all our crawl reports and webmaster tools and nothing has been flagged up.

I did discover, whilst typing in some longtail keyword phrases that our preview site URLs as well as our live site URLs appeared in SERPs.  I checked with our web agency who assured me that this was fine, but that they had put a redirect on these yesterday.  I thought this was a bit strange as that seems odd as we have been live for a year.  I guess my question is could the fact that these redirects have not been active (until yesterday) have any bearing on what has happened or is this completely unrelated?

Thanks

Catherine - very stressed Mozer

Thank you very much - will check it out now!