Recovering from index problem
-
Hi all. For a while, we've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/. Everything was going swimmingly, and we had a top 5 ranking for the term 'bird hides' for this page - http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/bird-hides.
Then disaster struck! The client added a link with a faulty parameter in the Joomla back end that caused a bunch of duplicate content issues. Before this happened, all the site's 19 pages were indexed. Now it's just a handful, including the faulty URL (<cite>thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/index.php?id=13</cite>)
This shows the issue pretty clearly.
I've removed the link, redirected the bad URL, updated the site map and got some new links pointing at the site to resolve the problem. Yet almost two month later, the bad URL is still showing in the SERPs and the indexing problem is still there.
Any ideas? I'm stumped!
-
Hi
You can use the URL removal, which should work fine, but I think this issue was you were blocking crawling in robots.txt for /?id=13 http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt and www http://www.thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt
If the crawler is blocked it can not see the redirect, so you would want to remove the /?id=13 from robots.txt and let Google crawl it to see the redirect, and that URL will drop out over time.
Something unrelated I just noticed - you should have a better 404 template http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/kjhf - one that uses your site's template/design and provides something a little more useful.
-Dan
-
I had no idea you could request a removal like that. Thank you!
-
Blink,
It sounds like you've done all the right things but if you wanted to, you can request removal of a cached page via google webmaster tools--it might help. Otherwise, just keep waiting, It'll go away. Have you looked at your server logs to see if googlebot's crawled those pages recently?
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
-
Site shows up after re-indexing, then disappears.
I have a site, natvest.com, with which I sell real estate in Alabama and Georgia. I need to show up in an "Alabama Land for Sale" search. Same thing for Georgia. If I re-index my site, I show up for roughly one day, before disappearing again. Happens every time I re-index. Ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | natvest0 -
Positions dropped and do not recover
Hi all, Site: https://www.fascinators.com.au k/w: fascinators (this is the main one I am looking at) About 2 years ago, I redesigned the site. It used to be on first positions in Google Australia. After redesign, positions dropped and never recovered. No matter what I do, I can not get them back. I even involved professional SEO agency for the last 6 month to help build links, but nothing works. (old site used really old non mobile-friendly engine) As far as I know site is technically sound with no issues. In the last few month position for my main keyword 'fascinators' jumps really wildly. From position 9 to not being in Google first 100. And jump can happen overnight. As of today it disappeared from first 100 again. I am really tearing my hair out on what can be wrong. Link building is underway. This is one area I am aware of. Thinking of keyword spamming, i removed lots of 'fascinators' from URL, but that did not seem to help much. Any ideas will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Rudolf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rudolfl1 -
Best practice to prevent pages from being indexed?
Generally speaking, is it better to use robots.txt or rel=noindex to prevent duplicate pages from being indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Redirecting index.html to the root
Hi, I was wondering if there is a safe way to consolidate link juice on a single version of a home page. I find incoming links to my site that link to both mysite.com/ and mysite.com/index.html. I've decided to go with mysite.com/ as my main and only URL for the site and now I'd like to transfer all link juice from mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
When i tried 301 redirect from index.html to the root it created an indefinite loop, of course. I know I can use a RewriteRule.., but will it transfer the juice?? Please help!5 -
Why is a page with a noindex code being indexed?
I was looking through the pages indexed by Google (with site:www.mywebsite.com) and one of the results was a page with "noindex, follow" in the code that seems to be a page generated by blog searches. Any ideas why it seems to be indexed or how to de-index it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Thousands of 404 Pages Indexed - Recommendations?
Background: I have a newly acquired client who has had a lot of issues over the past few months. What happened is he had a major issue with broken dynamic URL's where they would start infinite loops due to redirects and relative links. His previous SEO didn't pay attention to the sitemaps created by a backend generator, and it caused hundreds of thousands of pages to be indexed. Useless pages. These useless pages were all bringing up a 404 page that didn't have a 404 server response (it had a 200 response) which created a ton of duplicate content and bad links (relative linking). Now here I am, cleaning up this mess. I've fixed the 404 page so it creates a 404 server response. Google webmaster tools is now returning thousands of "not found" errors, great start. I fixed all site errors that cause infinite redirects. Cleaned up the sitemap and submitted it. When I search site:www.(domainname).com I am still getting an insane amount of pages that no longer exist. My question: How does Google handle all of these 404's? My client wants all the bad pages removed now but I don't have as much control over that. It's a slow process getting Google to remove these pages that are returning a 404. He is continuously dropping in rankings still. Is there a way of speeding up the process? It's not reasonable to enter tens of thousands of pages into the URL Removal Tool. I want to clean house and have Google just index the pages in the sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Sitemaps / Google Indexing / Submitted
We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app - http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages. Any help would be appreciated! Aron sitemap.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Removing a Page From Google index
We accidentally generated some pages on our site that ended up getting indexed by google. We have corrected the issue on the site and we 404 all of those pages. Should we manually delete the extra pages from Google's index or should we just let Google figure out that they are 404'd? What the best practice here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbuckles0