Accidental Noindex/Mis-Canonicalisation - Please help!
-
Hi everybody,
I was hoping somebody might be able to help as this is an issue my team and I have never come across before.
A client of ours recently migrated to a new site design. 301 redirects were properly implemented and the transition was fairly smooth.
However, we realised soon after that a sub-section of pages had either one or both of the following errors:
- They featured a canonical tag pointing to the wrong page
- They featured the 'meta noindex' tag
After realising this, both the canonicals and the noindex tags were immediately removed. However, Google crawled the site while these were in place and the pages subsequently dropped out of Google's index.
We re-submitted the affected pages to Google's index and used WMT to 'Fetch' the pages as Google. We have also since 'allowed' the pages in the robots.txt file as an extra measure.
We found that the pages which just had the noindex tag were immediately re-indexed, while the pages which featured the noindex tag and which were mis-canonicalised are still not being re-indexed.
Can anyone think of a reason why this might be the case? One of the pages which featured both tags was one of our most important organic landing pages, so we're eager to resolve this.
Any help or advice would be appreciated.
Thanks!
-
I'm not sure how helpful it is, in the sense of being good news, but I did something like this to one of my sites on purpose once, and wrote it up:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization
A couple of tips:
(1) I think what Oleg is saying, which I agree with is that if Page A had a canonical to Page B, instead of just removing the canonical tag, put in a canonical tag pointing from Page A to Page A. Sometimes, the self-referencing canonical will help over-ride the old/bad canonical.
(2) Fetch is a good bet, but I'd also re-submit an XML sitemap with just the "bad" URLs. It's not a cure-all, but it can help nudge Google.
Unfortunately, it really can take time to sort out. Make sure your internal links are correct as well. You could temporarily build new internal links (list a few resources on your home-page, for example) to push link-juice temporarily. You could also post the proper URLs on Twitter/FB, etc., to kick them a bit. Of course, that only works for a few pages, not for hundreds.
-
Yes it may just be a waiting game as Oleg mentioned. But perhaps to help speed up the process you could link to some of those pages from a higher level page (like the homepage or a department landing page).Don't spam tho, no more than 100 links on a page (including navigation/footer etc).
I'd also recommend having an XML sitemap with all the URLs of your website on it. You'll need to upload this to Google Webmaster Tools as well.
When they do get re-indexed keep an eye out for how they have been indexed; so look at what keywords bring up that page in SERPs (Raven Tools is an easy way to track keywords and see which URL comes up). If you find that 'odd' pages are being indexed for a certain keyword search you should do some link building specific to the keyword you want ranked pointing to the page/URL you want ranked.
Good luck!
Davinia
-
Hi Oleg,
Thanks for your response. Unfortunately the canonical URL was another of our main organic landing pages so a redirect wouldn't be appropriate in this situation.
I agree that it's just a matter of time but it's frustrating that Google has crawled the site since we updated the pages and still hasn't re-indexed the page in question.
-
Can you set a canonical/redirect on the page that was incorrect pointing back to the correct page?
i.e. page1.html had wrong canonical to pgae1.html -> change pgae1.html canonical to page1.html
Overall, I think it's just a matter of time before Google is able to recrawl and fix itself... it's odd that canonical + noindex is slower than just noindex. Do whatever you can to get G to recrawl the pages.
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 traffic/sales have plummeted
About 2 months ago we relaunched our Ecommerce store on Shopify Plus and have since seen a massive drop in traffic, sales and our most valuable pages are nowhere to be found. Also, GWT is showing that Google is indexing about half of our pages and none of the images are being indexed. We did extensive keyword research, created/implemented a keyword framework, wrote brand new category/product page content, implemented schema markup, optimized our blog content and even did link building where we got some 90+ DA links. We are literally at a loss for what is causing this. Our experience with Shopify Plus has been very poor because it doesn't even do basic SEO stuff so we've had to do a lot of workarounds to make it "SEO friendly". Has anyone else ever switched to Shopify Plus and had similar issues? Is there a silver bullet that you can think of that we are missing that could get the site being indexed/ranking again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aquatell0 -
Domain.com/old-url to domain.com/new-url
HI, I have to change old url`s to new one, for the same domain and all landing pages will be the same: domain.com/old-url I have to change to: domain.com/new-url All together more than 70.000 url. What is best way to do that? should I use 301st redirect? is it possible to do in code or how? what could you please suggest? Thank you, Edgars
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edzjus3330 -
Moving blog to a subdomain, how can I help it rank?
Hi all, We recently moved our blog to a sub-domain where it is hosted on Wordpress. It was very recent and we're actively working on the SEO, but any pointers on getting the subdomain to rank higher than the old blog posts would be terrific. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalMoz0 -
Magento Help - Server Reset
Good Morning, After rebooting a server, a magento based website reset itself going back to December 2013. All changes to the site and orders dating up until yesterday (6/19/14) have disappeared. There are several folders on the root of the server that have files with yesterday's date but we don't know how to bring everything back and restore. Any Magento or server experts out there ever face this issue or have any ideas or potential solutions? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Main content - javascript/ajax
Hi, On most of our pages Javascript is displaying our main content, so it doesn't show up on the page source and I assume isn't being crawled by Google to the best of its ability. It's also not showing up on MOZ's page grader and crawl results, making analysis and testing harder. What's the easiest way, without having to completely redo our website, to have this content crawled by search engines and moz?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S.S.N0 -
We will be switching our shopping cart platform from volusion to magento and really cautious / nervous about our rankings / seo stuff. any advice for anyone that has migrated stores, etc. these urls are years old, etc.
shopping cart platform switch and SEO. What do you suggest? What's the best way to ensure we keep rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0 -
Internal Search / Faceted Navigation
Hi there, I'm working on an e-learning site with the following content pages: main page, category pages, course pages, author pages, tag pages. We will also have an internal search for users to search by keyword for courses & authors & categories. Is it still recommend to "noindex, follow" and disallow in robots.txt internal search results? Or for a site like this, is it better to use faceted navigation? It seems that faceted navigation is mostly for e-commerce sites. What is the latest thinking on SEO best practices for internal search result pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
I need help with htaccess redirect
Hi guys, we have the domain cheats.co.uk, it has always displayed as cheats.co.uk without the www. However it is now showing 2 version of the site, both the www. and the non www. version. I know how to add to the htaccess folder to get the non www. version going to the www. version but i am worried about doing this because the non www. version has always been the one indexed in Google and has a page rank of 3. Should i in fact be redirecting the www.version to the non www. version to keep page rank etc? or will page rank be passed over etc if i redirect to the www. version I hope thats clear Thanks guys Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imrubbish0