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
-
Hi I know this is cheeky but you are all so helpful on here!
hi, quick question, I've made a new instillation of wordpress at sussexchef.com/dev and I'm about to start building pages, obvoisly I'm going to move it to sussexchef.com when its all looking right. when I choose my page address links/ permalinks thingy, should I use new url names that don't already exist on the old site? or should I keep the old url names so I don't get loads of 404's, but include the "dev/" in the url name? Eg the old address sussexchef.com/home should I use sussexchef.com/dev/home or sussexchef.com/home-sussex-caterers while building the development site? I'm guessing the later my help out in google searches too? But if I use Dev in the url shurly I will have to go through almost 100 pages removing the dev/ and also changing all the links too? This would be days of work!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SussexChef83
So confused! I'd really appreciate your help here. Ben0 -
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
Hi there. I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article ) Thanks 🙂 Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Can someone help me with RegEx?
Hey! I am having a tough time figuring this out, and I have already signed up for my RegEx course. So in the mean time, could you please help me? I have two old URLs: /faq /faq.php The new one is /faqs How can I write a 301 redirect to include faq & faq.php in the same line? I basically want to capture /faq and anything beyond the q including the .php. I thought this would work: Redirect 301 /faq. http://www.blah.com/faqs Using the period to catch everything after the q and redirect it to the /faqs page. Extra credit: And why Redirect 301 vs. RedirectMatch 301? It is an Apache server and mod_ rewrite is on. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cyberlicious0 -
Article Marketing / Article Posting
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards0 -
Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow. Are there any potential SEO problems here? What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Redirecting site from html/php to wordpress
I've never come across this and haven't been able to really find anything that explains it very well. I want to get opinions before we make a definitive decision. Here's the scenario... I am working on a site that was built in HTML/PHP and some of the pages are ranking pretty well. (some page 1, but not number 1) We are going to start using the Wordpress platform by year's end. The pages that were built in html have been built a little spammy but they still rank. I just think they are keyword stuffed a little and not very "reader friendly" (I think the last person was spinning content). So, we've built completely new content on our new pages and we've commissioned really good content writers for them. I will be handling the on-page SEO going forward so I know what to do there. My questions are this.... Should I 301 the old pages to the new pages with the better content? (old pages have the .html or .php extensions so www.example.com/keyword.php will become www.example.com/keyword-keyword Is there any negative side to doing this since the content will be completely different then the old pages that are being 301 from. (Keywords are pretty much staying the same with the exception of minor variations. ie, www.example.com/red-cashmere-sweater.php to www.example.com/cashmere-sweater) I ask this because I've moved sites before where I've just changed the location of the same content. I've never done it where the content is changing and so is the URL extension. Thank you in advance for your help and guidance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarinPirkey0 -
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
Hey! I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please! Thanks! http://www.moondoggieinc.com Kristy O
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO1 -
Accidently added a nofollow, noindex tag and then...
Hey guys, My first post here and ironically highlights a ridiculously stupid mistake! Ok, here's the deal... I started building links to one of my new page on a fairly good, old site (DA = >35). Before starting to build links, I added fresh new content, and while doing that, I accidentally added a "nofollow" and "noindex" tag to the page! Guess what, google DID de-index the page ! So the questions is (and YES, I did change the meta tags): Will google re-index the page with some good linking? Will it treat the page as a new, fresh page even though it was present for over a year? I had already started link building to that page, and now technically the links are pointing to a page that does not exist in the index, so once it does get re-indexed, will Google FLAG it as having too many links? Would I be ranking it as a new page? Will its previous ranking (for very few keywords) will come back? Thanks and Regards, Amod
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bonusjonathan0