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
-
Will this 301 redirects help me?
Hello, recently, I found out about all the SEO advantages from 301 redirects. I had 3 websites that are now expired, their topic was Counter Strike 1.6 servers. All of these websites were registered 9 years ago and have few good backlinks (from website with 1%-3% spam score and DA 30+). Now I have one website that is not only about Counter Strike 1.6 but also many other Steam shooter games. If I revive these 3 old domains and 301 redirect them to my new one, will it help me with SEO and increase my ranking on Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bonito19930 -
Please... Help me convince my boss that Keyword Density is not-important / damaging.
If you can, please provide any and all talking points that I can use in this argument. It seems that no matter what I show him, including Matt Cutts' video debunking Keyword Density back in 2011, it doesn't seem to stick. He is fully, 100% convinced that keyword density is hugely important and we need to focus our time and energy on it. Any sources you might have to help me show him that this is a myth would be hugely appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins2 -
Citation/Business Directory Question...
A company I work for has two numbers... one for the std call centre and one for tracking SEO. Now, if local citation/business directory listings have the same address but different numbers, will this affect local/other SEO results? Any help is greatly appreciated! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geniusenergyltd0 -
Domaim.com/jobs?location=10 is indexed, so is domain.com/jobs/sheffield
Whats the best way you'd tackle that problem? I'm inheriting a website and the old devs had multiple internal links pointing to domain.com/jobs?location=10 (plus a ton of other numbers assigned to locations) and so they've been indexed. I usually use WMTs parameter tool but I'm not sure what the best approach would be other than that. Any help would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
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 -
Help understanding 301 domain redirect
Can anyone help me understand a specific process of a 301 redirecting a domain. Here is what I would like to know.... When you 301 redirect a site, most if not all the links follow to your new site. But how does this process happen? 1.When Google sees the new domain does it simply apply the backlink profile of the old site to the new one? 2. Does it have to re-crawl all the links one by one and apply them to the new domain? 3. or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
Please help with some content ideas
I was reading this post http://www.clambr.com/link-building-tools/ about how he had basically outreached to experts in the field and each one had shared this post with their followers. I am wondering how this could translate to our small business marketing and design blog I am really struggling for content ideas that will work in regards to popularity and link building.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Subdomain canonicalisation
Hi Moz fans, I had a telephone conversation with an SEO company last week and they mentioned that the following "versions" of my domain were causing a canonicalisation issue; http://www.example.com www.example.com example.com I've already fixed the /index.html issue but do the above 3 also need to be fixed? Is the best solution to use a 301 redirect? As a side note, the SEOmoz web app doesn't identify these as being duplicate content... Regards, Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshSEO20110