Do I have to start over?
-
I have a client of which we put up an extensive responsive landing page with a blog in the backend, this was done with Worpress.
Over the new years, our web developer pushed the new site live without telling me, and left the privacy settings on (meaning: please ask search engines not to index this site).
The robots.txt I had set up was set up so that the site would be crawled weekly. The site had privacy settings on for 9 days (more than a week, ugh!). Thereby, taking away all the SEO work I had done prior and basically starting with a brand new slate.
My question: Do I need to start over with all the seo, or do I need to continue pushing forward and waiting for them to come back up? Either way, still need to do work, but I want to really know if my prior work has become moot. Thanks for your replies.
-
You are welcome. I hope all goes well.
-
Site was indexed for 3 months and ranking fairly well, and then privacy settings happened, lost all the rankings. Oh well. So keep on trucking. Thanks for the answer.
-
Appreciated, I thought along the same lines but wanted to make sure I was correct. Thanks for the answer
-
No, in my opinion, you don't need to start over. I've seen worse things happen and still have the site rank fairly quickly and well. Just adjust the settings so that google and other engines can now crawl the site and submit the sitemap via GWT. Other than a temporary bump in the road, I don't think it's going to have a long-term impact on your SEO.
Hope that helps!
Dana
-
Ugh, leaving the privacy settings on for WordPress is always frustrating.
I don't think you have to redo anything. The site will eventually be re-crawled (which you might be able to speed up with some smart link building), and I don't think you'll have lost anything when that happens. If there were links in place, they're still in place, and the SEO work you've done on-page will still retain its value.
It might just take a bit of time for the whole site to get re-indexed again (of course, if it was never indexed then you have nothing to worry about). I wouldn't worry about the robots.txt crawl rate, it gets ignored anyway.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
HELP!!! Steep Drop in Organic Traffic Starting 11/1/16
Starting November 1st, organic web traffic from Google dropped from an average of about 60 visits a day to about 5 per day. So we are more than 90% off!!!! At the end of September, we modified the header of the site to simplify it. We also added a snippet of code to each page to enable Zoho "Sales IQ" to work. Sales IQ enables us to track visitors and engage in chat sessions with them. Apart from that no changes have been made from the site. Any ideas as to what could have caused this drop in traffic? Was there a Google update at that time that could have caused the drop? Or could the recent site changes have caused this? I have attached a Google Webmasters Tool report showing the drop in traffic. I would very much appreciate some insight into this, as all organic traffic to our site has ceased. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan 9VNB1O50 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
If Penguin 2.0 targets specific pages and keywords, should I spend less SEO effort on them since will they be harder to optimize? Penalty repair is only starting at end of year.
I’m working with a company that got hit by Penguin 2.0. They’re going to switch to white-hat only for a few months and review analytics before considering repairing the penalty. In the meantime, would it make sense to focus less SEO effort (on-site optimization, link building, etc.) on any pages or keywords that were penalized or hit hardest? Or are those the pages we should work on the most? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Starting Over with a new site - Do's and Don'ts?
After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website. Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake. Our original site,(call it mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the engine in the old one. We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page. There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net. Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign. All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new. We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again. We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net. My questions are: 1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go? 2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ? Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site? It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site. 3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help 4. What have I forgotten? Cheers, all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
Hit by Penguin, Can I move the content from the old site to a new domain and start again with the same content which is high quality
I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | warren0071 -
What's a good place for a copywriter to start researching the more technical aspects of SEO?
I've been working as a copywriter for about a year and a half now and I feel like the more advanced SEO topics (rel= tags, .htaccess files, etc) are a bit over my head. Is there a website where I can read up on all of these things? I have a basic understanding of them but I couldn't talk about them for very long, and I want to become more well rounded as a search marketer. Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nxmassa0 -
New Website.. From where to start with a SEO Plan ?
Hi.. We have got two SEO and link builders working here in the office, putting in efforts is not a problem. And we have been doing SEO for our websites since a long time and they all rank well. Since, I have signed up for SEOMOZ, which is the one stop with all the heavy duty SEO guys, so we would like to get some suggestions from the experts. Ok here is the question. We have launched a new website this week and we have got a new SEO client, whose website is 6 months old. 1. What should be a proper SEO plan for a new website ? Got any Plan PDF or Buleprint, which you can send me ? 2. For the client website , he is ranking on 4-7th pages for his 4 keywords. Whats should be the correct way or plan to start doing SEO for them and get them to the first page ? 3. I feel like, doing competitive analysis is lacking with us and we are not good at evaluating that step. Whats the bet way to do competitive analysis ? 4. We are looking to build more and more links to the website . Whats the best way to make links ? Got any SEOMoz Blog post link, which explain this better or any forum thread which has got the tricks for this ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qubesys0