Odd pattern after site got deindexed and reindexed again
-
I had a very interesting experience with one of my sites happening for the last 4 months.
The site is for a professional service in a highly competitive market (NYC). There was an algo penalty several years ago that was recovered through new content and lots of quality links (mostly, media).
We were #3-15 for the main money keywords before we changed the site into Genesis. We tested the site on a shadow server where we put the no-index attribute in robots.txt. However, when the site was migrated back to a live hosting, we accidentally forgot to remove it, so the site got de-indexed by mistake.
The error was detected nd corrected about 5 days later, however the site did not appear in search for the next few weeks. After that, the site jumped bounced back. BUT, it had #1-5 positions instead on all money keywords. This lasted for 5-7 days, when the site bounced back to #3-15 positions again.
We've been putting a lot of investment and effort since that but the site never got back to #1-5.
Any idea on why this can happen? We have better links than competitors. The professional is a nationally recognized media person. There might be some older toxic links that give a little bit of penalty?
Thanks in advance!
-
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for getting in. I beleive I see the SERP fluctuations on a daily basis, but that exact thing was surely off the loop. Possibly, Google took into consideration some penalizing factor that it hadn't measured in right after the site was re-indexed. That's why I thought of some toxic links that were re-assessed.
-
Hi Arkady
This sounds like just normal fluctuations in the SERPs. You can use Mozcast too to watch how volatile search results are.
A couple of things I would look into:
- Local SEO (Moz)
- How to Do a Content Audit (Moz)
- Guide for Link Removals & Risk Mitigation (Moz - you mentioned checking backlinks, just a good habit to get into)
If your rankings are all back to normal then that's great! I would just use the above as value add to the site and your ongoing maintenance and see if you can catch some easy wins. Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any question - good luck!
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
-
My site is being deindexed for unknown reason
A few days ago I noticed that my site gusty.se was not showing up in google, only the subpages. There is no message in the google search console. I requested the site to be reindexed and about a day later the site was showing up in google again. Now another day has past and the site is now again not indexed in google. Question is why the site is being deindexed??? I have worked a bit with getting backlinks to the site and I did recently gain 3 backlinks within a few days (about a week has past since I gained these links). Still I can't believe Google would count this as unnatural link building, especially since I guess it will take some time for Google to detect new incoming links. Another thing I've notice though is that my site about two weeks ago got a high number of incoming links from different spam sites with .gq TLD's (see the attached screenshot). The majority of these sites have however not linked to my main page but to a sub page which still is indexed by Google. Can all these spamlinks be the reason to why Google has deindexed the main page of my site? I've read that Google in general ignore links from spam sites, still I have taken action against these spam sites by submitting a disavow text file containing all these spam domains. I submitted this file about 2 days ago. I have now again requested the site to be reindexed so perhaps will it soon be listed again. Still, I can't keep having my site deindexed and having me reindexing it every second day. I would really appreciate if someone could give me some insight in this problem. moz.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grodan21 -
No-Indexing on Ecommerce site
Hi Our site has a lot of similar/lower quality product pages which aren't a high priority - so these probably won't get looked at in detail to improve performance as we have over 200,000 products . Some of them do generate a small amount of revenue, but an article I read suggested no-indexing pages which are of little value to improve site performance & overall structure. I wanted to find out if anyone had done this and what results they saw? Will this actually improve rankings of our focus areas? It makes me a bit nervous to just block pages so any advice is appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Disavow files on m.site
Hi I have a site www.example.com and finally have got the developers to add Google webmaster verification codes for: example.com m.example.com As I was advised this is best practice - however I was wondering does this mean I now need to add the disavow file. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Site redesign..have I done everything?
Hello, We have a site that was recently put through the redesign process-a couple of weeks ago. It was a tired site that was optimized well, but still struggled because it was so outdated. I went ahead and re-optimized, submitted a new sitemap, and did the fetch. Have I missed a step? Could someone offer insight into what they do when a site is redesigned and the steps taken to make sure that Google crawls and "appreciates" 🙂 the new site as soon as possible? Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer0 -
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 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Multiple sites in the same niche
Hi All A question regarding multiple sites in the same niche... If I have say 10 sites all targetting the same niche yet all on different C-class IPs with different hosts, registrars, whois data and ages can I use the same template, or will Google discern a pattern? Basically I have developed a WordPress template which I want to use on the sites albeit with different logos / brand colours. NB/ All of the 10 sites will have unique, original content and they will NOT be interlinked
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielparry1 -
My site penalized after 301 Redirect or redesign?
Hi, I have a question regarding my site (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com) that has, all of a sudden, lost rankings on several keywords; plus, Google Analytics and the plug-in Clicky installed on my site (the site is built on WordPress) claim that my site has no visitors/visits anymore. I would like to provide a little background of what has happened. Three weeks ago I asked my web hosting company to do a 301 redirect from http://pokeronlineitalia.com to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com. At the same time I asked a web hosting company to to a redesign of the site. Strangely, the day after the new redesigned site went online Google Analytics and the Clicky plug-in showed that my site, from one day to the other, had no visitors/visits anymore (I had installed Google Analytics and Clicky before the 301 redirect). In addition, I noticed that I had lost positions on many keywords for which I used to rank on the second page. However, the PR of the site has remained intact and Google is indexing it without problems. Plus, I still rank high for a keyword. I tend to believe that because of this, my site was not penalized by mighty Google...but I'd like an SEO expert to tell me what he thinks about it. In particular, please answer this: has my site lost rankings because of the 301 redirect? Has my site been penalized because of the redesign? Is this only a temporary situation? Thank you very much for your help. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0