Penguin Update or URL Error - Rankings Tank
-
I just redid my site from Godaddy Quick Shopping Cart to Drupal. The site is much cleaner now. I transferred all the content.
Now my site dropped from being in the top ten on almost every key word we were targeting to 35+.
I "aliased" the urls so that they were the same as the Godaddy site. However when I look at our search results I notice that our URLs have extra wording at the end like this: ?categoryid=1 or some other number.
Could this be the reason that our rankings tanked? Previously on the godaddy site the results didnt show this.
-
I'm going to "guess" it's not the penguin but a url issue. I've moved around 20 sites to a different platform and it's never been a totally seamless transition as far as google is concerned (none of them Drupal however). Also check your sitemap. (the url that google thinks it is). I think you may see a 404 error.
Not sure if this is relevant but you might check out this known issue:
Known Issues
- While Sub-pathauto works when drupal_get_normal_path() is called, if drupal_get_path_alias() is called, the hook to alter URLs is not invoked. Functionality that uses this function to compare things like page visibility settings will not match the sub-path processed URL. This is due to core bug #1248626: drupal_get_path_alias() does not invoke url alter hook while drupal_get_normal_path() does.
Good Luck . From one hyperfocuser to another
-
CAN BE 3 possibilities
Google take is copied content , but being on same url it will resolve and serps will be back in a few days
Google considering work is being done agiain serps will be back in a few days
Penguin Update hit , try to fix and fill this form and go on holdays , wont be fixed for while .
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ&ndplr=1
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
-
How can i Rank this website
here is my website www.onlinehackingtricks.com with fresh content and with proper on page seo but if i will do some off page seo then google will give penality to me because my one website got deindexed so how can i rank this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEORAMAN0 -
I'm changing title tags and meta tags, url, will i loose my ranking?
Hi Guys QUESTION: I'm currently going through a re-design for my new website that was published in November 2014 - since launching we found there were many things we needed to change, our pages were content thin being one of the biggest. I had industry experts that came in and made comments on the title tags lacking relevance for eg: our title tag for our home page is currently "Psychic Advice" most ideal customers don't search "Psychic Advice" they search more like "Online Psychic Reading" or Psychic Readings" I noticed alot of my competitors also were using title tags such as Online Psychic Readings, Free Psychic Readings etc so it brings me to my question of "changing the title tags around. The issue is, im ranking for two keywords in my industry, online psychics and online psychic readings in NZ. 1. Our home page and category pages are content thin.... so hoping that adding the changes will create perhaps some consistency also with the added unique and quality content. Here is the current website: zenory. co.nz and the new one is www.ew-zenory.herokuapp.com which is currently in development I have 3 top level domains com,com.au, and co.nz Is there anyone that can give me an idea if I were to change my home page title tag to **ZENORY | Online Psychic Readings | Live Psychic Phone and Chat ** If this will push my rankings down though this page will have alot more valuable content etc? For obvious reasons im going to guess it will make drop, I'm wondering though if it is worth changing the title tags and meta descriptions around or leaving it as is if its already doing well? How much of a difference do title tags and meta descriptions really make? Any insight into this would be great! Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may1 -
Does Trade Mark in URL matter to Google
Hello community! We are planning to clean up TM and R in the URLs on the website. Google has indexed these pages but some TM pages are have " " " instead displaying in URL from SERP. What's your thoughts on a "spring cleaning" effort to remove all TM and R and other unsafe characters in URLs? Will this impact indexed pages and ranking etc? Thank you! b.dig
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b.digi0 -
Content optimized for old keywords and G Updates
Hi, We've got some old content, about 50 pages worth in an Ecommerce site, that is optimized for keywords that aren't the subject of the page - these keywords occur about 8 times (2 keywords per page) in the old content. We are going through these 50 pages and changing the title, H1, and meta description tag to match the exact subject of the page - so that we will increase in rankings again - the updates have been lowering our rankings. Do we need to completely rewrite the content for these 50 pages, or can we just sprinkle it with any needed additions of the one keyword that is the subject of the page? The reason I'm asking is that our rankings keep dropping and these 50 pages seem to be part of the problem. We're in the process of updating these 50 pages Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Removing/ Redirecting bad URL's from main domain
Our users create content for which we host on a seperate URL for a web version. Originally this was hosted on our main domain. This was causing problems because Google was seeing all these different types of content on our main domain. The page content was all over the place and (we think) may have harmed our main domain reputation. About a month ago, we added a robots.txt to block those URL's in that particular folder, so that Google doesn't crawl those pages and ignores it in the SERP. We now went a step further and are now redirecting (301 redirect) all those user created URL's to a totally brand new domain (not affiliated with our brand or main domain). This should have been done from the beginning, but it wasn't. Any suggestions on how can we remove all those original URL's and make Google see them as not affiliated with main domain?? or should we just give it the good ol' time recipe for it to fix itself??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | redcappi0 -
Advice on links after Penguin hit
Firstly we have no warnings or messages in WMT. We have racked up thousands of anchor text urls. Our fault, we didnt nofollow and also some of our many cms sites replicated the links sitewide to the tune of 20,000 links. I`m in the process of removing the code which causes this problem in most of the culprit sites but how long will it take roughly for a crawl to recalculate the links? In my WMT it still shows the links increasing but I think this is retrospective data. However, after this crawl we should see a more relevant link count. We also provide some web software which has been used by many sites. Google may consider our followed anchor text violating spam rules. So I ask, if we were to change the link text to our url only and add nofollow, will this improve the spam issue? We could have as many as 4,000 links per website, as it is a calendar function and list all dates into the future.......and we would like to retain a link to our website of course for marketing purposes. What we dont want is sitewide link spam again. Some of our other links are low quality, some are okay. However, we have lost rankings, probably due to low quality links and overuse of anchor text.. Is this the case the Google has just devalued the links algorythmically or is there an actual penalty to make the rankings drop? As we have no warnings in WMT, I feel there isnt the need to remove the lower quality links and in most cases we havent control over the link placements. We should just rectify that we have a better future linking profile? If we have to remove spam links, then that can only be a good reason to cause negative seo?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xtopher660 -
How best to do Location Specific Pages for Eccomerce Post Panda Update..
Hi , We have an eCommerce site and currently we have a problem with duplicate content. We created Location specific landing pages for our product categories which initially did very well until the recent Google Panda update caused a big drop in ranking and traffic. example http://xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/London/100 http://.xxx.co.uk/rent/lawn-mower/Manchester/100 Much of the content on these location pages is the same or very similar apart from different H1 tag, title tag and in some cases slight variations on the on page content but given that these items can be hired from 200 locations it would take years to have unique content for every location for each category... We did this originally in April as we can't compete nationally but we found it was easier to compete locally ,hence the creation of the location pages and it did do well for us until now. My question is , since the last Google Panda update, our traffic has dropped 40% , and rankings have gone through the floor and we are stuck with this mess Should we get rid off (301 ) all of the location specific pages for each of the categories ot just keep say 10 locations per cities as the most popular ones and either do No follow no index the other locations or 301's or what would people recommend ? The only examples I can see on the internet that others do with multiple locations is to have a store finder type thing... but you cant' rank for the individual product /category doing it that way... If anyone has any advice or good examples of sites I could see that employ a good location url specific method, please let me know. thanks Sarah
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Page Rank is 0
Hi. Can you please point me in the right direction concerning a site whose default page has a PR of 0? There does not appear to be any errors in the robots.txt file (that I can tell). When I ran a duplicate content check by searching the title tag and first sentance in quotes it did not return more than 2 sites. When I ran a site: it is reporting 287,000 results. Does this mean that they purchased links and have now been penalized? Or where should I go from here? Thank you for any feedback and assistance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JulB0