Do rankings return to previous rank after a site has been un-indexed?
-
My client has had a site since 1996 (the first one was a www subdomain, his current site has no www). He came to my company for SEO about a year ago, after having a WordPress site that was accidentally set to not be crawled/indexed by search engines.
We set the site to be indexed and added a blog. Since then, he has had slow increase in keyword rankings (on page 3 or most globally searched terms) but is still nowhere near page 1 for most of his keywords. He thinks my company has done nothing, while I see the keyword improvements as a sign of success - slow, gradual - but going in the right direction.
I don't know if he was ranking well before he had a site that was not set to be indexed - but if he was on page one, would he eventually return there? Or do we have to build everything over again?
-
Thank you, Dan! We have indeed been very transparent about the repercussions of not being indexed. Appreciate you taking the time to respond.
-
Unfortunately not. If he blocked crawlers from his site for long enough, they would eventually give up and treat the site as though it was gone from the Internet. If he doesn't rank now, he will effectively be starting from scratch.
Indeed you are doing fine if you are getting improvements in search engine results. Whether he will return to page 1 or not depends on many factors, such as how much his websites has changed, how many links have been built during that period, what other websites have done during that time and any Google updates that might have affected his linkbuilding.
I wish you the best of success - but you will need to be honest with him and tell him the damage he did by blocking search engine crawlers. Doing THAT was 100% not your fault.
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
-
Indexing "Without WWW" while it is already redirected to the "WWW" version
Hi Guys My websites are being indexed without "WWW" while the 'http://abc.com' is redirected to 'http://www.abc.com'. Now what I believe is that the URL encoded in my website files are written as 'http://abc.com' rather than 'http://www.abc.com' And since now Google has removed the "Set Preferred Domain" option from the Webmaster Tools, I can't set the preferred version of the URL. Oh & Some pages are indexed with "WWW" & Some are indexed "without WWW" Now I think that it's not an issue, but a lot of people have been saying that this may hurt the rankings.. Some comments/tips would be really appreciated
Industry News | | kasiddiqi0 -
Now that Google is no longer publicly displaying Page Rank updates, how will this effect Moz's ability to calculate DA and PA?
Hi, How much more important do you guys think that Moz's Page Authority and Domain Authority metrics are going to become now that Google has stopped giving people public access to a site or pages Page Rank? And how accurate is PA and DA as a measurement in comparison to Page Rank..so for example if I was seeking a guestposting opportunity and saw a site as having a PR of 4....if I now looked to Moz's Page and Domain Authority metrics instead...would that still give me equivalent information on the strength of that domain and thus make a judgement on whether it will be a worthy site for a guestpost.. I guess what I am asking is, how close is now looking at Moz's metrics (ie. a third party company) to the info on PageRank that was being updated by Google themselves? Also will the lack of updated public PR info from Google effect the ability for Moz to calculate PA and DA?? Look forward to your replies on this,
Industry News | | sanj50500 -
How can i discover how many of my pages have been indexed by google?
I am currently in the process of trying to produce a report for my corporation and this is a metric that i cannot seem to find on OpenSiteExplorer. Could anyone help?
Industry News | | CF20150 -
Is there a way to get a list (backlink profile) of all tiny url's that point to my site or a competitors site?
I have noticed that most all links you find in all the major back link profile tools such as OSE or GWM, etc... do not show tiny url's. If there is a service that shows all the tiny urls pointing to your site, can someone please share. It has already been proven that tiny url's do pass link juice, so with that being said... if there is no way to find all the tiny urls that point to a site, wouldn't it be a great strategy to create all my back links with tiny url's to mask my profile from competitors? Thanks!
Industry News | | johnd57890 -
SEO Risks for redirecting sites
Hey Everyone, I've tried searching for this question, but am not exactly sure what keywords to search for so I'm probably missing the resources if they already exist... My client has had duplicated sites for years, and after multiple penalizations of those sites I was finally able to convince him to consolidate them into a "mega-site". Currently, he has a main domain, a geo-subdomain for each office location under the main domain, and a geo-domain for each office location. We plan on redirecting each geo-domain to the corresponding geo-subdomain. So, the final result will be one main domain, and a sub-domain for each office location. I'm looking for any information regarding tracking SEO data after the redirects are in place, how to guard against potential drops in SERPs, what's the smartest strategy to implement, etc... My client is very sensitive to his sites' SEO data, so if anyone has any SEO-related advice regarding redirecting sites it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Industry News | | Level2Designs0 -
Same Hosting IP - Will it hurt same type of business ranking?
Hi, I am curious if example: There is 2 plumbing company and both using the same Singapore hosting
Industry News | | chanel27
and same IP, Will Google give less ranking to these 2 plumbing sites because Google might think that they are the same company and they are duplicate website even when their content is totally different. Does Google rank different hosting IP address better for the same business?0 -
Subdomains seen as one site
Earlier this month Google announced that sub-domains are now
Industry News | | AlanMosley
be treated as one site. At first I thought this was good news as I like to use
sub-domains for separation of categories and the like. But what about links
from one sub-domain to the other, they uised to be external links now they are
internal links. If you don’t have many external links, I would say that the
cross sub-domain links would have been important, if you have a lot of external
links then the flow of link juice would be of more benefit. I think overall its
is a good thing. Does anyone have any opinions about this or know of any writings
on the subject since this announcement? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html0 -
What is the best site-map software?
I am in the beginning stages of building a website and would like to know the site-mapping software for organizing my company's ideas. Any recommendations are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Industry News | | canadianplum0