Google Delivers Serious Blow

[bfree74]

My company's website has taken quite a tumble since February. Where we were once ranked in the top 10 in SERPs for our main keyword we have dropped 3/4 pages back. The only changes we made for that keyterm was adding a few more keyterms and links, but we did not over saturate the page with our keyword.

Google also seems to be misreading our site in some way and we are not sure why. Google shows our link total at 140. We have more than 1500 links. Google is also showing that we only have 260 pages indexed and we should have over 10,000.

Does anyone have any advice, suggestions or comments. We have sat on this and tried to let Google sort things out, but nothing is getting better and pages continue to fall. We have been using SEO on our site for almost 2 years now and this is the first major hit Google has delivered us and we are kind of baffled.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Well 1st thing I checked was to see if you'd taken care of the canonical issue.
Your site has a problem there. I don't know if Google is still having probems with it but they were for a long time and I lost all my rankings and was dropped last year due to that issue I think too.

Whats canonical mean? Google could be seeing www.denverfabrics and http://denverfabrics as 2 different mirror image sites. You need to re-direct the http site to the www site. I'm not certain thats the problem.

Here's some info from Webmasterworld. Google canonical - Google Search

Again I have not kept up with it lately and am not sure it's even still an issue, but it could not hurt to fix it. Just be sure you do the redirect right. Have your tech guys look into it.

IF that isn't the issue - well sometimes Google just changes algo or has a hiccup. I know it's so hard to take. Nor sure what you can do. Many say if you haven't done anything wrong to just wait it out and you'll come back.

 

[StephenR]

Again I have not kept up with it lately and am not sure it's even still an issue, but it could not hurt to fix it. Just be sure you do the redirect right. Have your tech guys look into it.

Yep it's still an issue. Google see's both of these URL's as distinctly different from one another. Not forcing Google to index your site in one distinct way will also dilute your page rank.

Stick the following code into your .htaccess file to fix this issue. ONLY do this if you know what you're doing and are familiar with .htaccess files.

The example will make all requests go to www.yourdomain.com. Simply reverse the example if you want all requests to go to yourdomain.com (without the www).

Code for .htaccess: (change to YOUR domain)

RewriteEngine on
#Redirect http://putyourdomainhere.com to http://www.putyourdomainhere.com RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^putyourdomainhere.com 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.putyourdomainhere.com/$1 [r=301,L]

This happened to me last year as well. I went from 130K pages indexed to roughly 200. That pretty much blew!

Not to be the harbinger of doom and gloom but it took Google about 2 months to straighten this out and I had to appeal for a reindex of my site. Somewhere in the forum is a thread on how to request this from Google. I'll go look for it.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Stephen. I could not remember how to do it and didn't want to give the wrong advice. When I went through this over a year ago I had SO many people give conflicting advice about the best way to do it.

 

[StephenR]

Yep, I remember that. It was such a hassle. Wasn't that right after the Big Daddy push came out?

 

[bfree74]

We re-directed our site.com to www.site.com today and sit back, wait and hope that helps us out some and gets our pages re-indexed. Thanks for the advice.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Good luck. Hope you pop back up in the serps!

 

[StephenR]

One more thing for you as well. I don't know if you're using Google sitemaps or not but if you're not I highly recommend a tool called XML Sitemaps. I've been using it since it hit the streets as you'll see when you check it out.

I highly recommend this tool and use on all of my sites (besides my blogs). It has a slew of customization features to streamline your sitemaps. In addition, it will create sitemaps in: .xml .(gz), .ror, .html and .txt (for Yahoo). All for the paltry fee of 14.99.

Yes their are free sitemap generators out there but I've found this to be the easiest to use and most robust. Especially for medium to large sites.

Unlimited XML, Text, HTML Sitemap Generator - XML Sitemaps

 

[bfree74]

While looking under our Google Webmaster tools, we noticed that we have a considerable amount of HTTP errors, but when we run a check on our system we find nothing. Same thing with not-found URLs. Are these external links that aren't working or do you think our tools aren't picking up on the problems?

 

[StephenR]

Find out what errors are showing up from within your backoffice and then check them against what Google has identified here: Webmaster Help Center - What are HTTP errors?

That may shed some light on the matter.