Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
It's been 6-8 weeks since we completed those changes and results have not returned.
Has anyone experienced this?
Has anyone made these fixes and had their results restored?
Is the entire domain penalized? i.e. do you now only rank for your site name?
Are you on Apache or the crap one (MSN)
[edited by: Pirates at 12:32 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2006]
[edited by: Whitey at 12:49 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2006]
Is the entire domain penalized? i.e. do you now only rank for your site name?
On one site, it is mostly indexed, we only rank for our "unique" site name. All other results are filtered towards the bottom of the results, where under normal circumstances we would be at the top, based on content, title tag [ unique ], IBL's and meta description [ unique]/
stevexyz- No - i think we should hold and wait for more inputs and experiences to come in. You may have triggered something, but may have taken a necessary first step.
Some people also think they have fixed their sites, but they appear not to have identified all of the issues described in g1smd's posts [webmasterworld.com...]
It's possible there are other things that need doing on those sites , plus we don't yet understand the restoration process, ie are filters applied , is there a delay process
Once the algorithms are changed, it's my guess other elements can be effected in the equation. What you are all describing are small sites [ compared to ours ] where the weighting ratio appears to be an issue, which is why it's your actions that have tripped the filter.
- This is just a hunch. We need more input.
[edited by: Whitey at 1:01 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2006]
My SEO doesn't think we're in a loop or else he thinks we would have noticed it.
What do you mean "THE REQUEST"
But there is something deliberate and unusual when our results are being "filtered" on very weak and unique terms. I also think we are not "established" like you, we are "restoring" ourselves and I'm not sure how Google treats this process - but thanks for the inputs, they may prove to be correct.
This example works on index.html used on homepage and subfolders. No apache loop.
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ $1 [R=permanent,L]
[edited by: tedster at 2:55 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2006]
Be even more thorough if you want to, and monitor the server headers with Firefox plus the Live HTTP Headers extension. It is either working right or it isn't. In this case, opinion doesn't enter into it.
I tend to think that it's temporary. (Maybe you redirected the version of your homepage that Google thinks is the primary.) But as long as Googlebot is seeing what it should, then everything should get sorted out eventually.
Google is displaying the index.html and the / Version on the Serps on the same btw. better position then ever.
I changed that internal linking on about 8 000 Pages.
I don't used any Rewrite Rule or other stuff - i changed only the Linking Structure.
[webmasterworld.com...]
That code will work but is not optimum. If you also have a 301 redirect from non-www to www then for domain.com/index.html you will have created a redirection chain. You will get to the correct place in two steps instead of one:
domain.com/index.html --> www.domain.com/index.html --> www.domain.com/
OR
domain.com/index.html --> domain.com/ --> www.domain.com/
Which order the chain occurs, depends on whether your code does the check for index pages or for non-www URLs first.
A redirection chain is not a good idea. You have a URL that issues a 301 redirect pointing to another URL which issues yet another 301 redirect. This needs to be avoided.
To correct this issue, the check for index pages should also force the domain to the www version in the rewrite, and the index check (which is domain insensitive) should occur before any check for non-www URLs:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html?\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
First, this forces all index pages, both index.html and index.htm to / for both non-www and www, and forces them all to be on www. The redirect woks for index pages both in the root and in any folders, and the redirect preserves the folder name in the redirect.
Secondly, for all pages that are on non-www the other redirect forces the domain to be www. This second directive is never used by index pages as the first directive will have already converted all of them.
See also: [webmasterworld.com...]
First, 301 redirect so pages served only as www.example.com/
Second, all internal links changed to full URL http://www.example.com/
Third, changed default homepage file served by the server from index.htm to home.htm AND emptied index.htm of all text and code, and then just added a HTML link to http://www.example.com/ This was done to ensure that Google suddenly does not find that page vanished. This just makes it empty, and whatever links etc are coming to index.htm from other sites, allow their PR to go to http://www.example.com/ I know it really is not needed (in a technical sense, 301 redirect is supposed to handle that). Did this also to ensure that in case I have still left a few internal links to index.htm unchanged by mistake.
After a couple of months, removed index.htm altogether.
Faced no problem at all.
Of course, with our without this, sites can go up and down, lose rankings and gain them back for quite a few other reasons g1smd has mentioned elsewhere.
[edited by: tedster at 6:04 pm (utc) on Oct. 9, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]
Using Xenu LinkSleuth you can very easily see any internal links pointing to the wrong URL, as they will be listed in the "URLs which Redirect" section of the report.
I also use sitemaps, so on those pages where I made the fix I changed the priority to a higher number in hopes that they would get crawled more quickly. I think it worked because the last crawl of these inner pages was in January and I made the fix the third or fourth week of August. The pages were crawled within three weeks and my site was back in on Sept 15 or 16. After the pages were crawled I adjusted the priorty of those pages back down. The crawl could have also been coincidence!
As I said though, I made so many improvements I'm not sure of the weight of this particular factor...
