Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've got a dynamic site with urls rewritten to be friendly. Many of these pages were ranking well in google search results, but all of a sudden over the last 8 days, they have dropped off completely. Most of them no longer show up on the search, only our home page does, which has the keywords that users search for.
I know of only one change made by our host on the 10th of January, which more or less coincides with the drop, but they are confident it has nothing to do with it. The change was the register_globals change which I know many hosts did upgrade.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance
Some Urls are not showing in the site command, others are but with no details (it just shows the url only, no text to describe). But also after messing around with it for a while and reading a lot more I've discovered the following:
I have been reading a lot, and have stumbled across the big daddy update issue. I have looked on the datacentre for big daddy, and within literally 5 minutes, the search results changes!
For example, right now one search brings up my specific prodcut url, but the same datacentre, 3 minutes earlier gave results where my product url wasn't even on any page. My home page is however, on page 2. It clearly is not as relevant to the search as my product page.
I can tell the search has been done ever so slightly differently, but I didn't do anything differently, nor do I know what the differences are. What does the "q" and the "hl" mean in:
[66.249.93.104...]
I dont know if it will return the same results for you, as they are both from the same datacentre but change data each type you search.
Thanks in advance
Seems strange huh?
<Sorry, no specifics.
See Terms of Service [webmasterworld.com]>
[edited by: tedster at 3:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 21, 2006]
That would be my first suspect, your new pages are Url only, your old PHP pages are supplemental.
IMO it could be (a) your old pages are still indexed and your new ones seen as duplicates, or (b) insufficient link juice to merit a proper re-indexing.
BTW, mentioning specifics is usually frowned-upon here....
ah, sorry, posted the same thing to another forum and they asked for specifics, so I thought it might help here too(lol!).
These urls were indexed fine before, one of the urls had a pagerank of 2, but now doesn't even show up with the domain name and the url name, but does show up on the cache, albeit the cache is from 4th Jan 06?
Also, seems weird that sometimes its in the index, sometimes not. Could it be that google is intermittently using different datacentres around at the moment?
Check for dupe content, stick a selection of phrases from different pages on G using quotes, and see what turns up....
-www.domain.com/dir/2345/earn-money/how-to-earn-money-online/
?
And whats more I've noticed that googlebot, who used to index me every day, now only seems to find the home page and the images?
The url it has now for the page I mentioned before, is a very very old one which no longer exists, but still works due to rewrite rules for SEO friendly urls.
Any ideas on what to do? Thanks.
Also noticed another thing that might (most probably is) relevant. My site uses a rewrite script to direct users to the home page (its an oscommerce site, so the home page is a "outside of the catalogue" page, and as such, is in another folder, not in the root. Any request that doesn't get a page or directory that is valid is redirected to the home page. Now thinking about it, I think this may be (very) bad?
it seems only googlebot image is properly going through my site, googlebot gets to my home page, and then stops. I'm thinking this could be the redirect script that it doesn't like?
Thanks again for all the responses.
And if so how long can these be - I am thinking about rewriting my product names but theu are way long with spaces, special chrs ect - would this upset the engines?
cheers
Maybe your website has been spam filtered due to "spammy" URL.
Anyway, just a hypothetical idea.
What exactly does a "spammy" URL look like?
arran.
What exactly does a "spammy" URL look like?
Something like this...
www.domain.com/dir/2345/earn-money/how-to-earn-money-online/
The term earn-money is listed twice in the URI string. There are four hyphens in the one directory name. For me, that is one too many.
The duplication of the earn-money would concern me. Although I doubt it would be the demise of your website. Check any redirects on your site with a server header tool and make sure they are returning the proper status codes.
Also, is your dynamic content accessible by using the dynamic URI and the static one? Possibly a duplicate content issue?
The same word is only duplicated, where the next tier has the same name as its mother, otherwise not. I don't *think* thats the issue since its been going on for ages and never been a problem.
One thing that I do think you may have hit on is the duplicate content. Just noticed one url that leads to the same as another, which the preferred url isn't in google index. So I guess she's dropping off those ones which are deemed duplicates. Ah. Time to start redirecting.
Thanks again for all the help. Any other ideas gladly received.
