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Recovery from Canonical Mistake?

         

The_Ralph

8:11 pm on Dec 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



We screwed up and mis-applied the canonical element. Every page on the site had the canonical element saying the home page was the canonical page.

Pages started to drop out of Google's index. Within two weeks we removed all canonical elements. I figured the pages would slowly return to the index. They returned slowly for a few weeks, but then stopped.

Many of my best pages are no longer indexed. It has been three months. These are good pages, substantially different from the home page, many with decent inbound links from other sites.

Is there anything I can do to get these pages to return to the Google index?

g1smd

10:44 pm on Dec 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Rather than "remove" the canonical element, it should have been "replaced" with a corrected version.

It seems like Google has "cached" your data, and doesn't delete it when you remove the tag. A replacement tag might have "overwritten" the faulty data.

I would try that solution first.