Just lost hundreds of number 1 ranks with a noindex mistake

[realmaverick]

Several days ago, my coder made a change, to "noindex, follow" gallery pages greater than page 1. I checked and it worked exactly as outlined.

Today I checked my traffic and we've lost 20,000 visitors today. So I quickly checked my SERPS and almost all are gone.

Somehow, he screwed up his code after I checked and now every page has noindex, follow on them.

What are the chances of retaining my SERPS now that the issue is resolved?

[TheMadScientist]

In my experience they will bounce right back where they were when they are reindexed, usually within 7 days for me... I've seen it reported pages may not be included again after removing the noindex, but IMO and my experience this is not the case.

Just as an 'experience note' I've noindexed large sections of sites before (yes, once, uh, much for the same yours were lol) and they have always returned to the same positions as they previously held for me.

[realmaverick]

THS, many thanks for posting. Obviously no guarantee's in anything. But it's nice to have a real user experience.

I've got everything crossed. Thanks again.

[netmeg]

I accidentally noindexed the home page on a site last year. Came back within four hours after I fixed it. YMMV.

[deadsea]

I'm not going to be quite as optimistic as others. A mistake like this can cost you lots of traffic. Most of your rankings will come back, but you will probably have a drop that will take months to fully recover. I have three cases, two of which are first hand.

* SEOMoz ran an experiment where they canonicalized all of a blog to the homepage for a month. Lost 50% of traffic during that month. Once they fixed the problem the only got back half way to where they had been. 25% long term drop.

* A client of mine made the same mistake as you but for a month. Same result as SEOMoz.

* A client of mine was rendering nearly blank pages to googlebot due to a bug. Was fixed after 3 days. Lost 20% of traffic initially, again once fixed only regained half of what was lost.

My conclusion is that Google has a "site quality and stability" metric that it uses to rank web sites. Mistakes like this can be very costly to rankings. It appears that it may take up to a year for your site to be once again considered fully stable by this algorithm.

[Shaddows]

noindex just keeps things out of SERPs, but are otherwise treated as normal pages by the algo. As such, there should be no long term effect.

In the examples above, SEOMoz is telling G something fundamental about the content, meaning its "score" will change. Ditto the blank page issue. The "same mistake but for a month" may or may not have been identical- putting "noindex,nofollow" or excluding from robots.txt would have serious long-term effects.

[freejung]

My conclusion is that Google has a "site quality and stability" metric

While I agree that the noindex error shouldn't hurt you once you remove it, I also agree with the above statement by deadsea -- it just doesn't apply in this case.

I recently had a glitch in which my site was replaced with a single page of content different from the normal homepage, for about an hour (my webhost messed up, and I switched webhosts a few days later). During that hour, the page was crawled and indexed and my homepage and many internal pages were completely nuked out of the SERPs.

It took weeks to get all of my pages reindexed, and the homepage is still in the #2 spot for my main keyword, for which I've been #1 for years. Most of my internal page rankings appear to have recovered.

My point is simply that it seems to me, from this experience and others, that even a brief lapse of stability can have lasting negative effects.

In the current case, however, the pages are all still there, with the same content and returning 200, they just say "noindex." So the site isn't unstable, you just told Google to remove it. Once you tell it otherwise, you should be fine.

[deadsea]

For the record, my client did put "noindex,follow" on far to many pages.

[Robert Charlton]

realmaverick - I'm curious whether your pages have come back.

In all cases I've seen where a site was accidentally noindexed, removing "noindex" sufficed to restore rankings fairly quickly. One such site had been noindexed for a few weeks.

As several here have pointed out, noindex shouldn't confuse Google about a page or site's position or reputation in the structure of the web. It's possible, though, that new algos which consider user response as a factor may react differently, unless Google is programmed to take such accidents into account.

I doubt that a few days would be enough to matter. Are you back, and, if so, how long did it take?

[incrediBILL]

Somehow, he screwed up his code after I checked and now every page has noindex, follow on them.

BWAHAHAHA did the same thing just the other day and it all bounced right back as soon as it was recrawled.

Had another snafu that took over a week to clean up which was a 302 redirect to clean up some bad search criteria going to the wrong page, I was changing the criteria and redirecting it where it should be, something went haywire in a certain condition and a bunch of pages accidentally went 302 back to a single page I didn't intend. Many PR 4 pages started disappearing out of the index like crazy.

Google took a while to sort that back out but all went right back.

[dickbaker]

I did that to a section of my site (not the whole site) a couple of years ago. It was two weeks before I noticed that something was wrong. I changed the tags to index, and my rankings came back in a week or so.

[netmeg]

There must be something going around; my dev accidentally NOINDEXED around a thousand pages last week. D'oh! Fixed it on Saturday, coming back now.