NOINDEXED my home page - How long will recovery take?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

I goofed big time. About two months ago I accidentally meta NOINDEX,FOLLOW the home page of one of my sites. I just discovered and changed it yesterday. Huh... so THAT'S why my rankings have been dropping...

Does anyone have experience on how long recovery might take? Is there anything that can be done to
speed up" recovery?

If you have any recent experience, tips, or warnings about this, please share them here. (Or, if you have also made this mistake, please post about it here so that I don't feel like I am the only one who has ever done this.)

[Pjman]

Many of my clients mess around like that, so I have some experience with this. I watched about a dozen recover.

Depends on how big your site is and PR of your home page is a decent indicator.

Your site was the equivalent of offline to SEs.

I find PR 4 or greater to recover from mistakes like that within a month. <PR 4 could take up to 3 months.

[netmeg]

Eh, I did that once, came back in hours. YMMV, but if you're crawled reasonably regularly, you should jump back in before too long.

[Planet13]

Thank You, Pjman and netmeg.

Since my PR is quite low, would you suggest getting links to the home page in order to help speed up things?

Or would that be asking for trouble?

[netmeg]

I don't think it's going to necessarily help you get the page back in; you might want to do that for other reasons. Check how you're being crawled in GWT, and keep an eye out.

My developer recently (as in at the end of March) accidentally noindexed almost a thousand taxonomy URLS for about ten days; when we discovered and fixed, most of them were back in 3.

[Planet13]

@netmeg:

Check how you're being crawled in GWT, and keep an eye out.

Can I ask how I should keep an eye out? Just watch to see that it is being crawled? Or should I search for the domain name in google? Or search for a particular phrase that is only to be found on the home page?

...accidentally noindexed almost a thousand taxonomy URLS for about ten days...

Pardon my ignorance, but Can I ask what a "taxonomy URL" is? Does it differ from just a regular URL?

Thanks in advance.

[crobb305]

Planet13, I wonder if this will help? Not sure if this only applies to deletions that occurred using the Removal Tool, or if it even matters. You may be able to get it reindexed this way. I'm not 100% certain: [google.com...]

***added: After reading more closely, it says to navigate to the "Removed content tab" so I don't think it will work in your case. I think you can only use that link to reindex content that you deleted with the removal tool. It may come in handy for others though who may not now about it. Thought it would help, but it may not apply to a general noindex.

If it's any consolation, I have seen noindexed pages come back very quickly upon changing to index.

[Pjman]

@Planet13

Yes, fresh links will speed it up a bit. I was able to get one of my clients (PR 2) back in 10 days after they linked the hell out of it from their other web properties.

[Planet13]

@crobb305:

Thank you for the tip. I will keep it in mind.

@Pjman:

Thank you for the input and the encouragement.

[netmeg]

Can I ask how I should keep an eye out? Just watch to see that it is being crawled? Or should I search for the domain name in google? Or search for a particular phrase that is only to be found on the home page?

Well you can certainly check to see if it's in Google, just site:example.com (if it's the home page) or try typing in your domain name in quotes.

But you can also look in GWT under Diagnostics and then Crawl Stats to see if Google is still crawling your site pretty regularly. They don't give you exact numbers, but there is a graph.

(the taxonomy urls are just some structural urls on one of my sites, similar to categories)