How soon will Google reindex "lost" pages after technical fix?

[Lenny2]

On the 22nd I had my programmer canonical tag our secondary and tertiary category sorting pages back to the main category page... to try and reduce the number of indexed pages in Google (we were hit in Feb. Panda update.) Long story short he sent all the pages (including the actual category pages) to domains on the site that don't exist... (it was a major programming snafu).

We've fixed the canonical tags and everything is in order... anybody have any experience on how long it takes to get re-indexed in the places we were previously? Has anybody experienced anything where they made a stupid mistake like this and didn't get their rankings back?

It took Google about 4 days to stop sending us traffic... Google typically has our site indexed within a couple of hours of putting new content... Though, i've never had to try and index hundreds of pages at once.

Worst case scenario for us is that Google doesn't put us back to our previous rankings... My line of thought is that nothing has changed on the pages... they have the same linking off site... same content on the site... etc. etc.; Am I just being hopeful that we get our rankings back? Or have you experienced a re-indexing after some similar experience?

[Andem]

to domains on the site that don't exist

So your site is setup across e.g. example1.com, example2.com, example3.com etc? You should set them all up in Google Webmaster Tools and look at the diagnostics.

Am I just being hopeful that we get our rankings back? Or have you experienced a re-indexing after some similar experience?

You should come back to regular rankings soon, once Google has had a chance to reindex your pages and recalculate their rankings based on no canonical tag. Shouldn't be an issue and may take a couple or more weeks.

[Lenny2]

Thanks Andem. That is what I was hoping... So far it's been a day since the fix... and we've seen many pages get indexed sans the previous rankings. Hopefully the rankings recalibrate sooner than later!

[Andem]

Depending on how many pages, I suspect you'll see a return soon enough. It all depends on how often Google visits your site and how important it believes it is. If it's 50 pages, expect a bounce back sooner. If you've got like 5,000 pages, I'd give it some time. Google is so finicky these days so YMMV. Good luck!

[g1smd]

The changes should have gone through several

plan - implement - test

stages.

Looks like the planning, and exact definitions as to what was to be done, were botched. The implementation was surely botched.

However, the worst part of it all appears to be that there was inadequate testing. This error should have been picked up within five minutes by anyone with a clue and with the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox installed.

This wasn't just a programming failure, it was a serious failure in the way you run your business.

[Andem]

g1smd is 100% correct. Even though it doesn't have anything to do with clean-up like the OP asked about, whoever is responsible should be fired immediately.

[Lenny2]

I agree... I totally f'd that up. I am not sophisticated enough (yet) for my business... and after years of running a successful website am only now figuring all this technical stuff out... It took a slap from Panda to wake me up! Plan - Implement - Test... Got it. Lesson learned.

On another note, we are seeing the pages back in the index... not with the same rankings... but, they are back. One interesting observation is that we are seeing the pages back up for other odd rankings that I've never seen before... it's like Google has reclassified the page(s) all together. I can only hope that we get our old rankings back. But, in the meantime it is very interesting that we are seeing new, never really seen before rankings... and traffic.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Even the best laid plans sometimes go awry, I once loaded a robots.txt exclusion for my entire site and it began losing traffic immediately. When I discovered the problem, a cache copy my browser happily set as default on my behalf, it took 3 days to go from 5% traffic back to 100%.

Fix problems immediately, even if it means taking the site offline for a day. It's when something lingers that it becomes more permanent.

[Lenny2]

In our case it was about 4 - 5 days before we fixed the issue. Our traffic didn't start sliding until the 3rd - 4th day. We fixed it 3 days ago... and we still haven't seen traffic back up to normal.. however, the serps are definitely being improved for us. Will report back how long (if ever) we get that traffic back!

[g1smd]

Hopefully it will be only days to weeks.

Some errors can take months, but this hopefully is not one of them.

[Lenny2]

So far:

28th - google loss 64%
29th - google loss 54%
30th - google loss 36%
1st - google loss 37%

Seeing the re-indexed pages slowly come back in the serps... but, not anywhere close to what we had two weeks ago...

[kellyman]

I did something similar and never did recover, but i was offline a lot longer than you....

be patient wait 4-6 weeks, if its not come back by then, there may be another issue look into,

[enigma1]

The thing to remember is that if your site is setup correctly you don't need canonical tags simply because you don't have canonical problems.

If you have SEO urls you should be using them, instead of exposing parameters differently ending up in the same page or using the different ordering and then trying to shift the problem elsewhere or hide it. IMO you should setup some logging mechanism to track where the canonical problems originate from and fix them.