Inadvertently Released our Blog and Caused a Penalty

[herculano]

Hi Folks,

We were testing our new blog system by posting several posts, however it should have been blocked by the robots.txt to prevent it from being indexed by the search engine, but we made the mistake of not migrating the robots.txt.

The effect was we got penalized due to our many blog test posts, most of our pages are at the very last page of google's index page 40-50.

We had created a WMT account for the site and had the directory removed and included the correct robots.txt to prevent the directory from being indexed, as well as included a meta noindex.

So what should we do next to get our rankings back?

- request a reconsideration?
- wait a week and see if it comes back on it's own?
- other options - wait longer, etc...

thanks!

[klark0]

I doubt it was the blog system that caused it.

When did the drop happen?

[herculano]

about 5-7 days after the blog was released, the test generated about 20% of the site's total pages... I have to mention that the site doesn't have a lot of pages, but the static pages are constantly updated...

it has pr4 and pr5 pages...

[seoskunk]

I think you should find it recovers ok, else do a reinclusion request explaining what happened

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Ouch Herculano, it sounds like you insta-panda-slapped yourself with too many low quality pages.

The only thing you can do is get the setup correct, ensure your site is how you want it, and submit a request to have the urls you didn't want indexed removed.

[herculano]

quick update on this... for other folks who might make the same mistake as we did...

I put a robot.txt restriction for my blog and a noindex on all my blog pages, I decided to wait before I do a reconsideration request, after about a week, seems to have some improvement, some of our pages instead of appearing on page 48-51 on G, they started appearing on page 4 slightly lower then pre-deranking postion of page 1 or 2, but definitely good improvement.