Fixing Lost Google Rankings

[baseballcube]

Quick background: I was a highly ranked baseball web site, ranking top 10 for almost all non-superstar Major Leaguers until 2011 when my site lost rankings for internal pages. I dug my head in the sand for a long time, depressed about rankings and nothing changed except for a couple of 3 day periods where rankings appeared better and then went away again. This made me even more depressed!

Fast forward to today where I realized that in Webmaster Tools, I had about 30,000 Server Errors and 20,000 Not found errors. I have moved my content a few times over the years without so much as a 301 redirect. Any redirect was a 302 using ASP's response.redirect.

I've been digging into the errors and trying to clean up the errors and redirecting everything to the new pages. I've been at it for about 5 days now and I'm not sure if I'm on the right track to recouping my rankings and i'm not sure how long it will take. WMT only gives me a 1000 each day for each error type and I've managed to wittle the list down by about 1000 each day.

Questions:

1. How long does it take until Google handles 301s
2. Would 60,000+ errors (500 and 404) cause me to lose rankings?
3. I also have lots of more than 30,000 pages of duplicate content. This might be cleaned up with my 301s though.
4. Anything else I can do?

Any help would be terrific.

[edited by: tedster at 7:30 pm (utc) on Mar 27, 2012]

[garyr_h]

1. That depends on the crawl. It seems to be about 3 weeks for some pages, some longer.

2. I've heard different answers to this question. Cutts has stated that it doesn't hurt you, but why not fix it anyway? Those 404 and 500 errors are caused because people are linking to those pages. Fix it, it is free links.

3. Yes, clean it up with 301 and change what you can.

4. Add content. Panda is about content. If you can add something to your pages, do so. For a site like yours, it should be easy. Look at your competitors, what are they offering that you aren't? What can you offer that they aren't? Do that.

[bhartzer]

Baseballcube, you should not rely on Google Webmaster Tools to find all of your server's errors. Those are readily available to you via your own site's server log files.

By looking at your log files and using tools to analyze those, you can see where the most errors are occurring and fix those first--rather than fixing errors that are not driving much traffic to your site.

If there's one error that is occurring 10,000 times a day, then you need to fix that one first--then fix the ones that have only 10 or 2 or 1 error a day.

[CainIV]

1. How long does it take until Google handles 301s

Weeks, depending on the depth of crawl to the website

2. Would 60,000+ errors (500 and 404) cause me to lose rankings?

Quite possibly.

3. I also have lots of more than 30,000 pages of duplicate content. This might be cleaned up with my 301s though.

Would definitely work on that immediately.

4. Anything else I can do?

Build high quality, trusted links and take a review of all content to ensure it is high quality and rewrite if necessary.

[baseballcube]

Thanks everyone for the help. I believe i have a good content site already and i'm more worried about why I was suddenly pulled out of the rankings despite 10 years of existence and lots of inbound links and a pretty good name in the baseball industry.

[petehall]

I've recently suffered a small drop on one of my sites.

To my alarm, I noticed Google has been indexing URLs both with and without the / on the end of subfolders.

This has without a doubt been causing me an issue, as the two page versions receive a page title alteration and a duplicate penalty of some sort.

I suppose someone has been linking to the pages without the forward slash. Either that or Google now requests both?!

Anyway I've now 301'd any URL without the slash... and am hoping this will make an improvement.

I am currently very annoyed with myself as never normally miss such a basic error.

Now time for more content...

[netmeg]

You definitely sound like you have some technical issues you need to clear up, but if I were you, I would also match my ranking drops against the Panda updates to see if there is any correlation there too. You may have more than one set of issues to deal with.