Category pages disappeared after adding breadcrumbs plugin by yoast

[fsmobilez]

i added breadcrumbs plugin by yoast on 26 june and on 27 june my site traffic dropped 70 %, i can see that main category pages of my site are not showing for popular keywords, instead other pages are showing on page 4 and above on google

like category/page1 /
also posts are showing

when i do search like site:www.example.com

main category pages are showing their but when searching for keywords they are not

i immediately removed this plugin after seeing traffic loss but that was too late. almost one week gone but no signs of recovery.

my site is about 8 years old with original content and ranking good since years.

can some one help what to do to ?

[aakk9999]

Firstly, to me it seems that installing plugin on 26th of June and losing 70% of the traffic a day later is far too soon to be caused by Google reacting on the plugin. The only way I can see this happening is that as a result of a plugin the server responded with 404/similar. Even blocking a site by robots.txt needs longer for Google to drop it. So it may be a coincidence.

Have you checked your server logs to make sure there is no server errors / server returning 404 where it should not?

Have you checked your Google Webmaster Tools? Specifically search queries (impressions, number of queries, average position, clicks). You can compare a week before 26th with a week after and compare figures.

I would also check number of pages indexed, HTML improvements (can show duplicate titles/descriptions), blocked by robots section and errors section.

Also, should it have been a plugin, have your pages been re-crawled so that Google can see there are no breadcrumbs there?

[incrediBILL]

I too find it hard to believe that a a bread crumb plugin caused such a rapid drop in ranking.

The only thing I could think that might've cause a problem, if any, was that technically you did install a new set of links at the top of the page which may have possibly triggered something in the algo to change your ranking but it seems unlikely but you never know.

This could easily be proven if you showed the actual page URLs crawled from the time it was installed until the time it was removed and compare those pages to see if their keywords didn't rank.

Have you had a recovery since?

Also, could it be possible the timing of the holiday week for the first week of July was responsible for the drop and you panicked over mere coincidence in bad timing of events?

[not2easy]

That stand-alone plugin was superseded when the same functionality was added to the WP-SEO plugin from the same developer(although it is still available separately). It requires settings and it defaults to an empty string if you add no prefix. It is a sort of touchy plugin to use and there are some warnings shown before activation about making sitewide changes to your URL structure on established sites. That said, I don't see it being the cause of a noticeable change in ranking that fast. I would follow some of the suggestions already mentioned and take a look at the sitemap you are currently producing vs. an older copy.

[fsmobilez]

Have you checked your server logs to make sure there is no server errors / server returning 404 where it should not?
Yes i have checked server log no 404 error.

Have you checked your Google Webmaster Tools? Specifically search queries (impressions, number of queries, average position, clicks). You can compare a week before 26th with a week after and compare figures.

Yes its dropped too much

I would also check number of pages indexed, HTML improvements (can show duplicate titles/descriptions), blocked by robots section and errors section.

Wmt showing this
Web pages
85 Submitted
15,413 Indexed

Coz i have clicked only on category link and clicked re submit sitemap for categories only

Also, should it have been a plugin, have your pages been re-crawled so that Google can see there are no breadcrumbs there?

Yes plugin removed and i can see google cached pages with out breadcrumb

[fsmobilez]

The only thing I could think that might've cause a problem, if any, was that technically you did install a new set of links at the top of the page which may have possibly triggered something in the algo to change your ranking but it seems unlikely but you never know.

Yes i added breadcrumb code on the very top of the site.

This could easily be proven if you showed the actual page URLs crawled from the time it was installed until the time it was removed and compare those pages to see if their keywords didn't rank.

Yes after adding breadcrumbs keywords didn't rank

Have you had a recovery since?

Till Now a big no

Also, could it be possible the timing of the holiday week for the first week of July was responsible for the drop and you panicked over mere coincidence in bad timing of events?

No thats ain't the issue. im 100% sure.

[incrediBILL]

Yes after adding breadcrumbs keywords didn't rank

I think you missed my point.

Just because you resubmit a new sitemap doesn't mean Google recrawls them immediately.

You have to check which pages were crawled vs. their keywords as I took a quick look at the site in your profile, assuming that's the site, and found category keywords ranking in the top 10 easily.

So if you have specific losses you need to correlate those to crawls while Yoast was present.

I don't think that's the problem, I think a change in the Google index algo might have played a factor here.

Happens all the time, Google spins the dials and things go South.

I wouldn't panic yet as stuff goes up and down all the time but putting Yoast in and taking Yoast out is also a bad signal as you're screwing around with your links in a major way which may make it much worse.

Unless the Yoast breadcrumbs used H!, H2, etc or something in the breadcrumbs I'm not sure what impact it could possible have.

I've never looked at those SEO plugins as I think they're all a BAD IDEA as I control my own SEO, it's not that complicated in the first place.