Followup: numerous top serps problem

307 redirect worked...

[nevetS]

A while back, I had posted regarding a problem I had. I had inadvertently targeted some keywords in some templates that I used for a large number of my customer sites and several of my personal web sites. My unfortunate side effect was that I ended up taking over 5 pages of serps and I was worried about getting penalized by google since it was quite easy to figure out the origination of these sites. I was also a little worried about privacy issues since most of my web sites are family sites and while they don't mind being indexed by google, I don't think anyone wanted high volumes of anonymous traffic. (fine for a random person to see the family album, not fine for a thousand random people looking at it daily).

Anyhow my solution was to put a 307 redirect on all of these sites to a page explaining that the sites were taken down pending a redesign that would not take over the google results the way that I did.

The rankings survived the Austin update, but two days ago, all of the pages disappeared from the rankings. One day ago, I removed the redirect having updated all of the pages to remove the reference to my search term.

I'm not sure if google decided that the 307 temporary redirect was taking too long to fix and therefore removed the pages from the index, that it removed them from the index for the fact that they all ended up in the same place, or if someone filled out a spam report.

Whatever happened, I'm happy, and my rankings don't seem to have been otherwise adversely affected. (although for my most desirable terms they've been non-existant since austin).

I'm not certain that there is anything to be learned from this, but I thought I'd share my experience for those that were interested.