A Blog Lesson Learned, But How Do I Recover?

[Brent_W]

I had (key here is had) a blog that was ranking very high for the main one word keyword that I was optimized for and was #1 for several others.

And then I made big mistake, without even thinking about it:

I changed my permalink structure!

All of the sudden I noticed my blog vanished from the first many pages of G. I logged into webmaster tools and realized that when I did that, the pages that were indexed were now coming up with a 404....and there were a lot.

So I went back to the original structure in hopes to regain what I had lost.

Over a month later, still nothing.

So this is where I come to the forum for help: Is there any way to recover from this? Will fresh content/link building do the trick, or should I look into something else?

[mahasaya]

Ouch, yes, that can hurt! Sorry for your loss.

I guess you re-submitted the old sitemaps again? I would think is is now only a matter of the spiders coming back and a little time, sometimes it can take a bit longer than a month.

Relevant content and good optimization is what it is, the machine should recognize it for what it was, I don't think you should panic just yet.

Have you done rank searches for the terms you were on the n°1 spots for since re-establishing the site as it was?

You might find you still appear in your old positions as before!

Hope all will settle.

[zapseo]

Since you are smart enough to use Google Webmaster tools, you might also notice that Google has a place (somewhere within there) where you can ask them to re-evaluate your site.

This is useful for not only situations like yours, but also for people who happened to get their sites infected or hacked and dropped from Google's index.

And yes, as the previous poster mentioned -- did you re-build your sitemap and re-submit?

[ezminisites]

Originally Posted by zapseo

Since you are smart enough to use Google Webmaster tools, you might also notice that Google has a place (somewhere within there) where you can ask them to re-evaluate your site.

This is useful for not only situations like yours, but also for people who happened to get their sites infected or hacked and dropped from Google's index.

And yes, as the previous poster mentioned -- did you re-build your sitemap and re-submit?

I totally agree with you on this one. Hence, maybe even explaining a bit what happened.

Cheers!

[Preben Frenning]

Get the platinum seo plugin for wordpress. It automatically sets up a redirect for your old posts when you change the structure

At least if I remember right. I did the same thing on my own blog (imarketingblog) to include category in the url, and whenever I clicked a link to an old blogpost from somewhere it got redirected to the new, correct url. Also, the redirects it makes passes the link juice too, meaning you won't lose anything.

I hope that helps,
- Preben

[Brent_W]

Originally Posted by mahasaya

Have you done rank searches for the terms you were on the n°1 spots for since re-establishing the site as it was?

You might find you still appear in your old positions as before!

Hope all will settle.

I have....and nothing there. That really sucks to, I had a lot of hits on major keywords.

Since you are smart enough to use Google Webmaster tools, you might also notice that Google has a place (somewhere within there) where you can ask them to re-evaluate your site.

This is useful for not only situations like yours, but also for people who happened to get their sites infected or hacked and dropped from Google's index.

And yes, as the previous poster mentioned -- did you re-build your sitemap and re-submit?

As soon as I discovered the issue, I switched back to the original format and resubmitted. I did not notice the site reconsideration. Is that a manual review or do they simply crawl it again?

And webmaster tools seems a bit flaky to me at times. It says I rank on page #1 for quite a few keywords (including some of the terms I used to), but when I do the search, nothing. I have backlinks showing up, but not my site.

[sbucciarel]

I've always used Dean's Permalink Migration Plugin if I wanted to change the permalinks. Does the trick.

[Rob Hall]

The main problem is that the backlinks which were once pointing to the specific locations will now be lost.

This means the link juice that was pointing to your site is also lost if it's heading to a 404.

What you've got to do is put in place a 301 redirect for each page that webmaster tools is reporting as broken, that way you save ALL of your link juice! :-)

There's an absolute ton of information on 301's and how to implement them by searching Google :-)

All the best!
Rob

[Preben Frenning]

Quote from the admin panel of Platinum SEO plugin:
"Automatically do 301 redirects for permalink changes:*checkbox*"

So yes, it makes every permalink change into a 301 redirect, as well as many other SEO related tasks.

[zapseo]

Originally Posted by Brent_W

I have....and nothing there. That really sucks to, I had a lot of hits on major keywords.



As soon as I discovered the issue, I switched back to the original format and resubmitted. I did not notice the site reconsideration. Is that a manual review or do they simply crawl it again?

Actually, I don't know ... however, Google does have a LOT of google groups on various parts of their technology which might be worth exploring for an answer.

And webmaster tools seems a bit flaky to me at times. It says I rank on page #1 for quite a few keywords (including some of the terms I used to), but when I do the search, nothing. I have backlinks showing up, but not my site.

Well -- as Google changes, rankiings are not so universal as before -- depending more and more upon such things as your location, browsing history and probably some other factors that don't come to mind at the moment.

Live JoyFully!

Judy Kettenhofen

Proudly appearing in "Warriors For Hire"