Big accident with a lot of indexed pages - Google is not happy

by 12 replies
15
Hi! I need some help because one of our engineers ****ed up very bad...

We had more than 500 pages indexed, we are a relatively new site but I think we have good content so Google was ok with our pages.

Most of this pages were profiles and had a url structure like /variableOne/variableTwo/variableThree

One of our engineers changed the url structure and with that, updated the sitemap.

The old url's starting throwing 404 because he didn't put any 301 redirection to the new ones and Google was not happy at all about this.

Google de inxeded most of the pages and now we have only 75 indexed and 10 of them are profiles.

This engineer was obviously at fault, but 2 weeks have passed and our indexed pages are still 75.

Any tips on this? We have put a lot of effort for this pages to be seo friendly but it seems google dont trust us anymore
Thanks!
#search engine optimization #accident #big #google #happy #indexed #lot #pages
  • So put in the 301 redirects.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Google stopped visiting the old url's. I guess it is because he gave up? We didn't knew about this because the engineer dint told us.
      • [2] replies
  • Make some little changes at your seo, than domain redirection
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Unfortunately these things take time. Google doesn't give forgiveness quickly. And this is not a penalty, so it's not something that you can submit for review. Here are the important things to do:
    1. Make sure that everything looks good in Google Webmaster Tools
    2. Make sure all the redirects are correctly in place (it's easy to make mistakes on this)
    3. If you don't have an XML site map, add one
    4. Work on your internal link strategy between the pages on the site. Use anchor text links.
    5. Make sure there are no other problems like noindex or nofollow tags on key pages on the site.

    Also, do you have good links coming into the site? Because if Google doesn't trust the site then they may deindex pages just on the basis of trust, not content.

    Hopefully this helps.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Banned




    It's a new site so it doesn't matter. Indexed doesn't mean ranked.

    ...and please stop saying engineer.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Did you resubmit the site map in Google Search Console?
  • Simple solution is 301 redirection,
    2nd simple solution, rename the urls back.
  • If you are not seeing a pickup of the new pages being indexed then there's a good possibility he made some other mistakes (broken links etc). suggestion s to do the redirect now are solid if you even know what ALL the old urls were. If not it's pointless.

    Redirects help for broken links or incoming links. There you have to map old to new
    I tend to agree with Yukon. If it's a new site it would normally correct itself. lIf that's not happening he may have messed up in other ways
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