Bad SEO advise destroyed us

7 replies
  • SEO
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Due to bad advise from a SEO company we are today, several months later, still suffering immensely from made mistakes.

This happened: We have a site with millions of products. The product pages can be filtered by color, size, gender, category, brand, etc. Each of these variations has its own unique url. The number of variations are infinite. The bad advise we got from the SEO company led to hundreds of thousands of these pages beeing crawled by google. The internal links were DOFOLLOW but the target page (the product page) were marked as NOINDEX. So we were passing link value to pages that were NOINDEX. This has all been fixed today so that Google bot can not see the links to the URLs that we do not want them to index.

But there is still a huge problem. Google bot/crawler/indexer does not seem to forget all the hundreds of thousands of NOINDEX URLs it previously visited. Weeks ago we decided to open up another 7000 product urls for indexation (from 5000 to 12000). So we removed the NOINDEX on those pages, added links to them from other pages on the site and also added them to the sitemap. Google has visited/seen the new sitemap several times since then. So we assumed this would mean that Google bot would visit these urls, see that the NOINDEX directive is removed, and decide to index them. But no!

What happened was that we got warnings in Search Console: "Submitted URL marked noindex". But that was not true - sure they hade NOINDEX previously, but not today. So how do we get Google bot to actually go and look and see that the NOINDEX directive is gone? By starting the verification process in Search Console for this specific error? No that did not work. The verification process failed. It seems as if Google just relies on the old data they have for these 7000 URLS but cant bother to go and check to see if it has been changed. How can we make them go and see?
#advise #bad #destroyed #seo
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  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    The noindex tag should not have ever been used. This is handled with canonical URLs, not noindex.
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  • Profile picture of the author iamDavidHawkins
    Following Black Hat SEO will destroy any website, instead of following google guidelines will help you in terms of SEO for website gradually your business will increase.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by iamDavidHawkins View Post

      Following Black Hat SEO will destroy any website, instead of following google guidelines will help you in terms of SEO for website gradually your business will increase.
      It wasn't black hat. It was just stupid.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ben Scott Jr
    You may have to give Google more time to provide their latest update. It probably already crawled the pages again but it's not reflecting yet.
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  • Profile picture of the author wickieagentur
    You have too much page so the Google bots take time to crawl pages in bulk. Remove the robots.txt from the pages you want to index and create a sitemap manually and submit that again ni search console.
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  • Profile picture of the author adsinthehood
    That's sad. Google search console is a good indication of whats happening on the net so there still may be troubles with some pages.

    Google does take time to establish the new normal of your site but within a month it should start to see the changed pages.

    Usually when you get a warning from search console it often has a link (button) fix issues or see issues. That should have provided a fix path.

    There may be hidden pages that are causing the issue.

    Through Google tools you should be able to ask Google to look at the site again and then see if there still are issues.

    You may need to get a better online provider to fix any ongoing issues and you should utilize a better reporting system to catch these problems sooner.

    You should also get a online marketing provider that can optimize your product descriptions so product listing rank better in online search results for that product.
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  • Profile picture of the author kelly jhowse
    Do i have to put is as one by one?
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