Accidental Canonical Tags Error - many pages dropped - Google Search and SEO forum at WebmasterWorld

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Accidental Canonical Tags Error - many pages dropped

wfernley

4:09 pm on Feb 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hi Everyone,

Early last week we updated our site to the latest version of our CMS. Unfortunately, a meta tag was added to each of our product pages that pointed to our products homepage /products/

We fixed the issue on Friday so hopefully no more pages will be dropped but we have lost many pages. How quick will Google get these indexed again?

goodroi

4:45 pm on Feb 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Depends on how much link juice is flowing to each page.

Your homepage likely has more link juice and can be fixed withing 24-28 hours. Your deep pages probably have much less link juice and thus are only crawled once a week or even less frequently. So it will take much longer for those pages to bounce back.

wfernley

5:07 pm on Feb 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thanks for your reply. When they get listed again, will they be starting fresh or will Google give them the same age and link juice as before?

deadsea

7:26 pm on Feb 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Let me refer you to a similar problem that somebody posted about last week:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I have experience with two such mistakes and SEOMoz did an experiment on a blog that did the exact same thing have done.

In all cases, mistakes like this can be disastrous. Expect to recover half the traffic that you have lost, but the rest is going to take months to come back.