Why One Of My Sites Took A Dump In Google

July 18th, 2007
Written By: Adam Sussman

With a cup of coffee in hand at six this morning I jump on Google and pecked away at a few of my ranking Keywords for one of my websites.

Doh! I find that the site is no longer ranking.

The site was originally built by another company and barely ranked at all. Upon taking it over I created a new site but had it built in development mode. For shits and giggles I had <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”> set just to insure nothing was crawling the development site and that any new blog posts created in test mode would not get picked up.

Once the site was completed we dumped it into production and we created hundreds of 301 redirects pointing all the old pages to the new pages.

I’ve been using Google’s Webmaster Tools to see how Google views my sites and see that I have been alerted to the fact I have quite a few URLs restricted.

Doh! Doh! Doh!

I took a quick break to figure out what’s going on and I see Vanessa Fox blogging “The first rule of indexing: make sure you’re letting the site be indexed”. As an x-Googler and one of the developers of Google’s Webmaster Tools, I tend to listen to what she has to say.

After reading her post, I slap myself on the forehead and correct the issue.

Thanks Vanessa!

Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under SEO / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Why One Of My Sites Took A Dump In Google”

Vanessa Fox
July 18th, 2007 11:36
1

Anytime.
Darren
July 18th, 2007 12:21
2

LMAO! I had to comment on such a brillaitn article title. Love the humour.
Marcus
July 18th, 2007 12:30
3

lol
Vic
July 18th, 2007 13:17
4

Occam’s razor

“All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.

It never fails.
pittfall
July 22nd, 2007 14:42
5

Don’t sweat the petty stuff!