Help Google just nerfed us out of the blue
blog.safeshepherd.com
blog.safeshepherd.com
I work at Google helping webmasters like this.
As far as I can tell, there are a couple of interacting issues we're seeing on the site that can be causing what you're seeing. It's a bit technical, but it's easy for you to implement a fix.
Firstly, our algorithms recently have been picking one of the following URLs as the canonical URL for the homepage:
http://www.safeshepherd.com/ https://www.safeshepherd.com/ https://safeshepherd.com/
For example, I see that the non-HTTPS pages redirect to the HTTPS pages (e.g. http://www.safeshepherd.com/ to https://www.safeshepherd.com/), but the non-www pages do not redirect to the www pages (both https://www.safeshepherd.com/ and https://safeshepherd.com/ return content). When we find the same content on multiple URLs like this, our algorithms pick one representative URL, and over the past few weeks the choice has been changing. As of 3 days ago, the current choice is https://safeshepherd.com/ .
As it stands, our algorithms are trying to figure out the right canonical URL format, but it's difficult in this kind of situation. You can help by redirecting to your preferred URL format (say https://www.safeshepherd.com/*), and our systems will pick up this signal, and that will be reflected in the search results and reporting in Webmaster Tools.
Secondly, Webmaster Tools treats these as different sites. For example, you would need to verify and check the statistics of both https://www.safeshepherd.com/ and https://safeshepherd.com/ (as well as the HTTP versions) as they're separate sites. It may be that you're checking (say) the stats for http://www.safeshepherd.com/ but if our algos have picked the https://www.safeshepherd.com/ URLs as canonical, the search queries of the former will suddenly be closer to zero but the latter will be a more accurate reflection of the site's traffic.
Hope this helps, Pierre
Those folks would have spotted these issues pretty quickly.
Obviously we can't be everywhere and we can't answer every question, but we try as much as possible to help when we can.
Just to confirm what I said elsewhere, this site doesn't have any manual spam actions or anything like that. It's just a matter of Google trying to pick the correct canonical url when you have a lot of different (www, non-www, http, https) urls you're showing. If you make things more consistent, I think Google will stabilize on your preferred url pretty quickly.
And now I know what "nerfed" means. :)
But it's different for 5xx HTTP errors for the robots.txt file. As Googlebot is currently configured, it will halt all crawling of the site if the site’s robots.txt file returns a 5xx status code for robots.txt. This crawling block will continue until Googlebot sees an acceptable status code for robots.txt fetches (HTTP 200 or 404).
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
In summary: If for any reason we cannot reach the robots.txt due to an error (e.g a firewall blocking Googlebot or a 5xx error code when fetching) Googlebot stops its crawling and it's reported in Webmaster Tools as a crawl error. That Help Center article above is about the error message shown in Webmaster Tools.
Given that you said you did not see errors being reported, That suggests there was something else going on. If you need more help, our forums are a great place to ask.
Funny thing was I tried resubmitting the main page in GWT an all the traffic came back almost instantly.
Second, in webmaster tools, should we always have the www and non-www setup so we can do the "change of address". For example, if www.mysite.com is my preferred URL, do I need to also make sure mysite.com is in webmaster tools and change the address to go to www.mysite.com?
Would "http:www.apple.com", "https:www.apple.com", "http:apple.com" and "https:apple.com" be treated by Google as four completely different and separate sites also to be ranked in isolation of each other? Why?
Many sites, for example give users their own "name.whatever.com" subdomain. In those cases treating the sites as the same doesn't make any sense.
For example, if http://mydomain.com/path and https://www.mydomain.com/path have 95% content correlation and repeated requests to http://mydomain.com/path have 95% content correlation, and the server headers look the same, why would it not be safe to decide those are duplicates of a single canonical url?
It's not safe to merge www.domain1.com and www.domain2.com. it's not safe to merge subdomain.domain.com and www.domain.com. However, for the limited cases of www and no-www, https and http, if they look similar, I think it's harmful not to treat them as the same site. You can't expect every website owner to be aware of this issue.
If it's a matter of not being able to be 100% sure, is there a single site that cares about google ranking that runs different sites on different combinations of www/no-www and https/http, but has similar content that would confuse a simple heuristic looking at page similarity? In what sort of circumstance could that happen other than with placeholder pages?
GWT allows selecting a preference between www and no-www, but I don't see a preference between https and http. I think Google should add a notice that using GWT to select between www and no-www is deprecated and the recommended way to handle www, no-www, http, and https selection is to use 301 redirects or rel="canonical" tags.
I see a couple of problems with your redirects:
1) http://www.MelonCard.com uses a 302 redirect to the https version. You have inbound links to that domain pointing to the http version, so the 302 negates the following 301.
2) Furthermore, your 301's seem to be implemented incorrectly. It works for me in Safari/Chrome, but if I use curl on the command line, or any crawling software I see an infinite redirect:
www.MelonCard.com/?from=shadow&from=shadow&from=shadow.....
This is likely interrupting Googlebot's crawl too. Certainly worth a fix!
A couple of other bits to note:
1) The redirect in Chrome sends me to:
www.safeshepherd.com/?from=shadow
which Google believes could be different to:
www.safeshepherd.com/
You should add a rel=canonical meta tag to the page to help Google out.
2) Your internal links point to safeshepherd.com without the www., but your MelonCard redirect redirects to the www. version. You should probably make this consistent, and also 301 one version to the other.
This latter points may seem picky, but Google can be troublesome with this.
Hope this helps! :)
rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://safeshepherd.com/$1 permanent;Bad:
rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 permanent;
rewrite ^ http://domain.com$request_uri? permanent;
return 301 http://domain.com$request_uri;Clearly, your definition of 'out of the blue' is not the same as mine... good luck figuring out if the problem was on your end or theirs (hitting the front page of HN usually helps).
Edit: clarified transition per comment below
Also: did you request a change of address in Webmaster tools? You have to control both domains, and request a "Change of Address" from old to new.
When I made the switch, I did everything by the book (my background is in SEO) including properly 301 redirecting the .us to the .com and alerting Google in Webmaster Tools.
The site completely disappeared from the Google search results--same symptoms as yours, with site: returning valid info but the site not showing up in search queries at all for the site's name.
This went on for 3 weeks.
Finally, after 22 days, it came back up in the rankings. Where previously it had been #4 for its keyword, it came back at #1.
No explanation from Google or in Webmaster Tools.
(If I may do a brief plug--our rank tracker will help you see if your site is ranking somewhere lower than the first few pages now, and will send you daily email updates so you'll know right away when you come back: http://whooshtraffic.com/rank-tracker/ )
Anyway, I'd have to say that this is par for the course for Google. It will likely come back in a few days or weeks. Time to play the waiting game, and develop some good links from your blog to your main site!
That is EXACTLY what is supossed to happen. Google runs a SE with over 5 billion URLs - if anyone tells you, or told you, that a transition was seemless and instantaneous, they lied.
To explain why, Google has this flow:
1. Crawl the old site - once it finds 301 redirects, it kills the old site and has no data on the new site yet.
2. Google crawls the new site, and starts to apply the old sites criteria - this is NOT, repeat NOT instantaneous.
3. All the "pre processed" signals are applied from the old to the new site.
22 days is a pretty short time to see things come back better, and I'd thank my lucky stars!
------------ Results for https://safeshepherd.com/robots.txt Error at line number 1:
User-Agent: * Capitalization. Field names are case sensitive - the User-agent field should be written with that capitalization Error at line number 2:
Allow: / No User Agent. An Allow line must have a User-agent line before it. As records are delimited by newlines, there cannot be new-lines between the User-agent and Allow lines. Warning at line number 2:
Allow: / Allow is not widely supported. The Allow field was a late addition to the robots.txt standard, and is not currently widely supported by crawlers. You should consider alternative ways of constructing your robots.txt file
Error at line number 3:
Disallow: /login/auth No User Agent. A Disallow line must have a User-agent line before it. As records are delimited by newlines, there cannot be newlines between the User-agent and Disallow lines. Error at line number 4:
Disallow: /users No User Agent. A Disallow line must have a User-agent line before it. As records are delimited by newlines, there cannot be newlines between the User-agent and Disallow lines. Error at line number 5:
Disallow: /signin No User Agent. A Disallow line must have a User-agent line before it. As records are delimited by newlines, there cannot be newlines between the User-agent and Disallow lines. Error at line number 6:
Disallow: /upgrade/submit No User Agent. A Disallow line must have a User-agent line before it. As records are delimited by newlines, there cannot be newlines between the User-agent and Disallow lines.
If I were moving a domain, I would have 301'd http://meloncard.com to safeshepherd.com right out of the gate.
Too add to everyone's anecdotal experiences, I 301'd a domain last week and the new domain only took a couple of days to show up in search. I was a happy customer.
Number one in AU, BR, JP,...
I guess situations like this shows the absurdity and lunacy of people who say things like that.
But I do see your blog as the first result. As for why your main landing page isn't #1, I suggest you just stay calm, and wait a few days. Google has a knack for bouncing results, especially these past few weeks with the Penguin update and all. And if you just recently did the 301-redirect, those things take time to get sorted out. (Since MelonCard was still a relatively young brand, a 301-redirect was harmless, but if you had an old brand/domain, a 301-redirect would be SEO suicide)
You're still in the index. Your blog is ranking for your brand. You haven't been nerfed out of the blue, so stop worrying and be patient.
The infographic about beenverified was alarming: (https://www.safeshepherd.com/beenverified) and I have actually tried to get my stuff off of there before and failed.
I'm not even worried about my own information. What I'm worried about is the accuracy of it! How can I trust a third party who doesn't even know me to provide an accurate background check when it references PRIVATE databases that I can't even verify the integrity of? My biggest worry is that some day I will be screwed out of an opportunity because of a company like this that simply provides inaccurate data because they confused me with some other John Doe.
It would be one thing to provide public records as a service, but been verified seriously ticks me off. To think they have the authority to 'verify' people irks me.
Then again, it may be a good thing, because I sure as hell wouldn't want to work with anyone stupid enough to use a service like beenverified.
To be fair, their landing page is nowhere to be found. The first result is their blog. The second result is safeshepherd.com/beenverified. The rest are their blog or the press talking about them. But all in all, they've hardly disappeared from teh intarwebs :)
What gives? We had perfect placement, built not through any SEO, but just a lot of people talking about us - had the proper config and everything, recently had a site overhaul that was handled properly, using webmaster tools, and everything was updated in google indexes within a day.
Google webmaster tools is more or less designed to help google, not you.
Unlike other updates which attempted to remove "web spam" from the search results by tweaking some of the parameters, this update (according to many in the SEO community) is an active attempt to catch people doing black hat or over SEO optimization. Unfortunately many legit sites have gotten caught in its net.
You can read about it in the WSJ among other places:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230350550457740...
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=safeshepherd.co...
http://www.branded3.com/seo/penguin-update-renders-seomoz-ma...
If you look at the first website mentioned in that WSJ article, they even admit that they paid for hundreds of backlinks to their site, which is a violation of our quality guidelines.