Ranking gone for the original page and a shortened url ranks instead.

[sainath]

Hi Experts!!! Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year In Advance.

I am been facing a issue with a few of my SERP results for "Singapore Visa" and related keyword. Until last to last Saturday i.e 16th December, I ranked for Singapore visa keyword with this url https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx !!! But since 18th December I am ranking for "Singapore Visa" keyword with this url and message below it in place of description.

Singapore visa - Musafir.com
go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa
No information is available for this page.
Learn why

The go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa redirects to https://in.musafir.com/Visa/singapore-visa.aspx with some UTM parameters. The URL go.musafir.com/Singapore-visa is a shortened URL which was used for SMS marketing and all of a sudden Google has picked it in SERP instead of Singapore VIsa Landing Page.

The Singapore visa Main page is not blocked by Robots.txt file.

Please help me to resolve this.

[VeroBrain]

Hi Sainath,

What at first seems to be inexplicable, appear possible causes.
First a pop up, which Google penalizes since last February.
Secondly, despite the chain of redirects, the second page has better PA and mR.
Hope this helps. Good luck!

Mª Verónica

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[ThompsonPaul]

Your robots.txt is actually the issue in this case, Sainath. (The giveaway is that No information is available for this page text, which is the standard response on Google for a page that is blocked by robots.txt.)

The problem is that your robots.txt is blocking all URLs that contain UTM parameters . Since the shortened URL is redirecting to a site page URL which contains UTM parameters (https://in.musafir.com/Visa/Singapore-Visa.aspx?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=youtube_channel&utm_campaign=Singapore_visa_video) and is therefore blocked from crawling, Google can't properly crawl/discover the actual destination page and its real URL and meta-description via this link, so it continues to return the only info it has available - the shortened URL and the blocked-description warning.

Your site is already protected from issues with UTM parameter URLs because it has properly implemented self-referential canonical tags, which is the correct way to deal with them. You should remove the robots.txt blocks for all those parameters (especially including the gclid - I suspect that's causing issues with our Adwords Quality Score). This way, the search engine will be able to properly understand each stage of the redirect you've created and index the proper URL and meta-description

In short - those parameter blocks in your robots.txt file are causing multiple issues for your site, without doing anything beneficial.

Does that make sense?

Paul

[sainath]

Thanks Thompson.

This answers my question. Will update the suggested changes and will keep you posted if this works. Have a great end to the old year and wishing you lots of success and peace in new year.

[ThompsonPaul]

Great! Happy to help. And yea, do let us know how the adjustments work out.

And thank you for the wonderful wishes - very much appreciated. Wishing you a rewarding 2018 too!

Paul

[sainath]

Hey Thompson!!! The idea worked. And the original ranking is back. Thanks a ton.

[ThompsonPaul]

That was quick - good job!

P.

[Bestbing]

For my own understanding should you or should you not disallow the google ?gclid= parameter?

Timo