Over 1000 pages de-indexed over night

[87ROB]

Hello,

On my site (www.bridgman.co.uk) we had a lot of duplicate page issues as reported by the Seomoz site report tool - this was due to database driven URL strings. As a result, I sent an excel file with all the duplicate pages to my web developer who put rel canonical tags on what I assumed would be all the correct pages.

I am not sure if this is a coincidence, or a direct result of the canonical tags, but a few days after (yesterday) the amount of pages indexed by google dropped from 1,200 to under 200.

The number is still declining, and other than the canonical tags I can't work out why Google would just start de-indexing most of our pages.

If you could offer any solutions that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Robert.

[Hondaspeder]

It could take a couple of days before you see results, Google has to step back and reassess most likely, or your web developer has no clue what he's doin haha.

[StalkerB]

First question would be do you think this may have had an effect on you? - http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071

All your content unique? Your links come from sites that may have been effected?

If not then I'd give it a few days to see if they come back (as HR128 says, may just be Google working out what's changed and what to do) and I'm doing a quick crawl of your site to see what I can see

[87ROB]

I don't think this is a result of an algo change, I've just had a look at the crawl diagnostics and it appears that he has put the tag value of the homepage (www.bridgman.co.uk/  - where all the back links are pointed to) as www.bridgman.co.uk/default.asp   !!

This has also been done to all of our product pages!! i.e.all of the duplicated product pages now have the tag value - www.bridgman.co.uk/productdetail.asp (a page which doesn't even exist on our site!!!)

Now I may be stating the obvious, but I guess this is the problem?

He did this 8 days ago, where should I go from here? Ask him to remove all rel canonical tags and pray we bounce back....?

[Getz.pro]

Could you be in a canonical loop?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

[StalkerB]

Hmm, I'd remove them.

The fact that all your individual product pages have a rel=canonical of productsdetail.asp and category level is products.asp is telling Google that all your products pages are the same!

The problem is there are a lot of parameters in your URLs, let me go have a look at how to deal with that when using the canonical tag.

EDIT - Spent half my lunch on this but couldn't find much I would guess you can get away with parameters in the canonical tag so decide which is the official URL and put that in the header for that paticular piece of content. Only really found this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[87ROB]

It appears so

I've asked my webmaster to remove all of the canonical tags but after reading that article I feel that a lot of the damage has already been done!

Looks like I'll have to submit a reconsideration request and beg Google for forgiveness.

[Getz.pro]

I would first remove the canonicals (or actually do them correctly) and wait for a re-crawl of the pages. If not, then re-submit.

Also, problems with canonicals do show up in the page grader app, so when your admin re-writes the canonical, test the page before Google sees it  : )

[saibose]

The 1st question I would ask myself as a website owner is: How many pages have duplicate content on them? Maybe try going the manual way and check for yourself. There will be pages you do not know about. Use a tool like Xenu's link sleuth to extract all links on your website(which are reachable from atleast 1 link of your website).

It may happen that google is adjusting its index for all. Worth keeping a track on whether your competitors are losing at the same or slower rate or not.

[jaraca]

Canonical and duplicate content are both interresting issues, thanks for your anserws!