Recovering from index problem

[Blink-SEO]

Hi all. For a while, we've been working on http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/. Everything was going swimmingly, and we had a top 5 ranking for the term 'bird hides' for this page - http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/bird-hides.

Then disaster struck! The client added a link with a faulty parameter in the Joomla back end that caused a bunch of duplicate content issues. Before this happened, all the site's 19 pages were indexed. Now it's just a handful, including the faulty URL (<cite>thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/index.php?id=13</cite>‎)

This shows the issue pretty clearly.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Athewilddeckcompany.co.uk&oq=site%3Athewilddeckcompany.co.uk&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2178j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

I've removed the link, redirected the bad URL, updated the site map and got some new links pointing at the site to resolve the problem. Yet almost two month later, the bad URL is still showing in the SERPs and the indexing problem is still there.

Any ideas? I'm stumped!

[Chris.Menke]

Blink,

It sounds like you've done all the right things but if you wanted to, you can request removal of a cached page via google webmaster tools--it might help. Otherwise, just keep waiting, It'll go away.  Have you looked at your server logs to see if googlebot's crawled those pages recently?

[Blink-SEO]

I had no idea you could request a removal like that. Thank you!

[evolvingSEO]

Hi

You can use the URL removal, which should work fine, but I think this issue was you were blocking crawling in robots.txt for /?id=13 http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt and www http://www.thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/robots.txt

If the crawler is blocked it can not see the redirect, so you would want to remove the /?id=13 from robots.txt and let Google crawl it to see the redirect, and that URL will drop out over time.

Something unrelated I just noticed - you should have a better 404 template http://thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/kjhf - one that uses your site's template/design and provides something a little more useful.

-Dan