Lost ranking once optimised a page

[mybabyradio]

Hi Ryan, I've added the canonical tag, but when I've saved it it's swapped around the the way you've listed it. Check it out in the source and let me know what you think? Also, all the URLS should be like this http://www.mybabyradio.com/experts-faq/conjunctivitis/ How do I do a 301 redirect?

[mybabyradio]

I agree, strange but more testing is required me thinks. In regards to the canonical tag this is what it looks like in our source:- Thinking on shouldn't it look like this

[mybabyradio]

Hi Ryan, for now, I'm gonna take the canonical tag off as I'm not sure it's right or if they're even helping sites. Just read some horror stories about these tags. Look forward to your reply in due course.

Many thanks

Peter

[Guest]

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[oznappies]

The canonical do help as they funnel the links to provide rank for the http://www.mybabyradio.com/experts-faq/conjunctivitis page. If you leave it out and follow Google webmaster tools you will see duplicate content errors showing up with the 4 urls Ryan mentioned highlighted.

[oznappies]

Any unsafe sites will be removed from the pages. So if you are 15 and there are 2 unsafe sites between 1 and 15 your rank will move up 2 spots to replace the pages that cannot be shown and so your rank will show 13.

[Hurf]

I had a very similar problem with my own site disappearing from the SERPS, but showing as it should on any other PCs (that I hadn't previously used.)

The problem then related to Google's personalised search. Essentially, I had accidentally deleted my site and prevented it showing up in personalised search - though it still worked in any other browser that wasn't displaying my personalised results. ( See this article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-test-lets-users-vote-add-and-delete-sites-in-serps/6031/ )

To remove personalised search take a look at: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048

This sounds to be a likely suspect for the issue you are having.

Personalised Search can also provide false results as you are seeing personalised results, based on your search history, activity and preferences, rather than the non-personalised results as they actually appear without personalised bias in the SERPS.

You can see your web history settings here: https://www.google.com/history/

Hope that helps!

[Guest]

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[RyanKent]

Hi Peter.

I am not clear what you mean by "swapped around". If the position of the href and rel properties were reversed, that is fine.

As far as which version of your link is used, with or without a trailing slash, that is up to your preference. I tend to think that a trailing slash represents a folder while a lack of a trailing slash represents a page. My preference for the conjunctivitis would be without the trailing slash.

The canonical tag, like most tools, can be used correctly to help your results. If used incorrectly, your results can worsen. It is a very important piece of code along with 301 redirects. I highly recommend taking a bit of time learning about both. My best advice is google "Matt Cutts canonical" and reviewing some of the results, along with "Matt Cutts 301".

[kwoolf]

Hi Ryan,

Looks like you're using Wordpress. To take care of those redirect issue, try the following in your .htaccess file. Test thoroughly on a demo site before going live with this. Wordpress plugins that you're using might have options that reach the same effect, so look into that as well.

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks

#Force trailing slash
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www.)?mybabyradio.com/$ [NC]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.mybabyradio.com/$1/ [R=301,L]
#Redirect non-www to www
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mybabyradio.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mybabyradio.com/$1 [R=301,L]