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It's Great that you got the solution. Can you please close this question now, it's still showing as unanswered. Thanks, Vijay

That was kind of my thought as well but with the drop in traffic I have to look at everything. SO strange.

They are encoded URLs. For example, Google will turn all " into %22 and all spaces in the URL to %20. You can learn more about them here http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp . And here is a useful tool for encoding and decoding URLs: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ . What you need to do is have the developer "escape out" or "rewrite" all non-alphanumeric characters in the URL. You'll also have to 301 redirect the old URLs to these new, search-engine friendly ones without the characters that get automatically encoded, like parentheses, commas, tildas and plus signs.

They have stopped, with no changes to the site. I have no idea why. Thank you for the offer though.

Just wanted to +1 EGOL's answer. I would add the PDFs to your sitemap; it shouldn't take much work to index them and they should definitely capture organic traffic.

Just noticed this response. I got a hold of someone at Microsoft and what happened was the site was never re-indexed as https. This drop in traffic lasted a few 6 weeks or so while the site was being re-indexed. It is now back to normal. So strange there was a year delay in htps indexing.

Actually, Google's Quality Review documentation indicates it being positive that a website have an about us page with credible information on it a relative short distance from the home page. While I think it would be wrong to say that there is any clear SEO value related to putting organization schema on an about page, I think it would be considered a "best practice" and certainly wouldn't hurt.

I have read in so many places that it caused a dip for others as well. I had a really bad experience with a site move once so I had a checklist of everything and double and triple checked it, but it has just been a slow decline.

Personally, I'd still recommend using robots.txt to disallow all crawlers, even if more steps are taken.

Good point. Sorry, I didn't realize the statement was specifically about the Sitemap feature. However, it's not unlikely that both issues were related.

It isn't like we have no traffic, we still get thousands in organic traffic a day. It just isn't as much as it used to be. We are the largest in our industry, not near the size of Amazon or Ebay, but still pretty large. So we have customers who exclusively sell through us. Most of our sellers are small business and don't have in house technical teams, so it is easier working with us. I understand content marketing and we are starting to do that but if we have been hit with Panda I don't know if it matters.

This was just put out https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemap-index-count-drop-is-a-bug-20608.html

Hey there! Normally, a change of address on a verified Google+ Local page should happen quickly. If it's been a week, I'd suggest phoning Google (https://support.google.com/business/?hl=en&rd=1#topic=4539639). I would also recommend that you use Moz Check Listing to be sure there isn't more than one Google+ Local page in the mix here.

Thanks for the response. I prefer the consistency as well but keep hitting walls. 1. I am using Wordpress HTTPS. I think it redirects all http to https. So a sitemap generator only sees the http. My sitemap is correct besides that. 2. I do not believe I have a redirect file setup, just the http to https plugin mentioned above. 3. Robots.txt and meta tags are all good.

Hi MrSem, Thanks for re-launching this conversation with new questions, which are good ones. My advice here, numbered for clarity: You should only have one "Contact" page on the site, listing all 5 of your locations. You should also have a unique page for each location. These are typically called "location landing pages", "local landing pages" or "city landing pages" - not "contact pages". The contact page should feature the basic contact info of each branch. The landing pages should feature much more than this. They should each be a unique resource of information about that branch, including NAP, driving directions, a map, reviews, special offers, customized CTAs, proofs of community involvement and anything else you can think of that might interest, inform and persuade customers as to the desirability of choosing your company. If you're listing a toll free number, be sure you're designating it as such and that it is the unique LOCAL number you're most closely associating with each branch of your business. If the number of locations you have is beginning to create navigational concerns, you may be reaching the point where you need to consider a store locator widget. Typically, I don't see these being implemented for a business with just 5 locations. More like 10+. For major brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, store locators are an essential medium for helping consumers find the branch nearest them. For your business, with 5 locations, the function simply may not be necessary. You can list all of your location in high level navigation without clutter, and you can also put them in the footer, on the contact page, etc. This shouldn't take up too much room, and should provide good UX for your users. Does this help answer your questions? Please, let me know if you have others.

Is it possible for you to give a clearer description of the categories? You say they are different products but that one is a second category of the other Does the page you want to rank show up for any other searches? In your analytics are you getting any traffic from Google to that page?

Recently I had that problem also mate. Thing is if you have any server issues you might get 503. If your site is on maintenance you might get 503. If your site gets high traffic and goes down you might get a 503. Best thing to do is check with Fetch as Google tool from WMT to see how Google sees it.

It is best practice to use nofollow tags and your robots.txt to keep search engines out of not only e-commerce pages, but also any areas that require a log in (such as a customer profile page or shopping history).  You want to do this so that they do not accidentally index pages that will redirect users who aren't logged in or create a weird/negative experience for them.

Hi there, just checking in do see if you have an update for us. Christy

Use the tool in GWT, Go to Google Index > Remove URLs