10 replies to this topic

[Say Yebo]

Help! I am hyperventilating at the thought of this...

I recently SEO'd a vetrinarian product site and the results have been great, client happy, great positions, fine customer feedback, etc.

It's a site that's been up for years and the SEO work was part of a revamp.

Suddenly, they've had to pull it down for legal reasons - some medical matter to do with the product - and they have to make major revisions.

All they have up now is their support pages which don't relate to product: about us, policies etc.

I have told them to make their revisions ASAP and get their pages back up. But as with all pharmaceutical issues, approval never happens fast.

Is there ANYTHING I can suggest to them to stop them losing their great positions?

[Jill]

I don't think so, but once they get their new stuff up, they may still be okay after it's all reindexed.

[Say Yebo]

I don't think so, but once they get their new stuff up, they may still be okay after it's all reindexed.

Gosh...thanks Jill. It's been so much careful work - I suspect they will be ok after re-indexing. Just such a pity to have such a major hiccup.

[phaithful]

You might also want to consider sending a 503 server response along with the "about us, policy, etc." pages, which is a "Service Unavailable" response. You can even add the "Retry-After" header and set the date which you think they'll have the changes back up.

This way you can hopefully avoid having your site re-indexed as something else, and the search engine bots will return when you have your content back in order.

[Pandjarov]

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do. In my opinion the situation will be worse than before you have even started making SEO improvements.

[torka]

Unfortunately there is nothing you can do. In my opinion the situation will be worse than before you have even started making SEO improvements.

Why do you think that? I can't see any reason why improving the site would make things worse, especially once the new content is approved and posted.

And, FWIW, I think you're way too pessimistic. There's almost always something you can do. It may not 100% solve the problem, but in nearly all situations there's something more productive that can be done than simply giving up without even trying. Even if it's just making sure that everything's all set to spring into action when new, approved content becomes available.

--Torka

[qwerty]

So for the pages that have been removed while the content is rewritten, is the server replying to requests with a 404? I can't speak to any legal questions, but I would think that the thing to do would be to 302 any removed pages to the pages you still have up. That way, the URLs in question won't be dropped from the index while you're waiting for the new content. That's assuming the rewritten pages will have the same URLs as the old ones, of course.

[Pandjarov]

Why do you think that? I can't see any reason why improving the site would make things worse, especially once the new content is approved and posted.

And, FWIW, I think you're way too pessimistic. There's almost always something you can do. It may not 100% solve the problem, but in nearly all situations there's something more productive that can be done than simply giving up without even trying. Even if it's just making sure that everything's all set to spring into action when new, approved content becomes available.

--Torka

At my daily work I face many, many hacked websites. Once they are marked as offensive sites it takes months for them to reach their previous status if ever. The same happens when a total part of a website is removed. My colleague for example totally reorganized the structure of his website making major changes to the content. It was big improvement, he added tons of information, improved the design, etc. This, however, led to drop in the position of the keywords he was after and his PR went down from 4 to 3.

Google has too strict criteria for "quality content" in a website. I hope that Say Yebo will manage to bring his/hers website back to the previous position and even more but I really doubt it.

[torka]

Unless an "improvement" is properly planned and executed, it can indeed lead to a temporary drop in the rankings.

For instance, when your friend "improved" his site, did he change URLs of already-indexed pages? If so, did he put proper 301 permanent redirects in place from the old URLs to the new URLs? Changing URLs without redirecting can cause a big -- but usually temporary -- drop in rankings.

Well... "temporary" assuming that the "improvements" actually made the site better. I've seen a lot of instances where website owners have a much higher opinion of the quality of their "improvements" than most impartial observers would share. For that matter, I've seen a lot of instances where website owners have a lot higher opinion of the quality of their site in general than that of most outside observers.

Google's quality criteria are not at all "too strict." I don't mean this to sound harsh, but IMO the problem is there are too many webmasters out there who think they can consistently earn extraordinary results with an ordinary run-of-the-mill website. It just doesn't work that way.

I still say you're being way too pessimistic. Just because something will take effort and time to overcome doesn't mean the webmaster needs to give up. Anything worth having is worth working for, and nobody ever said good SEO was an overnight deal.

This is not a case of the site being hacked or a botched redesign. (And even if it were, these are both things that can be recovered from with a bit of hard work and some time.)

As a couple of other members have suggested, it could be possible to put some server response codes in place that might either signal the engines the missing content will be back soon, or that will temporarily redirect to the remaining site content (thereby keeping the AWOL URLs in the index until they can be put back up).

So there are, in fact, things the webmaster can do to help ameliorate the situation until the content can be restored.

Once this temporary situation is cleared up, there's no reason why the site couldn't come back in the results to pretty much the same spot where it was before.

--Torka

[Say Yebo]

The Conclusion: The site was down for 4 days while the company resolved the legal issue. Then they put it up again with two pages 'missing' (the public was unable to access the two problem pages). During the days the site was down Google did not index it and it's SERP positions were not effected. :-)

Now, a custom 404 page shows up when anyone accesses the missing pages.

Thanks for all the input everyone!

[torka]

Excellent news! All's well that ends well, then.

--Torka