SERP Dropped. Confused !!!

Hello,

I am confused for my SERP can anyone suggest me if my assumption is right or wrong?

I am having a site ex: www.abc.com having pages in .PHP and it was ranking good on several keywords. But my designing team created a testing folder for this and uploaded same site in that testing folder. ex: : www.abc.com/test all same pages in .htm extension in test Folder. And the whole folder crawled.

Now the main question is : 1 keyword take mobile was raking on 1st page since last 6th month on google.com and was showing result of www.abc.com/mobile.php page (same duplicate page in testing page www.abc.com/test/mobile.htm ) but it suddenly dropped and gone on 4 to 5th page. Same happened with others. So I am thinking it can because of testing folder any other reason I am not seeing.

Can anyone please tell me whether I am right or wrong?

 

duplicate penalty i guess?
you should use robot.txt to prevent google bot from crawling your test folder

 

thanks and yes i was also thinking the same. and i am having robots.txt but as it was done by designing team it was crawled before i disallowed it. And as soon as i came to know i disallowed and also request for removal but it shows pages very later some pages i got before 10 days only in google crawled pages while it was crawled before 2 months ago.

 

Your page url has been completely changed from www.abc.com/mobile.php to www.abc.com/test/mobile.htm. So, how you can expect rankings? your back links, page strength in search engines and domain/page age was for first url. Use redirect tag in meta and redirect the old url to the new url.

 

i don't think candy completely changed it
candy just make a test folder, a duplicate!! not changed it!
candy still use the normal www.abc.com/mobile.php
that's what i get from reading the first post
read the first post completely first
and,redirect with meta can't help SERP, you need to use 301 redirect if you want to change it

 

Yes you are getting me properly

 

No my main page is www. abc.com/mobile.php and wants result on that page only. www. abc.com/test/mobile.htm was created for testing purpose by designer as they were redesigning the site. and in that test folder they kept all pages. and by mistake it was crawled

 

Google is very strict with duplicate, you should implement a "noinde,nofollow" attribute to prevent those duplicate pages getting indexed, resubmit sitemap once you've corrected that..

 

change URL will cause SERP change

 

Thanks. I disallowed whole Test folder in robots.txt and also resubmitted sitemap. now have to wait and hope for the best but its hard to get same ranking again

 

Jep.

Use robots.txt to block "test"

 

Yes, block the test folder in robots.txt and also page removal request in webmaster and wait.

 

I would also recommend blocking the folder using robots.txt
It's also easy to check if it actually works using google webmaster tools.

 

It's definitely a combination of duplicate pages and changing URLs. The solutions recommended here should do the trick eventually, but it might take some time. For this reason I always have my test versions on a totally different domain, and then transfer them once all the bugs are worked out. I'd recommend doing that for your next round of updates.

 

Changed website structure = ranking fluctuate. It is pretty common for any website that change their url structure or extension. It does take time before rank again. (mostly)

 

you need to update your URL, will help until Google change their databases

 

You can stop crawling duplicate pages/folder through robots.txt, then return your SERP.

 

There is no duplicate content penalty, its a filter, not a penalty.

 

The EVIL sandbox! Your site might never be seem on google again...or it might be back to its repious position tomorrow. You decide