We're using Magento as our ecommerce platform. We've run into some issues which affected our rankings for our home page in the SERPs, but not other parts of the site, such as our category pages. It's very strange. We we're #1-#5 in the SERPs - on Google, Bing and Yahoo - for around 5-6 keyword phrases (around 20 in total, but 5-6 have the bulk of decent CTR and conversions) for our home page. Over the past four months, we dropped for these 5-6 keyword phrases from the first page, to pages 2 & 3 on Google. We only dropped for a few keywords on Yahoo and Bing. I determined we weren't being penalized by Google and used Majestic SEO to look at our link profile versus the competition in our niche. We have a better link profile, as a good portion of our competition are using spammy, useless blogs for deep linking, links, etc. Problem #1: We switched review systems from Magento's default system to a 3rd party plugin. There were 200+ instances of products reviews in the index from this system. However, it took the title tag from our home page (with all of our keywords from the title tag) and inserted it into the title tag of some 200+ title tags within these review product pages. We had over 200+ instances of the homepage version of our title tag. We fixed it by having our developer swap them out from "Home Page Title Tag Keyword Phrases" to "Product Review". Problem solved. Problem #2: Our developer apparently has a development site which was indexed and it's an exact duplicate of our website. I had him use the X Robots tag, so hopefully this will resolve any potential cross-site duplicate content issues. Here's problem #3: Google keeps indexing weird string variations of our homepage. I had our developer use the canonical tag on the homepage, so that it will perhaps tell Google that hompage[dot]com/?12345 is actually the same as our actual homepage. Here's what Google Webmaster Tools shows me under duplicate title tags: hompage[dot]com homepage[dot]com/?dir=asc&order=name homepage[dot]com/?gclid=CN7C1rrK < ------- why is it indexing a Google Click Identifier? homepage[dot]com/?order=msrp_price&dir=asc Any thoughts as to how I can resolve this?
If it was a penalty, you would have got a notification in Google Webmaster Tools. However, you can't rule out an algorithmic demotion (for example by Panda) based upon the three problems you detail below. So now your titles are exactly as before? Also, how does the new review system change your site's content compared to the old one? (For example, if on the old system you had reviews served up as html pages and now it's done via JavaScript, for example.) Has Google now de-indexed those pages? Yes - canonical. Read this: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/pages-with-duplicate-title-tags.2531110/#post-17925307 Once you've made the changes, allow Google time to crawl your site and update its index. Note, if you got hit by Panda due to duplicate content then you will need to wait for the next refresh (not sure when exactly is the next one - read this for the latest news). It's probably indexed the gclid due to someone linking (maybe a social share or social bookmark) using it. It's not uncommon.
Yeah, we never got a message in Webmaster Tools, but an algorithmic demotion seems to be the logical conclusion. The review system we had would generate an actual HTML page (the title tag would be the home page title tag on EVERY single review), then post it on the actual product page via Javascript. We now use a third party plugin which posts the reviews via jquery, not creating any extra pages. This was updated like 7 days ago, but Google has picked up the new pages with title tags updated to "Product Review". Not yet. Our developer was actually arguing with me over this. He finally updated it today. Also, since he created a clone of our home site, he never bothered to remove any of the URLs from oursite[dot]com in the category and product pages. Webmaster Tools pickup like 2000+ links point to oursite[dot]com from the development site. I told him to fix it immediately. Can you say SEO horror show? What annoyed me on a personal level was the nonchalant and flippant attitude he displayed. He's a great coder (incredible), but he's a know-it-all. He's our back end Magento developer, so he blames every thing on our front-end developer. It's like a soap opera. Thanks for the link. I know, that's what kills me. We have to wait for the next update. This whole situation made me realize I can't ever assume the on-page factors and the site architecture are up to snuff. I will inspect everything going forward.
Well, at worst it's that. From what you've written, it should be easy enough to recover from. Hahaha, and "donkey developer". Mistakes happen, but on this scale, you don't argue but get it sorted ASAP. Personally, for any development site I want anyone to have access to, I made sure it can't be without a password (surely he's heard of .htaccess and .htpasswd?). Are you able to renegotiate his terms so he gets a financial penalty for screw-ups like this? It might help him keep his attitude under control if he knows it's going to cost him (unless he's a religious-level with his beliefs). Well, Panda is the worst case scenario. All the best to you with that. Even if it gets sorted, post back so that other people in a similar situation have a real example to follow when they fix their problems (and also it will satisfy my curiosity heh).