.htaccess Mods hurting Google SERPS

We had some mods done to our .htaccess file so our blog file names would be SE friendly.

I came across a thread on another site that got me thinking. Our site recently dropped in the SERPS considerably in Google and Yahoo about 3 months after we modified our .htaccess file to have SE friendly urls for our blog and Tour DB names.

any theories?

 

Did your URLs change? If so, that is what hurt you and you need to get links to the new URLs. Could take 6 months or so for pages to rank well again.

Did you do the mods site wide or just to the blog directory?

 

It was done site wide i think. our tours DB also got modded. But the engines spidered the new urls just fine. The latest google update slammed us into nowhere, and someone posted a read on the htaccess theory and got me thinking.

 

Did you do redirects on all the urls as well?

Although a 3 month delay in dropping from the rankings means it is probably not related.

Have you just dropped in the last month or so? Because Google has been in the midst of an update for quite a while now and a lot of sites have moved around.

 

just curious why do you have  at the beginging of every page?

 

You have to redirect all the old pages to the new ones (also with the mod rewrite. If you forgot that you may have lost your places). I'd suggest you get that redirection as fast as possible. Succes.

 

We can't seem to find what is causing the  in the pages....thanks for pointing it out...

 

here's a snippet from our .htaccess in our root, any ideas grately appreciated:



<Files 403.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>
# BEGIN Tour Directory Rewrite
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On



RewriteRule ^grand-canyon-tours/$ /tours/index.php?aktion=anzeigen&rubrik=001 [QSA,L]



</IfModule>

# END Tour Directory Rewrite

 

Try looking in the included files from the beginning... There can be just a little sqauare or something before the <?php tag...

 

could you be so kind as to paste a few urls of the pages that have that on it? If it is allowed to do so in the forum

 

I saw it on the sites linked in your signature (using Firefox on Mac OS X).

 

Thanks for the firefox tip. We isolated it and discovered to learn it was a Meta tag. Using BBedit we had the show invisibles feature on when viewing the code. But no visible markings appeared.

We simply deleted the meta and all was fine.

The meta tag was:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

any theories?

Bri

 

ps;

any theories on the htaccess file that was the original subject of this thread...but thank you to everyone for their helping in getting rid of the squiggly at the top.

 

Your re-write shouldn't have had anything to do with a drop in SERPs three months later. I have sites with a lot more rewrites than that which weren't affected. A lot of sites dropped in rankings with the latest update. Did you lose a lot of backlinks? Google likes a lot of backlinks from sector related sites - and it seems even more so now - so that is most likely the cause of your drop.

 

We did drop a lot of backlinks.... =(

 

Don't you want a R=301 in the above?


RewriteRule ^grand-canyon-tours/$ /tours/index.php?aktion=anzeigen&rubrik=001 [QSA,L R=301]

 

Instead of [QSA,L] I'm using this: [R=permanent,L]