I have 301 redirected my site domain from non-www to www before 10 hours. Before 10 hours my site was on the second result for a keyword, now it is on the fifth page of Google when I search the same keyword. I have lost my rankings on all other keywords too. I have just removed this 301 redirection and now I hope to get back my Google positions. Do you have any idea or experience on this issue? Thanks for sharing.
You just need time for the crawler to go through the redirects and the data centres to catch up, then things will return to normal. Also log into google webmaster tools and set your pre-faired listing non-www or www
Google treats 301's in this fashion: They crawl the site, when they get a 301 they hold the request and send it to the back of the pile and come back and crawl it later. With that said, canonicalizing your homepage is a good decision and it will be a lot better for you in the long run. I am sure that is just a temporary set back...was your non-www URL the one ranking on the SERP?
I've just set my 301, and i am really excited about the idea to finally get some real traffic... I would go for an www or no but defenetly i would choose one, because likes it and here we are not talking about MSN Bot or yahoo slurp, because they don't count in this ended fight.
It was receiving around 300 uniques and 2K page views daily from Google. Now it is receiving around 100 PVs. Now it is generating 1% of its normal earning from Adsense, 99% was lost. May be the reason of this decrease is not related to the 301 too much. Because I moved its hosting to another provider 1 month ago. I also changed the site name (title) and added new text content to the homepage.
That's odd. I would suggest you follow the guidence others have said in here....manually let Google know (via webmaster tools) which version of the site you prefer. Other than that, it really shouldn't be a problem. Send me the URL so I can make sure you did it correctly...you could have an unseen HTTP error somehow...I have had it happen in the past to me personally....the page renders correctly and everything looks ok, but you serve the bots a 404 or something.
I added a 301 re-direct from non www to +www at the start of last week. The site was already being listed as +www and had it set in webmaster tools. Just wanted to see if it would help in any way. I've also noticed a drop in serps and visitors (around 40%) but I kind of expected this. Going to wait a couple of months before removing it. As you also changed hosts and content it might be worth waiting before deciding it was a negative change. Google probably just needs some time to know how to rank your site with the changes made. Is your new host reliable?
The new hosting is reliable. I think that I found the main reason. Somehow index.html was named index.php mistakenly while I was editing the files. That file is its homepage. Today its homepage also lost its PR after losing its search result rankings. This should be the worst experience for a webmaster. Thanks to all replies here. I was thinking that www redirection caused the problem.
Maybe you should wait a while and see what happens, it could be only temporarily and your serps will come back.
This is quite normal... When you implement 301 redirects you will almost always see a big dip in rankings and traffic initially. It's expected. You have to wait on Google to recrawl every inbound link to those redirected URLs, discover the URL for each inbound link, and transfer credit for that inbound link to the new URL. This can take days, weeks, or more than a month depending on how many inbound links you have and how often the sites that link to you get crawled. Be patient. Your rankings will return and should be the same if not better. PS: If you are only fixing canonicalization issues, you can set your preferred domain in Google WMT but it's not necessary. This ONLY works to fix canonicalization issues with Google... and doesn't help with canonicalization, etc. at the other engines. And it STILL doesn't fix canonicalization issues due to showing http://www.example.com/index.html vs http://www.example.com/ (i.e. canonicalization due to using or not using default document names in your URLs). 301 redirects are STILL the absolute best method for fixing canonicalization issues and using 301 redirects will fix them for ALL search engines.
I second that.Google is changing his algorithms every week so be patient.you'll be back in business soon