I can't remember exactly the times it 'kills' the site but hurts my traffic considerable. Traffic does bounce back, as google only de-lists the site from the serps for 24 hours or so. Now as you can see google has brought back the site and visitors are back to normal again and growing.
Quote: Originally Posted by MammaRose View Post So are you saying that www.site.com/index.htm is a duplicate of www.site.com? If that is the case, then maybe that will fix my problem also. Yep. Do a 301 from index.htm and see if it helps. Wow. Is this true? Then it would appear that one should establish a single, canonical URL immediately, to avoid duplicate content penalties, and undesired PR dilution. I have not done this. . . . Is this a proper command for the .htaccess file ? redirect permanent site/index.htm http://site.com and redirect permanent www.site/index.htm http://site.com (for those who prefer their domain name to be cononical, as opposed to their www. subdomain) and redirect permanent site/index.htm http://www.site.com (for those who prefer their www. subdomain to be cononical, as opposed to their domain name) or must it be - redirect permanent http://www.site/index.htm http://site.com (I'm guessing - I don't know how - is the first http:// required?)
I agree with the indexing/deindexing theory here because U have seen exactly that on my site. We have a fiarly big community site, it has around 16,000 pages but is quite new. I wouldn't expect google to index all the pages of the forum etc but our oringinal index figure sat at around 1500. We submitted a sitemap and started link building and it rose to about 4000. Our SERPs drastically increased and two weeks later we are back down to about 2000 and SERPs are bad again. Last week we went up to about 3000 and SERPs rose then low and behold this week we drop down to about 1500 indexed pages and the SERPs die again...