A very interesting thing happened to my website after something as “simple” as a server upgrade. On Saturday we upgraded our primary web server to PHP5 and MySQL5. Everything went ok except for a couple phpbb and oscommerce installations.
One of these oscommerce installations that went awry was www.footbagshop.com. I spent all Friday night and most of Saturday updating queries and installing new contribs to get it all working again. One thing I missed was the SEO urls contrib I had installed. This takes a nasty url like product.php?id=1 and converts it to something clean and friendly like product-name-id.html
Anyway, I hadn’t noticed that in my mad coding efforts over the weekend I had broken a small part of this contrib. That small part was my product category listing in the left nav on all pages. The links still worked fine, but the URL rewrite wasn’t functioning quite right. Instead of rewriting a link as “freestyle-footbags-c-41.html,” they were being rewritten as “c-41.html”. So in Google’s eyes, my old page was gone and a new one replaced it.
After a huge decrease in orders, I knew something was off. I did a quick search for my top 2 keywords “hacky sack” and “hacky sacks” and was quite surprised to see my website completely gone from the rankings. Previously I was 5th and 7th for those two keywords.
I did some quick research and found the problem, fixed it, resubmitted my sitemap, added a couple quick links from my other related sites, and sat on my hands to wait.
The purpose of this post, “Google’s speedy index refresh”, was the fact that within 5 hours my site was comfortably sitting back in its previous ranking and sales were rolling in again.
Moral of the story:
Be very, very careful with page name changes. Google catches this quickly (by the way, Yahoo and MSN were unchanged), and Google penalizes quickly and severely.
