Question Ranking drop when all category content was updated by mistake

[cam]

So I have an e-commerce website and we recently updated all our category content for every category and subcategory by mistake... this has caused a massive drop in rankings for our main keywords (anywhere from 3-7 places). The new content was live for around 20 days before someone noticed, we have since changed the content back to the original which prior to the update was raking extremely well, in position 1/2 for most of our keywords.

So the main question is will our rankings recover and is there anything that can be done to help or speed the process up?

 

[Community]

Hi Cam,

Could you explain a little more what you mean by "content updated" ? Also was there any other changes/updates or anything which may have been done around the same time ?

You can request reindexing after a major change which generally speeds things up quite alot.

You can do this by navigating to your Search Console ( webmaster tools ), heading to Crawling - Fetch as Google bot - submit to index - Crawl this URL and its direct links.

You can do individual URL's too to test the waters, I've found in most cases that after submitting to index for individual pages an updated cached result can be as quick as minutes, but give it half hour or so before checking.

Just be mindful that if it doesnt work, it could be a coincidence that your ranking drop happened at the same time and there could be another cause.

 

[cam]

Hi there,

Basically we created a new store front on a new URL to target a different country, also in english. We created new content to avoid any duplicate content issues. When the content was pushed live both the new sore view and the main UK store view were updated with the new content my mistake. By category content i mean the page heading, description etc (pretty much all the text apart from the product names). Page titles, meta data etc were unaffected.

I have already requested reindexing about 48hours ago but wasn't sure if the positions should return or it could pose a long term problem even though everything has been put back to how it was before the content was changed.

I understand other factors may be at play here however i'm pretty confident it's the content update that has caused the issue. And obviously it was duplicated on both websites/store views.

Thanks

 

[Community]

Hi Cam,

I see, quite alot in play that could have some effect on how the site is seen, but it's best not to panic and start changing everything and anything, you've changed things back. Its best to give it a bit of time now and see what comes of it.

If you've taken note that the pages have been recrawled and re-cached in the index after say a week or two, then it could be down to something else or how these two sites are configured for multi national SEO .

In the mean time its probably best to note down any possible causes, do a site audit just incase there is something that stands out like a sore thumb and take note of anything that you may want to change after you've given it some time to recover.

If it hasnt bounced back in good time, feel free to post some more details including the URL's and we'll be happy to see if there is anything that could potentially be done to help.