Comments on: How I Killed My Search Engine Ranking When I Installed WordPress

By: Richard Cummings

Richard Cummings — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:09:21 +0000

Todd, I was searching for exactly what that checkbox does technically and you provided that answer and a great story with it. Glad to hear you got your sites back in the SERPs. Cheers, Richard

By: Nell

Nell — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 04:52:33 +0000

I just bought a PR 4 domain and got that problem

I wasn’t realized that i turned off the SEO and did repaired that by changing the privacy setting.

Anyone knows when can I get back the PR 4 ? I bought the domain for high price and just bought it because the PR. It’s useless if the PR doesn’t come up

Hopefully there’s some hero can help me ?

Thanks for the share anyway Todd

By: Jane Mountrose

Jane Mountrose — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 21:52:18 +0000

Thanks for this information, Todd. I know you wrote this last year, but it is still relevant. I just noticed this problem on two of our sites and I have no idea how it happened, other than that we just updated wordpress on one of the sites. I hope google will come back soon.

It maker me wonder how many people have this problem and don’t even know it.

We’ll take your advice for adding a new post.

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:31:02 +0000

Hi,

Just had the same problem with 6 PR 5 sites I have bought over the last 3 weeks.

The Fantastico issue (it is a problem I think as they don’t inform you) is still live. These sites were across two hosts and both had the blocking of the SE’s as default.

I’d worked out the problem before finding your post but wondered if I’d done any long time damage.

You’ve reassured me!

Thanks

Joe

By: Todd Heitner

Todd Heitner — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:35:04 +0000

@SAP Business One:
Oh man, that stinks. You’re right, it’s a different cause but the same problem.

I don’t know exactly how long it took before my pages started showing up where they were ranked before, but I know that after about 2 or 3 weeks they were there. But I wasn’t checking it every day or anything either. I just know that when I checked back a few weeks later it was there.

And as you probably know, there’s no way to accurately predict what Google is going to do. How quickly they restored my ranking may be no indication of what they’ll do with the site you’re working on. But at least it gives you something to go on.

I really didn’t do any damage control at the time other than fixing the problem and then making this blog post to get Google to come back to the site. I might have made another blog post between this post and when I noticed my rankings back, but I don’t remember.

One other thing to pay close attention to, especially before any more time passes, is to see how URLs were indexed in Google, specifically whether the www. was included or not.

If the URLs in Google have www. (http://www.domain.com) but your URLs in WordPress resolve to just http://domain.com then my understanding is it’s viewed as a different page the same as if it were on a subdomain and won’t transfer the ranking the page had before. That’s another mistake I learned the hard way.

Even though there were some bumps in the road, I’m still very glad I switched to WordPress.

By: SAP Business One

SAP Business One — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:06:57 +0000

Todd, thanks for your post. This morning, in doing a keyword analysis for a client, I noticed that they had lost all rankings in the last 10 days since I migrated them to WordPress. Wow, what a knock. After several hours, I realized what had gone wrong after researched every other possible cause. I had block the SE’s intentionally because I used another domain to host the site while I built it and didn’t want it indexed but forgot to unblock it when going live with the new WP converted site. Yikes. So my strategy for repair is essentailly the same, I’ve created some bookmarks, rss feeds, new content and pinged them all. Within minutes I can see things being reindexed but still have no ranking for the primary keywords. Ouch.. damage control time, looking for solutions. How long did it take for you to get your rankings back? How much damage control did you do beyond the initial steps you mentioned?

By: Todd Heitner

Todd Heitner — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:50:45 +0000

That’s possible. Or it could have to do with the version of Fantastico. I’m thinking they may have changed the setting at some point.

I was glad to see that my site recovered after not too long. Fortunately I wasn’t too dependent on traffic from Google for my business at the time. But after having switched the site to WordPress and getting that privacy setting fixed and occasionally posting things, I’ve seen really favorable results from Google.

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:50:57 +0000

Very interesting post. However, I have used both ways of installing WordPress in the past and haven’t had a problem. Perhaps, the way fantastico deals with your installations is based on your Web host’s settings. Anyway..so sorry to hear about your experience. Makes me wonder how I would have coped if it happened to me.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:58:30 +0000

This is very helpful i have been setting up wordpress site and http://www.easytojuice.com i am really having trouble doing that manual thing.. thanks to fantastico making things a lot more better!

By: Tom Coghill

Tom Coghill — Sun, 16 May 2010 07:02:38 +0000

Hi Todd I owe you big time. I was changing a major site from html to wordpress and we used fantastico and http:/healthrecipes.com went from number one for the key words “health recipes” to not even in the ranking, lot of traffic missed and I was lost. Today you gave me the solution. Thanks for all the work you put into this post. I reset the privacy and changed the side bar on the workpress so google will reindex the site.
Thanks
Tom