Tuesday, August 27, 2013

drop traffic because of "url parameters" in google webmasters?


Hi friends

Just wanted to warn about "url parameters" under "crawl" in google webmasters. Do not deal with it if you are using wordpress or joomla. It should be for e-commerce sites. The google webmasters blog clearly stated to not to deal unless untill you have complete knowledge (risk) about it. Seriously it is risky.

I am using wordpress for my website http://healthbeautyfitness.in/. I started it four months back and it is running good with daily 7000 visitors. Last friday I did a biggest mistake by fingering into url parameters which is under crawl in the google webmasters. Now the health site traffic literally dropped to 1000 visitors per day.

There is a reason for the mistake (i dont know it is mistake or not) i did. When i see the crawl errors in webmasters I decided to omit the pages which has "page" in the URL.



So I opened the page "url parameters". Then I clicked on "Configure URL parameters »". The post screen looks like this.






Now  I clicked on edit in first row and below popup came


I thought it will omit the pages which has "page" in parameters and saved the configuration. Just in 48 Hours of time my traffic drasitcally dropped. 

Now i reset the the settings and waiting to get my traffic back. And re-submitted the sitemap too.

If you know any better solution, please suggest. 


Hope I will get my traffic back soon.

Watch this video is very helpful for webmasters about url parameters.