WordPress Disaster- Permalinks Structure Changed on my Blog and Income PLUMMETS
Wow- What a disaster. I went away for the long weekend and sporadically checked my AdSense ad amazon revenue. The was a big dip. My income dropped by about 75%. Since the blog is a family related blog my assumption was that maybe because of labour day the traffic just wasn’t there. However The blog is several year ago and I last few years the blog held its own and I had never seen a dip like that. I certainly wasn’t panicked.
I got hoe from cottage up north and was caught up in unpacking and settling kids, etc. and didn’t really think about it.
I just about vomited when I looked at numbers. Income from Adsense slashed as as Amazon earnings. CTR rate was fine but page impressions were way way off.
I took quick look at my blog and within minutes I noticed the lonks struture was changed- I have no idea how it happened but the permalinks structure was changed and all the pages on my blog and been re-named, Consequently the hundreds of pages on my blog were not indexed by Google. A quick search proved me correct. My pages and post were not showing up in search engines.
Spontaneous Change of Permalink Structure on WordPress Blog
I took deep breath and thought though my options. I am still dumbfounded as to how the permalinks structure changed, I did not do it and had not been anywhere near that part if admin panel for weeks. it looked like the change had happened Sept 2. How very very scary. I figure that little change cost me several hundred dollars probably more because I don’t know when pages will get re-indexed and show up again in Google, traffic back, etc.
Getting Site Indexed FAST
My first step was to change back the structure. All trackbacks, cross links and sites thank link to specific sites that link back are getting dead links and search engine bots are reporting those deadlinks.
Nest using Google site map plugin I manually updated the site map.
Next was to create some fresh content. So created some new posts.
Also this is when it pays to have fiends with sites and blogs- I called in favours and had them write posts add links to their sites if only temporarily to get site crawled.
Normally I have Related Posts Plugin set to show 5 related posts but in this crisis I have set to 10 posts for better cross linking and faster re-indexing of site.
Any other thoughts??
Thanks!
We had this happen to us upon upgrading to WordPress 3.0 on TastyPlacement.com. I am not sure exactly how it happened, but my permalink structure was changed upon the update. The way we discovered it (and the way to monitor if it ever changes) is that we had set up google alerts for the name of our site. I got some google alerts noting that new pages were showing up in the google index–but they were copies of existing page. That warning was all I needed to quickly correct the problem