[osCmax V2.0.25] Google un-indexed my pretty URLs. What happened?

[Shortbus]

I'm not sure where to ask for help for this issue, but it has happened in the past month since my migration to oscmax.

For years I've used Apache RewriteRules in .htaccess to keep most of my top categories keyword friendly and they've all remained that way in G's and Y!'s index for as long as I can remember. For example...

RewriteRule ^outdoor-products$ index.php?cPath=23_109 [NC,L]

... and whenever that page was returned in the SERPs it would appear as...

www.example.com/outdoor-products

Now it shows up in the SERPs as...

www.example.com/index.php?cPath=23_109

This has happened to all of my pages and its all taken place in the last month. I've got backlinks from all across the web that link to the keyword friendly versions of my URLs and if I enter any of those URLs in the browser, the page still loads properly and the address bar of my browser still displays the desired keyword URL in it so I know the RewriteRule is working.

What could have happened to make the SEs stop using the clean URLs in favor of the ugly oscommerce URLs?

[Shortbus]

In an effort to reverse what has been indexed, is there any way to tell the search engines to rewrite...

www.example.com/index.php?cPath=23_109

to

www.example.com/outdoor-products

[ridexbuilder]

Just editing the supplied .htaccess and turning on SEO URLs in admin will give the required result - no further manual intervention required.

The URLs will be different, depending on the Admin setting used and may look like:
www.example.com/outdoor-products-c-2.html which differentiates similar/same categories/products

[Shortbus]

Thanks, but I prefer not to have the SEO URLs style of links for these 8 specific pages. I *really* need to get the URLs back the way I had them. I've got four years worth of article marketing, forum posts, web 2.0 backlinks, you name it -- all linked to my very short, descriptive rewritten URLs.

All 8 of my URLs that have been affected by this have been on page 1 of G, Y!, and Bing for several years and now the best one is on page 3! Some of them are gone.

How could this have happened? How do I tell the SEs to NOT display oscommerce URLs and ONLY display my URLs for the ones affected by this?

[tcshadow]

Google has recently done an algo change that has hit a lot of article directories very hard. Your SERP changes might be because of this.

Have you tried to google just <code>www.example.com/outdoor-products</code> see if it is actually indexed?

If so search for your keyword and scroll through the pages to find where it's at. If it's been comepletely deindexed maybe it's because big G thinks it's duplicate content?

If it is indexed you've just taken a SERP hit not been de-indexed.

[Shortbus]

Yes, I have searched G for all 8 of the URLs that I've been nurturing the past 4 years. When I search G for any of the URLs (by actually searching for the exact URL that used to be indexed)...

www.example.com/outdoor-products comes up as www.example.com/index.php?cPath=23_109
www.example.com/short-url comes up as www.example.com/index.php?cPath=20_159

And so on.

So to recap, all of my short URLs that have not been touched in years are gone and all that remains are some ugly oscommerce URLs with a drastic drop is search rank. I could understand if G thinks my pages are spam (which they're not) and chose to drop their ranks, but why would it change my URLs?

[tcshadow]

In that case I'm guessing google is treating your re-write as a 301 redirect.

I have the same problem with some of my pages where google decides it wants to show the ugly stock oscommerce url instead of my pretty SEO URL's one. It blows and I feel for you.

Do you generate a google sitemap? Check the output make sure it's generating the correct URL and not the stock one within that sitemap.


SEO in general sucks.