Category: Technical SEO Issues
Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO issues.
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URL / sitemap structure for support pages
Agree with Dirk. You can use links to show the structure more effectively than the URLs per se.
| CleverPhD0 -
Where are the crawled URLS in webmaster tools coming from?
Just to make complete. Google search console will list errors for pages with links coming from 3 general location Crawling links on your website. Starting from somewhere on your site and going link to link. Crawling links in your sitemap. Crawling URLs from your site that do not exist anymore on your site or sitemap. I have seen Google keep things in memory and come back to hit pages again that are no longer from option 1 or option 2. If you used to have a bunch of 301 directs in place for an old version of your website and then your developer changes something to delete all those 301s and they become 404s, you will find those pages showing up as errors again. This is really useful as it can help diagnose the issue and you can fix it. Crawling links from other sites. Sometimes, this is how links get crawled for #3. Here is what really sucks about Search Console and I mean sucks big bananas if you are trying to diagnose an issue. If you look at your Search Console error page. You can click on the URL in the report, it will pop up a box and then you can click the tab "Linked From" and see what pages are linking to the URL in question. That is good! If you then download the CSV, all of that info is lost. If you have more than 20 errors to deal with, you do not have a practical way to manage things and see if there is a trend etc. Otherwise you are left with clicking a lot of links in the report and taking lots of notes and going a little insane. Good luck!
| CleverPhD0 -
Site went down and traffic hasn't recovered
My indexation number went back to normal for 2/3 sites. But for one of my sites, the number still hasn't returned to normal. Do you have any idea as to why this might be? Do you think it's a bug with Google?
| TMI.com0 -
Linking Pages - 404s
I'm currently seeing around 107 pages that are 404'd with inbound referring links. I looked through a number of them and there is a wide variety of linking domains (not just one or two). I would go through and simply 301 redirect them to the best possible alternative. You might want to look at just the /international/ page since it has a good number of root linking domains by itself, but the others are probably best settled with just a 301 redirect.
| rjonesx. 01 -
301 Redirects
Thanks for the feedback. I've tried both (full URL and no URL leading) and neither work. It seems to always redirect to the new "/folder-new/" but the old "/page-old/" no matter what. For example: Redirect 301 /folder-old/page-old/ /folder-new/page-new/ results in: http:///www.site.com/folder-new/page-old/
| BrandBuilder0 -
HTML snapshot creating soft 404
A side note first. Something to consider on transient content for job listings like this that I have used on job sites I have worked on and worked pretty well - The unavailable after meta tag http://searchengineland.com/more-info-on-googles-unavailable-after-meta-tag-new-x-robots-tag-in-header-support-11714 http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882 "The “unavailable_after” Meta tag will allow you to tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific time. " This way your pages would be removed from the index on the date you list and if you have also removed the links from your sitemap etc, Google may not need to crawl them and find the 404 and/or soft404 to begin with. The soft 404 (according to Google) means your server is not showing a 404 server response for the HTML snapshot version. I would try fetch as Google on those pages to see what Google is seeing and that may help you diagnose the situation. I may be that your server is giving a different response than the 404 and Google is questioning it.
| CleverPhD0 -
Pop-ups ok for SEO?
Agreed. No SEO ding directly, but as donford said, be careful that you don't mess up UX. One thing to be aware of. If you use a 3rd party to host the pop-up, it can slow down the site if the script blocks the downloading of other assets on your page. You could then have a page speed issue that can indirectly cause issues with SEO.
| CleverPhD0 -
Is putting a manufacturer's product manual on my site in PDF duplicate content
Thanks for the answer Kevin. For those interested in learning about using the HTTP Header to establish a canonical tag, you can look here on Google's Webmaster Central Blog.
| rjonesx. 00 -
Home page duplicate content...
Hi Liam, If you have a mix of slash and no-slash URL's, just make sure that they all forward correctly. If you go to www.example.com/product/, does that forward correctly to www.example.com/product, or what does it do? If you wish to PM me your URL, I will happily do a quick crawl to make sure there is nothing else that might cause you issues. -Andy
| Andy.Drinkwater0 -
How to rank 1 page for multiple keywords in the new way
You are very welcome -Andy
| Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Google disavow tool ( how long does it take ? )
is any body tell me the how we know we are improving my spam score is 5 so i created a disavow file and upload on google. but i don't know what would be the next step
| CLTranslation0 -
New site - http or https?
Https - google has been warning us - https is preferred over http. At the moment if two sites are equal https will prevail. Alick is spot on. However google is conditioning us at present - so that when it amps up the power for https we will be prepared. I have no doubt google will amp up the power of https in 2-3 years if not earlier - significantly more juice will be given to https sites over http. https hurts PBN's and impacts many black hat practices. The sooner you do it and bed https down the better. There maybe a slight loss in page loading speed, which should be monitored. Hope that assists.
| ClaytonJ0 -
301 redirect adding trailing slash to url
Cheers all for the responses, this was pretty much what I was hoping to hear.... Thanks Tim
| TimHolmes0 -
Duplicate Content Brainstorming
Thanks for your in-depth explanation. Siteliner shows: Duplicate Content: 24% Common Content: 58% Unique Content: 19% We will probably opt-in on the first strategy
| slidescamp0 -
Why isn't our new site being indexed?
Hey Dirk, No worries - I visited the question first time today and considered it unanswered as the site is perfectly accessible in California. I like to confirm what Search Console says as that is 'straight from the horses mouth'. Thanks for confirming that the IP redirect has changed, that is interesting. It is impossible for us to know when that happened - I would have expected thing to get indexed quite fast when it changed. With the extra info I'm happy to mark this as answered, but would be good to hear from the OP. Best, -Tom
| Tom-Anthony0 -
Z-indexed content
I just now noticed this response. That's some helpful information. Thank you for the response. We appreciate it!
| cokergroup0