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Category: Technical SEO Issues

Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO issues.


  • Hi Cayenne. This can happen in cases where Google views the mobile site as a non-mobile or as the only available result to a desktop search query.  Here's a recent blog post from Google during at the time of the change: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/04/faqs-april-21st-mobile-friendly.html What you'll want to check is the mobile friendliness and load speeds of both the mobile and desktop sites. At times people have seen very slow loading desktop sites with lots of PageSpeed issues get outranked by the lighter mobile versions. Next, use the various checks mentioned on that page to ensure that mobile.domain.com is indeed viewed as mobile by Google. And here's Moz's guide to provide an overall picture of what the mobile site should accomplish: https://moz.com/learn/seo/mobile-optimization Cheers!

    | RyanPurkey
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  • Hello Jimmy and Andy, Thank you for your answers! Yes, the cached version of Google displays correctly, and the text snippets are indexed, so everything looks fine and working as it should Thanks

    | Pipistrella
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  • Andrew, Your canonical needs to exist - so for the page you mentioned you need to update the url to the one with the trailing slash. In fact - for all pages on your site you should check if the canonical exist (Screaming Frog can do miracles here) The issue with the https is a bit different - you should not have both versions (http/https in parallel) - so if your https certificate is ok you should put your site in https & redirect the http version to https This can be done by adding these lines to your htaccess: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} If you switch to https - you must make sure that all the resources you call on a page are also on HTTPS - if not, users could get a security warning. There is an article on how to migrate site to HTTPS on Yoast: https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/ If your site is on https - your canonicals need to be in https as well. A tool like Screaming Frog can help you to check that both (https & canonicals are ok) - it's not free - but certainly worth the investment. Hope this helps - don't hesitate to ask if it's not clear Dirk

    | DirkC
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  • Christy: I think that the answers have been helpful, but the jury is still out.  I'm taking advice from both Patrick and Toby's input, and I'll update this space as soon as I see some changes. The one question that I don't see answered is: are these 404s definitely harming the website's SEO, assuming that they are NOT being visited by users?  I'd love to know what people think on that.

    | yoursearchteam
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  • Hey Matt Antonio! I just wanted to clarify that this error isn't specific to the robots.txt file and can also indicate that we are being blocked by X-Robots Tag, HTTP Header, or Meta Robots Tag. Usually this error does indicate an actual issue with the site we are crawling rather than with our crawler. The other Q&A post you mentioned is definitely an exception to that rule, but that issue was resolved in August 2014 and has not occurred again. I hope that clears things up a bit. We are always happy to look into the specific issue causing the crawl error with a site, so I do agree that contacting the help team for these types of issues is often a good idea. Thanks, Chiaryn

    | ChiarynMiranda
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  • Hi Michael What that means, according to YourDictionary, "The inability of a DNS server to convert a domain name to an IP address in a TCP/IP network. A DNS failure may occur within a company's private network or within the Internet." You should check out TechRepublic's 10 tips for troubleshooting DNS problems and see if any of those can help you. Hope this helps!

    | PatrickDelehanty
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  • Thanks for all your help with this.

    | frantan
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  • I'm inclined to agree that YouTube is the easiest, quickest way to get your videos indexed. Google is showing fewer video snippets overall than they used to, so that is likely contributing to your not seeing video snippets as well. Spending some time optimizing your YouTube descriptions so that they're unique and descriptive, plus including links back to your site in the description, your profile, and the video content itself would definitely be worth doing. If you don't want to lose the potential links & shares that having a great video on your site can attract, think of ways to enhance the page the video embed lives on - what other ways beyond the video could you make that page a great resource?

    | RuthBurrReedy
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  • Thanks Patrick, Your help is super appreciated! I will look into this with our webmaster. Graham

    | Brain-Drop
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  • Good stuff Patrick!  Yeah, I am thinking I hit the sweet spot.  It's that clickthrough rate that's rocking my world a bit, but who knows?  I feel like Google is still processing our pages though as we have close to 900,000 products, so I am looking forward to more improvements I hope...  Plus, I still have more mods to make.  Believe it or not, I actually did make these changes to a sub-set of our products that had the most to gain, but also had the least to lose.  I just thought it would take longer for me to see improvements, so hopefully the Googles aren't playing tricks on me. Thanks for the quality answer!  I really appreciate it. Craig

    | TheCraig
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  • Hi Landon, As Patrick Suggets Google's PageSpeed Insights has recommendations for both your Desktop and Mobile. Follow that and everything will be fine.

    | Verve-Innovation
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  • Hi Christine! Just clarifying for myself—when you say your page juice isn't going through, are you specifically referring to DA/PA? Or something else (SERP position, etc.)?

    | MattRoney
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  • It's best practice to verify all versions of your site in Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console) and submit your disavow file to each of them. Most likely, though, if you only use one version (i.e. if all of your urls are https://www.... and all other versions redirect to this one) then submitting to that version should be enough.  But, there's no harm in being on the safe side and submitting the file to all versions.

    | MarieHaynes
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  • I can't see this causing you problems.  I've commonly noindexed huge numbers of pages, mostly for sites with Panda issues, and in several cases we've seen great increases in traffic with a future Panda refresh.

    | MarieHaynes
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  • Hi Dirk, Many thanks for your help. I will look at adding some useful videos to help improve pages , user engagement and time on the site. Many thanks Pete

    | PeteC12
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  • Hi, Yes & No . I'm quoting Google on this read it carefully you will get the whole idea about 404. Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking? A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL—if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won’t be able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist / return 404s does not affect how your site’s other URLs (the ones that return 200 (Successful)) perform in our search results. Q: So 404s don’t hurt my website at all? A: If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results. However, there may be other reasons that you’d want to address certain types of 404s. For example, if some of the pages that 404 are pages you actually care about, you should look into why we’re seeing 404s when we crawl them! If you see a misspelling of a legitimate URL (www.example.com/awsome instead of www.example.com/awesome), it’s likely that someone intended to link to you and simply made a typo. Instead of returning a 404, you could 301 redirect the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic from that link. You can also make sure that, when users do land on a 404 page on your site, you help them find what they were looking for rather than just saying “404 Not found." Hope that helps. Thanks

    | Alick300
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  • Hi, Find your single.php file in your theme folder.  THen change: to <h1 < span="">class="post-title entry-title"></h1 <> plus make sure you change the closing tag to that will be shortly after where you find that. If you have a child theme (recommended) then you will need to find this file in the main theme, and copy it across to your child theme before changing. NB: Make sure you back up before changing stuff!

    | TheWebMastercom
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  • Hi Mark Here's Google's stance on Infinite scroll search-friendly recommendations using this page created by John Mueller as an example - Quicksprout also builds on this with some tips of their own. Hope this helps! Good luck!

    | PatrickDelehanty
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