Category: Technical SEO Issues
Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO issues.
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Switching forum software - 301 redirects?
Run your site through SEM Rush. It's generally pretty accurate if you need a better understanding of what pages draw traffic and for which queries. After that, it's a good idea to use your analytics tools to identify pages that draw traffic. One really good link may be driving a ton of traffic to a specific page, but it may not necessarily rank very well. The site might lose a significant amount of referrals due to that link. So make sure to check where your referral sources go as well. When all of that is said and done, it's time to look at links. Use a few different sources such as Webmaster Tools (Google and Bing), Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and OSE. Majestic and Ahrefs are the favorites, as far as percentage of links and freshness. When you have the Keep and Cull list, make sure to redirect the keepers to relevant pages. If the page was about donuts, send it to the new donuts page. Don't send it to the bagels page. Google dislikes that. Blanket redirects are generally sub-optimal. As for the culled pages, you might try to offer a useful 404 page. Something that helps them find something similar to the topic of the page that went away. When all of the dust clears, 410 the culled pages. Alternately, you can skip straight to a 410 if you're only worried about bots wasting crawl budget on a bunch of 404 results.
| Travis_Bailey0 -
Mobile site not ranking
Thanks all for your answers. I have read the same about redirecting, but our main site and our mobile site are very different: by both content and layout, as well as url naming structure. If a mobile version of the desktop page is completely different, do I need to do redirects and canonicalization? (i.e. home page on mobile site is completely different from home page on desktop, but both represent the same company). Thanks again for all your help!!!!
| lfrazer0 -
Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?
If you have a page that lists all the villas outside the search results, then you don't lose anything by blocking that folder on the robots.txt But still, somebody, the guy that wrote the custom theme knows how to do the changes needed. If you want I can help you with it, for free Just PM me (I'll need FTP access).
| FedeEinhorn0 -
Home page not indexed by any search engines
Yes, the site is verified in Google Webmaster Tools, I did not receive any messages regarding penalties. Thanks
| bcglf1 -
Virtual inlcude v.s. Redirect 301
yes that's correct on "iphone 5s abonnement" and "phone 5s aanbieding" i am sattisfied. I am concerned with the keyword iPhone 5s. with that my page is going up and down and don't know why. the include pages are exact duplicates with a canonical url in it.
| JoostBruining0 -
Where am I going wrong?
Edward, I just had another thought. If you have good photography it would probably be worth starting a Pinterest board for your products and recipes. Best of luck, Amelia
| CommT1 -
No google traffic for this site? Help?
Thanks for pointing this out I will go through the site and see what I can change.
| dashesndots0 -
I am convinced I have an internal PR problem, thoughts please?
We were hit by Panda and Penguin and got an unnatural link penalty way back in 2012, Staff at Google confirmed there was no issue, however I have confirmation that we have STILL not recovered from a penguin refresh yet! Even after all this time. However as of yesterday my pagerank is back on all my sub pages! Maybe this is the first sign of an actual recovery. Even though the pagrank back in the day was a steady 6 with the odd occasion of a 7.
| gazzerman10 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
I'd just swap it. Make the breadcrumbs H2 (or just regular paragraph text) and product title H1 on the product pages. Having the same text for H1 & H2 should be fine, just don't keyword stuff.
| OlegKorneitchouk0 -
Changes to title and description not appearing in Google search...
Oh, I see what happened. The domain was misspelled initially. I found the right site with intitle operator. I was a little confused about the difference in geographic targeting. San Francisco not being in Florida and all. ; ) But it still holds that the instagram plugin uses a vulnerable version of prettyPhoto. It's a great idea to see if there's an update, or you'll definitely want to consider a replacement.
| Travis_Bailey0 -
What is the best way to refresh a webpage of a news site, SEO wise?
Hi Panos, I don't necessarily disagree with Eric's answer, but I wanted to answer from a different point of view. I'm going to assume you really want or need some refresh mechanism built into the page. In which case I'd agree that a Javascript approach using AJAX is probably a better solution. It will mean that users only need to load the new article headlines, and not the whole page, so the strain on your servers should be reduced. Furthermore, I find it a neater solution all around anyway - you could provide a notice 'new headlines available' that people click to refresh the articles list. This might be the best of both worlds? Either way, meta refresh isn't as flexible, isn't as clean, and will put more strain on your servers. Good luck! -Tom
| Tom-Anthony0 -
H1 Headers and Unique Content
I go with the simple rule here, whenever dealing with the on-page optimization, try to go with the options that go best for users and search engine will come along. If you think having the same H1 as Title will serve users better then go for it and if you think you can craft a better H1 for users to engage with the website and continue their journey then try not to go with option one. Hope this helps!
| MoosaHemani0 -
Are sitewide links bad for SEO?
Hi Matias. Now that it's been a few months, I was curious to see if you were able to get your traffic back. Let us know if there has been some progress and what actions helped cure the curse.
| ABK7170 -
Switching host
Happy to assist, Dario. I'm interested to know if you were finally able to make your upgrade directly to a dedicated IP address in your new account? Paul
| ThompsonPaul0 -
Lost pagerank due to domain redirect
Thank you for your reply! I knew it i just thought that it had such a strong pr (6) that it is a huge loss even if Google decreasing the focus from it. I also saw the authority metrics growing on the new domain which means that the new domain got some of its authority from the old. Perhaps we should wait another pr refresh. I tried to convince them to redirect the subpages to relewant new subpages but they wanted the hole previous version and the old domain to disappear. Thank you for your reply!
| SebestynMrton0 -
Exclude status codes in Screaming Frog
Thanks for your help. It literally was just the fact that it had to be done before the crawl began and could not be changed during the crawl. Hopefully this is changed because sometimes during a crawl you find things you want to exclude that you may have not known of their existence before hand.
| CHAD2150 -
Can anyone speak to the pros and cons of installing mod_expire on an Apache server?
PS it appears your website is 301 redirecting a lot of calls you can see them lit in almost a florescent blue during the speed test I ran here. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ds3ceI/CCISOLUTIONS.COM 1 good idea is to use the free pingdom RUM or real user measurement testing. It will show you what your end users actually see. https://www.pingdom.com/free/ Another great tool is neustars RUM tool they actually provide you with simulated real users if you want to see the maximum amount of users per minute your site can handle. It is free for 30 days and well worth the effort. Pingdom RUM is free for life. 5WLPWit.png
| BlueprintMarketing1 -
Salvaging links from WMT “Crawl Errors” list?
Hi Gregory - Yes, as Frederico mentions you do not have to put the rewrite cond. before every rewrite since it the htaccess is on your root its implied. You might need to do this if you creating multiple redirects for www to non-www etc. Also Frederico is right - this isnt the best way to deal with these links, but I use a different solution. First I get a flat file of my inbound links using other tools as well as WMT, and then i run them through a test to ensure that the linking page still exist. Then I go through the list and just remove the scraper / stats sites like webstatsdomain, alexa etc so that the list is more manageable. Then I decide which links are ok to keep (there's no real quick way to decide, and everyone has their own method). But the only links are "bad" would be ones that may violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Your list should be quite small at this point, unless you had a bunch of links to a page that you subsequently moved or changed its URL. In that case, add the rewrite to htaccess. The remaining list you can simply contact the sites and notify them of the broken link and ask to have it fixed. This is the best case scenario (instead of having it go to a 404 or even a 301 redirect). If its a good link, its worth the effort. Hope that helps!
| JaredMumford0 -
How to Delete the slug /category/ from wordpress category pages
Hi, What David mentioned in his response is the best way to remove the /category/ from the URL. However, based on your comment, you can't remove the /category/ because it conflicts with the page URLs which kind of contradict your initial question. I would suggest reworking on the page URL and the category URL. If you use 301 redirect to redirect the old URL to the new URL, everything should be fine once Google crawls your site again and see the redirect.
| TommyTan0