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Category: Technical SEO Issues

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


  • Hello Andy, Thanks for taking the time. The product guide is a separate text only page with info-graphics and related text. There is only that one page. I don't see there is a canonical issue with this page, compared to the product pages as where items can be added to the shopping cart. I think this is what you refer to when mentioning the canonical issues with e-commerce sites. This part should be covered. Kim

    | KimX
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  • Hi Jeffrey! Did zeus1956's response help? We'd love an update.

    | MattRoney
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  • I would ask on the Squarespace forums then rather than here - you are more likely to find others who have had these same issues and if there is anything more up to date, you will find out. -Andy

    | Andy.Drinkwater
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  • Hey Russ, there is no canonical issues for the pages I have demoted.

    | promodirect
    0

  • I have tried all these of-course before hand. Still nothing.

    | AngelosS
    0

  • If I have understood it correctly, you want: To redirect certain category pages to new category pages on a new domain. Redirect all other pages to the homepage on a new domain Not to redirect the homepage and for that to stay on the current domain. If so I think this should probably do what you want: RewriteRule ^$ - [L] RewriteRule categoryA/ http://www.newdomain.com/newcategoryA/ [R=301,L] RewriteRule (.+) http://www.newdomain.com/ [R=301,L] The first rule says "if this is the homepage stop evaluating rules". The second maps a category page over to the new version and stops evaluating rules; you'll need to duplicate this one for all the specific categories. The last rule is your catch-all rule for redirecting everything else to the homepage of the new domain. If you want to easily test/check then I highly recommend this .htaccess checker tool. Good luck!

    | Tom-Anthony
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  • All the images on the page are not on a subdomain of rcautomotive.com but a completely different domain " images.dealerfire.com ". Even the image that is used to populate social media thumbnails is from dealerfire.com. I would start with looking at moving those over to rcautomotive.com if possible

    | Saijo.George
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  • Hi Shervin, It is too complicated to say for sure if a penalty is causing you issues because there is so much that needs to be looked at. As a starting point, look over your Google Analytics to see if there has been something obvious happen at any stage. I would then head over to MOZ's Algorithm History to see if any drops in traffic match the date of any algorithm updates. If you see a match, this is your starting point. Points to consider: Have you done any link building? If so, was any of it spammy? Is your content unique? Is it amazing? Does it answer the questions that people would ask? How is your user experience? Do you feel that people are arriving at your pages and then just dropping off again? If so, create a free account with HotJar and watch live session recordings to see how visitors are using your site and pages. Of course, these are only a few points and there could be many other issues, but it is a starting point for you. -Andy

    | Andy.Drinkwater
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  • Yes, I took Laura's advice and all sorted now.

    | Marketing_Today
    0

  • This is exactly the solution I've been after. Your input and walk-thru is much appreciated!

    | LoganRay
    0

  • Hi Shervin, I have to agree with the comment below, we have tested this theory a number of times to include Geo results as well as secondary keywords and so far all of the results have conclusively shown that Google will pick up multiple keywords as you have described above. Geo results are something that we are currently using with most of our landing pages. Although Google is intelligent enough to prioritize your keyword and landing page for people searching that are located in Arizona I would always include the Geo in the keyword for searchers from elsewhere in the country, for example if someone in Florida is searching for "termite inspections", most of their results will return local results, unless you rank for the keyword very well nationally you will not get a look in, secondly they probably done want an Arizona company anyway. If someone searches "termite inspections Arizona", it will be classed as a much less competitive keyword being made up of 3 words rather than 2. This means nationally and locally you have a better chance of hitting your target audience and as a bonus you will continue to rank for "termite inspections" nationally. I hope that helps, if you need anymore information on this feel free to contact me directly and I will talk you through our results. Thanks, Stefan

    | Sigma_Digital
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  • Hello, The source code on those pages have a Robots Index,Follow tag. This should be noindex, follow. They also have two rel = canonical tags, which point to different URLs, thus conflicting with each other. Really I would have to log into the back-end to see what's going on, but I'm guessing one of the rel canonical tags is being added by Mageworks or Yoast and the other is default from Wordpress. You may require some custom coding to the blog template, and I recommend working with a developer if you can't figure it out on your own. There are lots of Wordpress developers on sites like Upwork and Guru who could probably get this done for you for a minimal investment.

    | Everett
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  • I don't blame you, this could be a large undertaking. Things i would recommend: Make sure you know what the top pages are all on all current sites in regards to external links. You need a list of all pages that have external links and where those are from. You need to get as many external links changed as possible. Redirects are paramount of course. 301 redirects across the board. The content should match or be very similar. In a week or two after launch, check to see how many internal links are linking to old URLs. Do this by crawling your site and fixing any internal 301 redirects. Once you've confirmed the redirects are in place, submit the old sitemaps and the one new sitemap. It forces the SEs to visit the old URLs to find the redirects and also find the new URLs. In a week, remove the old sitemaps. Those are the first things that come to mind. This is a good resource as well https://www.branded3.com/blog/website-migration-guide-building-an-seo-checklist-for-moving-your-site/

    | katemorris
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  • No problem Alex, always happy to help! For client.com to benefit from the content migration, it will need to be linked to in some way, preferably from the nav. Perhaps this could be done using a less obvious link in the header similar to where you'd expect to find a Login link but without a link to the content search engines have no way of finding it. This link can be external but strong internal linking practices are important too. Moz does a great job of covering this here. In terms of improving overall site strength, it will help. As you said, the engagement metrics will send some positive signals that people actually like the site but more significantly, it's going to be a lot more niche-specific, high-quality content going on the site that helps paint the picture of exactly what you do.

    | ChrisAshton
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  • Hello, I ran your site through ahref.com and saw 16 backlinks, when I looked at follow backlinks I saw 10, of those 10 backlinks I see that 8 of those 10 backlinks contain the same anchor text for the same article " The Great History Freeze to preserve photographic negatives: Join The Great History Freeze and help preserve a collection of invaluable and irreplaceable negatives. " This I'd imagine is what is costing you your DA drop, since you basically have 3 follow backlinks, if google is even counting that as legitimate links. You could be suffering a negative SEO issue from those domains using the same text, as well it seems pretty spammy. Now a days google seems to be counting backlinks that are bad less or not at all. I'd imagine that this would be the case and could bet a DA increase would happen if you could acquire even 3 to 5 more backlinks from legit sources. So far, I've seen more correlation between DA and backlinks than I have DA and SEO. I see sites with crap for SEO but a decent backlink profile climb higher and faster in DA than a site with epic SEO and a handful of backlinks or even hundreds of crap backlinks. Quality always matters over quantity.

    | Deacyde
    1

  • Hi Kirowski! It's pretty much an aesthetic distinction. Know, though, that Moz tools don't work with all of the new TLDs, so you might lose some functionality in our toolset. Also, the illustrious EGOL made a very good point about these in another recent thread about them: "My personal opinion is if you tell people that your website is at egol.buliders they will say "WHAT?" But if you tell them egol.com or egol.co.uk they will get it immediately." Just make sure your domain name is something folks will remember.

    | MattRoney
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  • Hi Aleyda, Thanks for the response. The website is a .com and actually attracts visitors internationally,  although none of the content is aimed at specific countries. The content is more or less the same as it was on the original version though.  We use categories on the website, though due to the fact w can add no content to category pages we have created content page to look and feel like a category page , set the categories to no index and ensured the content pages that replace them are the rel-canonical.  Visitor numbers are starting to improve steadily now.

    | musthavemarketing
    0

  • Is the link to an image? If so, that is the cause. Try uploading a simple html page--should work.

    | KevinBudzynski
    0

  • Hi, Cyrus Shepard did a really good post on this not too long ago. There's a lot more to it than simply redirecting the old URLs. Check out the full list here: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl Post-launch, you'll want to closely monitor the index. Check back daily (it only takes a few minutes) to ensure that your HTTP URL count is decreasing and your HTTPS count is increasing.

    | LoganRay
    1