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Category: Technical SEO Issues

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


  • What exactly are you planning to render server-side? In principle, you shouldn't have anything to worry about if you render everything server-side, provided the rendering isn't so slow that it affects Google's measures of page speed. What do you see when you use the 'Fetch and Render' feature in Search Console at present?

    | StephanSolomonidis
    0

  • Hey Robert, Thank you for responding, the article was very helpful, however I still don't understand the following scenario: If you search for Embrace care in Google, the first result is the Embrace 'About us' page with the following snippet: Embrace is a leading independent provider of health and social care in the UK. We provide residential, educational and supported living services which enable ... Can you let me know your thoughts on why google would use this snippet instead of the meta description below, which includes both 'Embrace' and 'care'? Embrace provides residential, educational and supported services in health and social care environments, supporting the elderly, adults and children.

    | A_Q
    0

  • Hi there, It's definitely possible that you are blocking a folder or subfolder in your robots.txt file that is preventing Google from crawling some of your videos. Could you possibly share a link to the robots.txt file so I could look at it specifically? Also, Google Search Console should tell you which URLs are being blocked specifically so that could be useful as well. Happy to help — just please send some more specific details. Thanks!

    | sergeystefoglo
    0

  • Google ignores anything after the ? when it comes to indexing so you should be fine with your testing.

    | EricaMcGillivray
    0

  • For which keywords are you seeing a fluctuation? Anyway fluctuations are normal. Particularly during or after a spike in link acquisition, which you are undergoing according to both ahref and majestic. And let's assume you are referring to keywords like "virginia beach va", it's a rather generic keyword, and even if competition doesn't seems high, in my experience it's hard to get a stable ranking for generic keywords.

    | max.favilli
    0

  • Hi Guys Thanks for all of your help. After weeks of trying lots of suggestions (including the ones above), we have finally found a solution - Cloudflare. We have done our 301 redirects via cloudflare to remove the .aspx E.g. /old-directory/page1.aspx has been 301 redirected to /old-directory/page1 using cloudflare. This has removed the .aspx and allowed me to use business catalyst's 301 redirects to direct /old-directory/page1 to new-directory/page1 This has fully restored my page rank! I would like to thank Adam at Redback Creations in Northern Ireland for helping me with this issue. Keith

    | EntertainmentIdeas
    0

  • Hey WWW SEO, It seems to me that the pages' implementations seem correct, so it doesn't appear to be a tracking-based issue. Have you taken to top terms that are driving traffic to these pages (Google Search Console or internal data if you have it) and plotted them in Google Trends to see how they compare over the past 24 months or so? Some may not be high-enough volume, but those that are should give you a feel for where the the volume stands in YoY comparison. Regards, Trenton

    | TrentonGreener
    0

  • Quite a guide about canonicals from Google And this one is a new guide from Yoast for canonicals which is pretty impressive. Take a look. Hope that helps.

    | AngelosS
    1

  • As Eric hinted, the best method to prevent any pages being indexed would be to use htaccess password protection dialog on your development site. It's fairly easy to implement. You can find instructions to do so here: http://www.htaccesstools.com/articles/password-protection/

    | Chris_Hickman
    0

  • Thanks, great to hear of someone else's experience with a similar issue. Glad to hear your rankings mostly improved where you had a corresponding page on the main website. Makes me hopeful that the same will be the case for us.

    | ViviCa1
    0

  • AH! OK, gotcha. In that case, Martijn was right - you'll need to add the Review type. Required fields for the Review type are: reviewBody (text) reviewRating (of type: Rating) author (of type: Person or Organization) So the markup would look something like this:

    | RuthBurrReedy
    0

  • Oop hi Ikkie, thanks for responding and sorry I didn't. Been one of those weeks! When I tried this I got the following error: 'www.midlandnetworks.co.uk redirected you too many times.' Do I need to replace the first bit of my htaccess with that or just stick it on the end? Sticking on the end didn't seem too successful for me.

    | davedon
    0

  • Your hreflang markup looks correct. As far as the _ga query string parameter is concerned, what you want is for Google to ignore it. For that you can use canonical tags. So make sure https://example.de/?_ga=1.16730294.1000579032.1461248919 has the following markup in the HTML :

    | NickJasuja
    0

  • Felt like something is going on

    | solvid
    1

  • Hey, this is Russ here at Moz. Do the redirects point to the homepage or to the current URL? For example, does the http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html redirect to http://newsite.com or http://newsite.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html If it does redirect to the same URL on newsite.com, I would try using wildcard robots.txt entries to simply block the offending content altogether. For example, if all the spam is off the styless.asp page, you could simply block styless.asp?* in your robots.txt and prevent Google from ever crawling those spammy links. However, if you are redirecting everything to the homepage, I think you will need to go back to the old webmaster and figure something out. While Google is great at detecting spam, once you are under a penalty it can be difficult to recover. No one is perfect, including Google, and you don't want to be one of their "mistakes".

    | rjonesx. 0
    0

  • In general, for link value to transfer either through 301s or canonicals, the content of the page needs to be nearly identical. See Cyrus' post for more. And canonicals are not always followed by Google, they are just a "hint", so it's unlikely you'll pass much value that way.

    | evolvingSEO
    0

  • I just did a check and you're right, even though these pages are showing up as errors to the user they are actually showing up as 200 OK, which is causing the duplicate content issue. Thank you!

    | kfallconnect
    0

  • It is _possible _that a subdomain-based landing page could be cannibalizing rankings for specific terms from another page on your site. But if that landing page is actually that good for the term, its not necessarily a bad thing to have it ranking. If its ranking better than the pages you optimized for organic then maybe you should look at why that is (i.e. is it getting good/better links, are people sharing it around, is it better targeted than the organic page, is it more intuitive or has a better call to action, etc. etc.). Now, if you really don't want thoe pages to rank in organic in place of optimized pages you created then you can very easily add a NoIndex tag to the page or exclude it from being crawled in Robots.txt

    | MikeRoberts
    0

  • Hi Michael I don't think this is a concern in terms of a penalty or anything severe. But I would say, if you'd prefer the other breadcrumbs to show up, perhaps try some breadcrumb structured data (unless you have already?) - to get the preferred ones to show up. https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs

    | evolvingSEO
    0