Category: Technical SEO Issues
Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO issues.
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Site not getting indexed by googlebot.
Hi there, thanks for your question! Did any of these responses help you resolve your issue? We would love an update. Christy
| Christy-Correll0 -
Anchor text with punctuation
Hi Radi, I would get rid of all punctuation except for "-" as it is seen as a space. If you use othe punctuations they are ignored. When added in a query the results are without the punctuation. Same goes for Bing. More info: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?rd=1#exceptions_punctuations Makes it easier for you I hope Grt Tymen
| Tymen0 -
Hundreds of 404 errors are showing up for pages that never existed
There have been a few people at Moz with similar problems with GSC. People always throw a few ideas around: maybe Google is creating URLs to try to find pages that it can't find through crawling links alone? Maybe another site was trying to hack your site by creating URLs they were hoping would trigger certain content on your site (a laughable idea now, but I remember my college professor showing us a site that put cost parameters in the URL during check out)? However they got there, though, Eric and Chris gave you some good ways to make sure that you're not still in trouble (if you ever were). Hope this helps!
| KristinaKledzik0 -
Subdomain as News Section instead of Source in Google News?
Yes it's better if you put all the other suddomains as sections. Good luck M
| ebarrel0 -
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
If you are sure you want to downrank the old site, you can contact the webmasters linking to it and tell them about your new site. Telling them that there is no content on the old site should also help.
| DaveGerecht0 -
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
You're right - I'm worrying about something that isn't yet a problem. Thank you
| RosemaryB1 -
Why are these blackhat sites so successful?
Not exactly. When it comes to different countries, like the example domains you listed above. (.com and .ca) Google allows for mirrored or duplicate sites by country. When it comes to multiple sites in the same country, Google will give value to the first use of the content, then no value to the 2nd use. In the example you gave of San Diego and Atlanta, it is important to create unique content, citations and backlinks that are localized to that site's location. I have a client that has two separate appliance companies in the same area and two separate websites. I've used some of the same general content on both, but have content that is unique to both, along with unique links, and they both rank really well.
| tdawson090 -
Why HTML entities gets crawled as content keywords in Google search console?
Thank u so much for your response chris.
| Jenifer300 -
Images, CSS and Javascript on subdomain or external website
The only major improvement I can think of hosting images externally would be improving the overall speed of your website. If you run a pagespeed test with Google's free tool and notice your site is rendering slow then I would first consider reducing the number of javascript and css files being loaded. You will run into issues if your site is loading too many external files you can expect to see increases in bounce rates and poor engagement metrics. This may have changed but Moz did an expierement awhile back on if website speed impacts search ranking however if certain pages are taking too long to load they probably This may have changed but Moz did an experiment awhile back on if website speed impacts search ranking. Even if speed does not directly impact rankings if certain pages are taking too long to load they probably won't be indexed. What I would do is run Google's page speed tool on a few pages and if you have Google analytics on your site you can get some insights by looking at Behavior-> Site Speed-> Speed Suggestions and check out some of the recommendations Google is making about your site.If you have a problem with If you find out that you have a problem with speed I came across a good article on some tips and suggestions that may be helpful for you about reducing http request. I hope this helps some.
| JordanLowry0 -
Hreflang for multple countries but single language
The only valid redirection is the one based on user browser, not IP, IMHO. However, if you want to use that kind of redirection for the home page (not the others pages), then that redirection should be working the first time, so that users can eventually choose to go to another version of the site they prefer (i.e.: I live in Spain and I go to domain.eu. When I travel in the US, I still want to go to domain.eu, not always being pushed to use domain.com). Moreover, doing that, you will let crawlers to discover also the others version even though they were redirected to the one corresponding to their IP the first time. In other words, Googlebot (Mountain View, USA, IP), the first time will go always to domain.com, but once there it will able to discover also domain.eu and domain.co.uk from the versions selector, and it won't be redirected again to domain.com. Said all this, the fact is that you want to target a political area (EU) with domain.eu, the world with domain.com and the UK with domain.co.uk. This desire to target three different kind of geographies complicates everything :-). The only solution I see is: Domain.com set up as "global" >> hreflang="en". All users using English will see it in the SERPs despite of their location but in these cases (see point 2 and 3); Domain.eu set up as the site for the European countries >> hreflang="en-ES" - hreflang="en-IT" - hreflang="en-DE" and so on. Domain.co.uk set up as the site for Great Britain >> hreflang="en-GB". Doing this and implementing the hreflang in the canonical URLs of the sites and referencing only canonical URLs of the others sites (apart having the self-referral hreflang), then you should be safe. However, remember that with those hreflang, people searching in another language than English will never (or almost never) see your sites but for brand name searches or very specific brand + product queries. Therefore, I am still of the idea that having only English websites for targeting the world means missing a huge business opportunity.
| gfiorelli10 -
CSS background image links bad for seo?
We don't get a ton from image search and the images themselves aren't worth finding. The developers are coding like this for sitespeed reasons (I'd agree with it being "odd"). Thanks.
| JimLynch0 -
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi Ricky, This one is always a tough question to answer. It depends on a number of factors, not least of which being your vertical but it will take some creative thinking for sure.\ Unfortunately it isn't something I can even give you broad suggestions on. The questions you need to answer are "who would want to see our services pages?" and once you're comfortable you've got the answer to that, ask "where would they find it helpful to stumble across this page?". It could be an industry-relevant website where your product is a great fit, maybe a relevant forum where someone is literally asking for what your page covers etc. This is why it's so important to make all of your landing pages genuinely helpful - if the current answer to the first question is "nobody would want to see it, it's terrible" then that should be priority #1 Build something link-worthy and reach out to those niches. Don't forget good old fashioned competitor link analysis here either. You may find nothing directly in their link profiles but it might spark an idea - I know it's happened to me plenty of times!
| ChrisAshton0 -
Just saw a competitor jump in rank by double digits, questioning my url structure choice now.
Yes I have run a full report, but thank you very much for the resource, I'm sure others will find it very helpful. From the report I've seen that our backlink profile seems to be our biggest issue of ranking, especially since we lost one of our biggest. And for a niche industry eCommerce site, it's very difficult to find backlink opportunities. Hoping that after this site redesign we will of increased out DA and PA some, but won't see that change for a few more months at best. Again thank you for the resource and response everyone!
| Deacyde0 -
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Thanks for your answer Dirk! I will check all links pointing to that old link, and will upgrade them to the link of the new static page. Hopefully that will solve my problem.
| Neckermann0 -
Noindex PPC landing pages or optimise for SEO?
Our clients have bespoke CMS's developed in-house, with additional functionality built in if a client needs something different. But I think it would be a great idea to ask our developers if we could start making this standard across all new websites. Definitely seems like something that will make life a lot easier in future... Thanks again for your help!
| Ria_0 -
Duplicate content - working with CMS constraints
You're very welcome, we're all in this google together. I know that issue all too well, happens a lot with sitemap pages, sites that don't declare one type or url structure so they have site.com/ and site.com. I'm kinda surprised the CMS doesn't redirect the url when you create the friendly url, but glad they agreed to work on it, I would utilize your best offense and get the other customers of the CMS to upvote and squeak their wheels. Since this also seems like a case of a CMS missing crucial features for site growth. If they don't fix this promptly, consider if possible a switch to a more commonly used CMS like Drupal, Wordpress or even Joomla, all are established for years with these kinda issues already worked out and in some cases extra addons to help assist. But understand, often the choice of CMS isn't always up to us. It does seem like for now, best you can do is try and reduce what you can on that page, but could be that the issue will keep presenting itself until the root cause is contained.
| Deacyde0 -
Trailing Slash Problems
I know this is an old thread but just wondering if anyone ever found a solution in Squarespace, or did everyone just move over to Wordpress?
| TrinaDPhoto0