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Category: Technical SEO Issues

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


  • I have made loads of redirects as I renamed my pages a lot in the beginning of my SEO career, and it had no effect on my ranking as long as I made a 301 redirect. However, I can not recommend to rename your pages unless it is absolute necessary as you should never fix something that ain't broken:-)

    | Omeo21
    2

  • Hey Dan Ha! Yes a lot changes but this is one thing that has stayed consistent - it's still totally fine to delete old tags. They will result in a 404, but those 404s are generally harmless!

    | evolvingSEO
    0

  • Hi there! Just redirecting from www. to non-www is not a ranking signal. That, unless you have also changed some UX, content or some other key aspect in your site, will not affect rankings. Best luck! GR

    | GastonRiera
    0

  • Hi there! The canonical tags in those pages are implemented incorrectly. There should have absolute urls, like: https://www.domain.com/page/product/ So, the canonical here: https://www.morningstar.com/company/sustainability should be: Look, there are 2 changes from the current tag: 1. https:// at the beginning 2. Removing the trailing slash at the end. In both pages, the changes are the same. Best luck. GR

    | GastonRiera
    0

  • Yes, and it's fairly common. Each of the search engine may or many not use your meta title. If the search engine deemed that another title (derived from the laning page) will match the user's intent better, they may switch it.  Since Google & Bing have different algo's, this happens. For more info see How Does Bing Choose The Title For My Web Page.

    | KevinBudzynski
    0

  • Hi Dale, Nigel is right here - it's best practice to leave the Titles/Descriptions on these archive pages as-is and follow Google's guidelines (use next/prev link tags) to indicate paginated content. If your concern is duplicate content, next/prev tags give Google a clear signal of the relationship between these pages. Best, Mike

    | MikeTek
    0

  • The responses here are great. I think you should have all of the resources you need now. Although it doesn't show domains that link to you, I also like to see the ones that are hosted on the same server, which you can find here: https://viewdns.info/reverseip/ . I agree that Google Search Console and Moz are great places to start.

    | Everett
    0

  • Hi Mike, That new tool is very revealing and supports my experience that you can't dupe Google into ranking a different page just by canonicalization. Thanks! Nigel

    | Nigel_Carr
    0

  • Long URLs is a pet peeve! But I agree with Martin on the traffic analogy. Modify the pages that need the most help and measure against the pages you do not change.

    | WebMarkets
    2

  • Good to hear. Although this is solved, I did want to say the "Redirection" plugin is Wordpress is free and easy to use. Best of success to you!

    | NickW816
    2

  • Thank you, Nigel Carr! My first reaction looking at your answer was "No, wait.. you got it wrong", then I realized the beauty of it's simplicity. You're right. Simple does it Have a good weekend!

    | Dan-Louis
    0

  • Both issues are on ALL WordPress sites. xmlrpc.php return 405 because it's work under HTTP POST but bot crawl under HTTP GET. And error 405 mean switch from GET to POST. But bot can't do that. admin-ajax.php return 400 because it's not designed for direct use. You must make call with some parameter and it will return some information. But as name says - it's responsible for AJAX calls and it's not for direct use that's why it return 400 when it's called w/o parameters. So - that issues are not related to your issue. For example mine WP sites also return same error codes to the bot. Peter

    | Mobilio
    0

  • Thanks, Kevin. Glad I'm not the only one. Disabling tags and categories aren't an option, in my case. Guess I need to look at more of the potential upside. Seems tags and categories, if handled correctly, could provide a new way to engage visitors and search engines. I've heard people refer to 'spidering budgets, or whatnot'. Guess it's an entirely new topic of discussion... if limiting the spurious spider searching, (from good spiders,) means that said spiders will spend more time on the conventional pathways of a site.

    | linkjuiced
    0

  • Hi Dale If that loop you have specified there was true then the homepage wouldn't show up. https://www.theirsite.com/keyword>https://www.theirsite.com/>https://www.theirsite.com/keyword ad infinitum... It would just keep on going and Google wouldn't be able to show the page. You could use Screaming Frog to check for redirect chains - SEMrush and MOZ also pick them up so scanning the site would be my preferred option before touching it. Failing that I would remove it and see what happens. Regards Nigel

    | Nigel_Carr
    0

  • Hello there, I would always check with more than my own browser to make sure it wasn’t only happen for myself. You can try to use the curl tools from keycdn, or ultimately you can also check with google itself by using the “fetch with google” tool in your Search Console. If the problem presist you should check if there is any script on your site could potentially cause the issue. Hope this helps, Joseph Yap

    | Seenlyst
    0

  • Hi There, There should be no problem in receiving the notifications if you have A.)Turned ON notifications, B.) Removed the admins properly and taken access. Both processes are listed below. Turn alerts on and off Sign in to your Google Admin console. Sign in using an administrator account From the Admin console Home page, go to Reports. To see Reports, you might have to click More controls at the bottom. In the left pane, click Manage Alerts. If you have custom alerts, they'll appear at the bottom of the list. In the Status column on the right, turn the switch on to receive an alert, or turn off to stop receiving the alert. (Optional) Click the Email recipients column to edit alert recipients by email address. You can also check or uncheck Super Administrator(s) to start or stop alerts for users who are super administrators We lost our site owner! If the verified owner of your site leaves, or you're not sure who the verified owner is, simply verify another owner for your site. The new owner will be able to see the list of all owners and users verified to that site, as well as the method used to verify each owner. You can then optionally unverify previous owners by removing their verification token (for example, removing the HTML tag from the site, for HTML-tag-verified owners). See Add or remove owners for more information.

    | Vijay-Gaur
    0

  • Nope, sorry, that site doesn't have Jetpack installed.

    | DaleZon
    0

  • Nigel brings up an interesting point that sheds light on the importance of content relevance. With the increase of different types of results, business listings, brand/product markup, Articles, Videos, it really solidifies how crucial it is to make sure ALL of your content matches up with the subject. Even when you do do your best to do everything right, definitely expect Google to throw some curve balls at you. For example I couldn't rank for "Font Awesome Rocks" but apparently, Awesome Rocks got taken down! ROFL DhdXm_SUYAAmVIl.jpg:large

    | TucsonAZWebDesign
    0

  • Quick thing to check - have a look at your server logs. Those kinds of random load time increases look typical of the load spikes that are typical of bot overloads - where spambots may be hitting your pages in bursts, causing the server to overload and slow (or even reset, as Vijay mentions). Those bot hits aren't recorded in GA - you'll have to look at the actual server access logs to find them. Hope that helps? Paul

    | ThompsonPaul
    0