Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Just add the sitemap index file to your robots.txt and let them figure it out from there. You basically just want to point them to your sitemaps and they're able to do that from just the sitemap index. So there's not really a need to list all of them in there.

Thanks for your answers and helping us out guys!

I'm with you on using rel=canonical but the new pages are slightly different in that they have a lot more content for SEO purposes. The content definitely provides value to users but wondering if the extra content means Google will ignore canonical tag? Google mentions that canonical is good for duplicates where pages are very similar if not identical.

looks ok

Download XENU - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html - run a crawl of your site and right click the properties of any page to see all internal links linking to that page.

Hey James, sorry to hear you're getting blasted by negative links and appreciate your responses here. I actually sorted this one out (fingers crossed it stays that way) by having the dev team implement a redirect rule that 301 redirects any query string back to the folder we want ranking. Similar signal to what the canonical tag would send but in my opinion a stronger signal since there is no longer a way to reach those weird query string URLs with a 200 response. Once that was implemented the appropriate page was right back to its old high ranking position and the query strings are hardly to be seen in the index and are no longer preferred to the old ranking page - so looks like all is right with the world again. We also disavowed the domain that was the source of many of the query string URLs. I don't think it was a case of negative SEO - just bad coding on their side. I'm not sure what exactly did the trick but I suspect strongly that the 301 redirects is what solidified the index due tot the strong correlation of that change with ranking recovery. Maybe you can employ a similar solution whereby you can disavow domains where these links originate or set up server side handling to manage URLs of a specific pattern - for example, any URL containing "pornsite.com" if not any query string altogether (in our case we don't have any use for query strings in our URLs so just bagged them all). Thanks again, Matt

Is your site appeared with brand name and domain name? If no then share your domain name or if yes, then update with unique keyword which don't have any other page.

Yes agreed with james wolff, If you are adding Disallow:/ at last no need to adding any other disallow. Thanks

Yes  i agree

Where the issue becomes more complex, is if you add CloudFlare to your site for DDoS protection, to serve up from closer towers, etc. Many sites who want to load faster or avoid attack are doing so. We have thus incurred a redirect issue to work through and it takes some technical expertise. Because CloudFlare is a third party for SSL certificates in many hosting packages, this seems to catch many off-guard and wondering what went wrong. If helpful, we have had greater success buying our own CloudFlare service versus letting a hosting provider be an affiliate service for our SSL.

Hello! Actually, often having more results can sometimes increase the CTR to either result But either way I wouldn't be concerned about CTR in that sense. I would worry again about if users are enjoying your pages once they land on them. You can, however, still work on improving CTR in general to both pages by making your titles and descriptions better - more clicks = more traffic anyway!

Hey there, One thing is for sure - js and css files have no value to your site's SEO. If your site is looking good and working well under the new design there's no point in worrying about this. Good luck!!

This got resolved, so here's what happened for anyone else with this issue. After 6 weeks of the page ranking well on mobile, but not ranking at all on desktop, we: specified the old URL in the sitemap.xml put in an individual 301 from the old URL to the new (ie didn't just rely on the rules we were using for other URLs) ensured only one redirect was required from old to new URL put a link on the homepage, using the targeted keyword phrase, to the new URL (these were in addition to the other technical fixes detailed in the original post above) About a week after this, the desktop ranking returned, with the new URL ranking.  Maybe coincidence, maybe the extra steps were required. But it's worked, whatever the reason.

Hi, It is the homepage url I am using. Thanks

Hi! The Moz tool is not being more specific as to what element is a duplicate? (ie: description, title, H1, etc)? I ran it through Screaming Frog and it only found a few H1s that are a duplicate, which is not even a big issue really.

Hi Gaston and Gamajunova, It's true in your example that http://site.com and https://site.com are completely different URLs to Mozscape (and more importantly, search engines), but only their PA would be different - their DA will be the same. The PA 1 is normal if that exact URL (the https version) has never received any links in the past, but the DA drop is significant and I would suggest looking at another tool like Ahrefs to see if the domain has lost a lot of links recently. If you haven't lost any links, I would say the latest Moz index hasn't crawled many links pointing to your domain - so it's reporting a significantly decreased DA. If that's the case, don't worry too much about your DA. It will come back eventually and it won't have any impact on your organic performance. Cheers, David

I'd chalk it up to being a quirk. "Golf holidays" is the keyword that actually has volume, therefore anything happening on "golfholidays" is mostly a curiosity unless you can track conversions from it. I would ignore it and keep plowing forward with your efforts to rank for the one you care about. More likely than not you just need to keep building the authority of your site and make sure your page is well optimized for the phrase "golf holidays" and you'll get there. Most of the sites I see ranking on page 1 for that query have a decent number of links to them. 5 results are homepages which tend to have more links than internal landing pages, and the landing pages that are ranking are reasonably well targeted. As an example of what it takes to show up with a well optimized internal page with no links - British Airways (https://www.britishairways.com/en-us/destinations/holiday-types/golf-holidays) is only ranking 10th for the query with a highly authoritative site.

I would try to optimize your homepage for your main keyword, but it is ok to also optimize the main keyword category page as well (maybe a good opportunity to use LSIs in Meta Title?). Your home page will generally get more initial inbound links if you are a local business or have your brand name mentioned a lot online. Best case scenario is both pages rank, which I have seen happen on occassion as well.

Hi I have the same issue with my website- I do not agree with you Andreas - I had a look on a famous ecommerce website I can see that they are using Oracle for their help center - the content is indexed but urls are not friendly and it seems oracle does not support SEO- According to you is there a way to do it properly?