Magento technical SEO issues
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Hi This is lots of questions and don't expect full answers but if anyone can help or put me in touch with some who can that would be great
so here are 3 issues we have from some auditing our site
Firstly on pages like https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc so any pages where there is a sortby the cananoical link doesn't seem to be working correctly.
So for here it is https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc"/>
but should be https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us"/>
secondly with have a lot of duplicate title tags mainly caused from the blog and the above problem see-> http://prntscr.com/b2t9xe
but regarding the blog we have an issue where 2 canonical appearing for example this page
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/there are 2 canonical links appearing
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/"/>
we want it to be this
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/"/>Thirdly
Our mobile usability issues have gone up a lot see- > http://prntscr.com/b2tado
I can see what the issue is that this folder https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/skin/frontend/tidybooks/default/images/ was being crawled by google and contains lots of 'index of' pages. I've disallowed directory in robots.txt as shown here -> http://prntscr.com/b2tbc5is that correct?
any help would be great
Just to let you know
we use magento v1.7
we use SEO suite ultimate extension
and we use fishpigs wordpress extension
thanks
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Hello Geraldine,
I'm going to rephrase your questions here just to make sure I understand them correctly.
1. Your Sort-By URLs are using self-referencing rel= canonical tags.
When I looked into this issue I found that some of these pages no longer exist and produce a 404 error page. Example:
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/sort-by/position/sort-direction/desc/l/letters:5I did find some that I was able to access and verified the problem above. You should contact MageWorks to ask if there is a way you can fix this with the SEO plugin you're using. If not, I suggest adding a disallow statement in the robots.txt file for the /sort-by/ folders to keep them from being accessed and indexed. Then I would go into Google Search Console (GSC) and remove that entire directory from the index, as described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en .
2. You have duplicate title tags, mostly caused by the blog and the sort-by URLs discussed above.
If you're not using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress you should be. Without seeing the report and knowing exactly what those URLs are with duplicate title tags, I can't help answer this question very well. Common examples are Tag pages and paginated Category pages. I usually advise blog owners to disallow the Tag pages in the Robots.txt file and removing the directory from Google SERPs using GSC URL Removal Tool, as described above.
3. Image directory pages are causing mobile usability errors in GSC and you have blocked them from being indexed.
Because those index pages do not need to be accessed in order to render the page, I don't see any problem with blocking those in the robots.txt file. However, you do NOT want to block anything that needs to be accessed in order to render the page so I would advise you to use the Robots.txt tester tool in GSC to make sure your Robots.txt code is not inadvertently blocking those image files as well, such as https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/skin/frontend/tidybooks/us/images/eco.png . As long as you aren't blocking access to the actual image files, only to the directory pages, your solution is OK.
It would be better to serve an error code on those pages though. Best practice is to not allow folder index pages to be loaded like that. Otherwise, it creates a bit of a security risk. Often webmasters will show a "403: Forbidden" code on those URLs.
I hope this helps. Please feel free to respond with any updates or clarifications. Hopefully others will chime in now that your issues are broken up into component parts. In the future, you'll get better responses by asking three different questions instead of lumping them all into one. This is because someone my know how to help with one of your questions, but not the others, and are less inclined to answer the one they can help with because they can't answer the others.
Good luck!
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Thanks Everett for you response to be honest I think I'm going to separate these questions out on different post as suggested as they concern different elements.
For question 1 - we use a separate layered navigation module by Mandev so I guess by first port of call is to speak to them. Mageworks refuse to deal with that side. There are a ton of options available, plus all sort-by options are NOINDEX, FOLLOW Robots Meta Header.
For question 2 - We do use yoast plugin and I have noindexed all relevant bits causing issues but whether it's an integration issue between Magento and wordpress I'm not sure as I can see no referencing to yoast in our page source code. Below is example for some of the duplicate tags we are getting, I have noindex pages using yoast in wordpress however the code is showing index follow. Also you will see the 2 canonical links as well and no mention of yoast.
Duplicate title tags
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The Tidy Books UK Blog
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Displaying 30 of 37
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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.
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