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Hi

Use GitHub.com for your code. Run dareboost.com

Can you send us your domain or say the number of plug-ins?

_ "SEO stated that the site should not be so delicate; that too many plugins and widgets are used making it inherently unstable."_

They might be right it one bad plugin can kill a WordPress site so yes too many plugins and widgets can make a WP site a nightmare how many plugins?

• _My question is, shouldn't a Wordpress site be simple enough to hand over to a decent coder with little risk of breaking the code? Are there any standards regarding the hand over of a site? I am comfortable with my developers, but what if they change professions or close their company? How would I transition the site? _

**One great thing about WordPress is there are plenty of devs that are great & **

to find them

1. **https://performancefoundry.com/ is great **
2. https://codeable.io/ has hundreds of great devs

• _There must be standards and protocols that allow a third party, such as an SEO to change code without causing havoc. Does anyone have some insight? _

1. https://github.com/marketplace/category/code-quality
2. See https://i.imgur.com/HNh3VjM.png is https://codeclimate.com
3. https://codebeat.co
4. https://codeclimate.com/
5. https://github.com/cknow/checker
6. Use GitHub.com or https://pantheon.io

Hope this helps,

Tom

yj0gswV.png HNh3VjM.png

You don’t need to worry about instapage & robot.txt your site has the robots.txt & instapage is not set to no index.

so yes use google search console to fetch / index the pages it’s very easy if you read the help information I posted below

https://help.instapage.com/hc/en-us#

hope that helps,

Tom

If you cannot turn off  “Meta Noindex“ you cannot fix it with robots.txt I  suggest you contact the developer of the  Instapage  landing pages app. If it’s locked to no index as you said that is the only of for countering a pre coded  by the company Meta Noindex issue?

I will look into this for you I bet that you can change it but not via robots.txt. I

will update it in the morning for you.

All the best,

Tom

Moz Update DA was updated last night.

Domain Authority is now Domain Authority 2.0

• https://moz.com/domain-authority-2.0
• https://moz-static.s3.amazonaws.com/products/landing-pages/announcements/Authority_Scoring_Guide.pdf
• https://moz.com/community/q/a-new-and-improved-domain-authority-is-on-the-way

Hope this helps,

Tom

That would normally be the case but not tonight.

LOL, I am picking up a lot of the UK Q&A I will be at BrightonSEO and search love London if any of you guys will be in the area I'd love to grab a pint?

sincerely,

Thomas

Sorry Nigel

was not trying to make this more complicated was just trying to make sure that we were all on the same page.

FYI if you need a method of adding the rel canonical to your website quickly you can use Google tag manager or if you want to add to the header

https://support.stackpath.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001445283-EdgeRules-Adding-a-Canonical-Header

Use a self-referencing canonical

https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-recommend-self-referencing-canonical-tags/

Please let me know if you want me to remove the image below?

you can use this one if needed http://bseo.io/c1vMSv

mgkic5E.png

Every other month I come back and check in but I'm glad to see that you're here

Hey man I understand is a big deal

could you do me a huge favor and run your site through screaming frog SEO spider send me a couple of pages with the domains whited out so I can tell you 100% what to do in this situation because I am basing this on what you have told me and honestly I would like to look at what a tool can show me and that will tell me what I need to do.

Or you can tell me if the mobile version of the site hit's Google's index yes or no?

respectfully,

Tom

The single self-referencing URL will work.

What URLs are you  using with the “alternate” tag on?

You said 
”1. We have multiple brand sites, that have a similar setup. They all have mobile and desktop versions of the sites running on the same URL, both of which show the same content.

2. The server determines whether if you're on a desktop or mobile devices using the header information, and points the user to the site relevant files for the given device.”

thats Dynamic serving same URL

Dynamic serving is a setup where the server responds with different HTML (and CSS) on the same URL depending on which user agent requests the page (mobile, tablet, or desktop).

that would NOT give you the mobile or m.example.com & www.example.com different URLs

**But If you do have  a different  m.example.com & www.example.com  URLs you should use this code or  XML site maps **

for different URLs use this:

Annotations in the HTML

On the desktop page (http://www.example.com/page-1), add the following annotation:

<linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<="" span="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></linkrel="alternate"media="only>

On the mobile page (http://m.example.com/page-1), the required annotation should be:

<linkrel="canonical"href="http: www.example.com="" page-1"=""></linkrel="canonical"href="http:>

This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

Or

Annotations in sitemaps

We support including the rel="alternate"annotation for the desktop pages in sitemaps like this:

<urlsetxmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"<="" span="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc>
<xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<="" span="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"/></xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only></urlsetxmlns="http:>

You should have the same URL on mobile and desktop

You should have the same rel canonical tag on your URLs unless and this is a big unless you're talking about using Google AMP?

If the URL you want to be indexed is the same URL point everything to that URL if that makes it easier to understand.

respectfully,

Tom

Unless you are using AMP?

Then you would add

Linking pages with

In order to solve this problem, we add information about the AMP page to the non-AMP page and vice versa, in the form of  tags in the .

Add the following to the non-AMP page:

<link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html">

And this to the AMP page:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/full/document.html">

are you using AMP pages?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/discovery

I hope that helps you if not please let me know.

Respectfully,

Tom

Cool, that's what I thought when I heard your description I just wanted to be very thorough because sometimes you get very little information and I appreciate you letting me know that.

dynamic  serving URLs are identical to each other so you should have a self-referencing canonical tag because the URL does not change the real canonical tag just decides what should be in the index and the same URL.

You're Rel canonical should be something like this example below

Example URL https://www.example.com/example-url/

because the end URL is the same and URL that you want to be indexed in Google you want to be certain that you have a self-referencing URL to prevent query strings and other things like that and you do not need to point a URL to an identical URL you just need a self-referencing canonical if that makes sense.

See: https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/

I hope that is of help,

Tom

If you don't mind me asking did you run a complete crawl of the site prior to changing the theme?

I only ask because very unlikely that the identical URL structure will remain considering all the different modifications to photographs and pages.

if you have the original version you could run a screaming frog test on both the original and new site?

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

you could do this by taking your backed up version of your old site and uploading it to pantheon.io that would allow you a free staging server allowing you to not have to worry about duplicate content and perform tests like this.

Respectfully,

Tom

Nice to meet you too James a pleasure to see someone on here that is is dedicated

You guys are fast I was going to answer this and had to do some other things but let me weigh in on couple things.

as you said

“We are in a predicament of how to properly use the canonical and alternate rel tags**. Currently we have a canonical on mobile and alternate on desktop, both of which have the same URL because both mobile and desktop use the same as explained in the first paragraph.”**

so what you’re saying is that you have a dynamic site so you don’t need to add “alternate"media” tags to the site.

https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving

As it is not immediately apparent in this setup that the site alters the HTML for mobile user agents (the mobile content is "hidden" when crawled with a desktop user agent), it’s  recommend that the server send a hint to request that Googlebot for smartphones also crawl the page, and thus discover the mobile content. This hint is implemented using the Vary HTTP header.

**you don’t need this **

Annotations in the HTML

On the desktop page (http://www.example.com/page-1), add the following annotation:

<code dir="ltr"><linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<br="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></linkrel="alternate"media="only></code> 

On the mobile page (http://m.example.com/page-1), the required annotation should be:

 <code dir="ltr"><linkrel="canonical"href="http: www.example.com="" page-1"=""></linkrel="canonical"href="http:></code> 

This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

Annotations in sitemaps

We support including the rel="alternate"annotation for the desktop pages in sitemaps like this:

 <code dir="ltr"><urlsetxmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"<br="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url><loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc>
    <xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<br="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"/></xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only></url></urlsetxmlns="http:></code> 

The required rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL should still be added to the mobile page's HTML.

**to be sure **

Are you willing to share your domain with us? Or one domain?

1. We're talking about multiple websites that all have the identical site structure or at least mobile and desktop site structure?

2. Your server is making the change for you?

3. Would you be kind enough to install this plug-in on chrome in order for you to show a couple examples of the canonical and the URL?

• https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/portents-seo-page-review/babgchcegnkbiojmdpnoilficladccfm?hl=en-US
• https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-redirect-trace/nnpljppamoaalgkieeciijbcccohlpoh?hl=en

In addition, would you be kind enough to run your site through the two tools here ( 100% free and very easy to use)

• https://varvy.com/mobile/
• https://varvy.com/
• &
• https://redbot.org/

If you would not mind doing this and sending screenshots it would mean a lot to us and getting your canonical's straightened out.

screenshots https://snag.gy/  then upload to http://imgur.com/

everything is on the same server I'm assuming?

Of the three below how would you categorize your site?

1. https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls
2. https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving
3. https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/responsive-design

Respectfully,

Tom

Thank you

Effect digital what should I call you by the way? It seems that where answering a lot of the same questions and I love that!

Respectfully,

Tom

Hi Surge,

I created the image with a pro version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ ( it's a local tool that you have to configure on a server or bigger sites)

However given the size of your site I prefer to use https://www.deepcrawl.com , https://oncrawl.com , and https://botafy.com  I am currently 50% done with deep crawl which will provide more details than Screaming frog can.

I can send you some very large private files is there way to do that?

Or do you want them posted here?

sincerely,

Tom

There is room to even out your site structure

https://i.imgur.com/Fmqsj4U.png

Fmqsj4U.png

In order not to hurt your site I would not do number one or number two unless the category is extremely relevant which in this case I would err on the side of caution choose number two if you are going to consolidate.

1. 301-redirect to the first page of the category
2. create canonical tag with URL of first page of the category
3. return 404/410

Again I will have a lot more information for you in less than day.

Tom