Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can block Wayback Machine from crawling and creating a record of your site by adding the following to your Robots.txt file:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

This will not only stop new records from being created but also stop people viewing what had previously been indexed by Wayback Machine.

More information about this can be found here: https://archive.org/about/exclude.php

I agree with your SEO agency.

Heading tags should be used to provide a hierarchy for the content on a page, not just to format text.

Heading tags should be avoided in page templates where they are not relevant in demonstrating the hierarchy of content on a page - ie. in the header, main navigation, sidebars and footer.

I find it strange that this happens with Yoast as it points the canonical tag for the homepage to a 301 redirect URL. I don't think it's a big problem as search engines seem to handle it well, but it's a problem that I wouldn't expect to see in such a popular and reputable SEO plugin.

If you use the plugin editor to remove the trailing slash you will remove the trailing slash from all pages of your site (something you may not want to do).

If you only want to remove the trailing slash from the homepage the easiest option would be to manually add the canonical URL without the trailing slash in the Advanced tab for Yoast when editing the homepage (as Linda said above). Doing this for one page will take you 2 seconds and fix the problem!

Hi Drew,

If you have multiple canonical tags on a single page, Google will ignore both of them so you will definitely need to to remove the old canonical tag so there is only one on each page.

But it sounds like you are trying to use canonical tags correctly to resolve these duplicate content issues.

If you wan't to read more about canonical tags, this recent article by Patrick Stox on Search Engine Land is excellent: http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tags-easy-right-whats-worst-happen-274635

Cheers,

David

Hi Miss Thumann,

Definitely writing your own content is the best option here.

You won't get any value out of republishing content from high DA sites and it could even have negative consequences.

If you want to publish content from another site because you think your readers might like it, you can do it, BUT you should use a canonical tag to tell search engines who the original source is.

Cheers,

David

Hi William,

Moz would be picking up these URLs because they are linked internally, and they are being reported as duplicates because these pages are identical and there are no canonical tags in place.

https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php should have a self referring canonical tag so that any query strings added to the end of the URL are canonicalized back to https://im.tapclicks.com/signup.php

Adding this canonical tag will resolve these 'High Priority' issues

Cheers,

David

Hi 94501,

I went through this about 6 months ago with a big Australian company. I did pretty much everything you suggested and the transition was very smooth.

Here are my dot point on what I think you should do and answers to your questions:

• 301 redirect pages from old site to corresponding pages on new site.
• Don't worry about nofollowing links from the old site to new site.
• No need to submit requests for old pages to be removed from index - search engines will figure it out with the redirects.
• No risk of the old site losing organic traffic - besides he obvious of not having those pages to get organic traffic, like you said.
• It took 2-3 weeks for G to figure out everything that was going on and index and rank the new site properly.

Only other thing I would add is to make sure you keep things like page titles, heading tags, etc., the same for the pages that are already performing well.

Also, if the new site is using a template that has big changes from the old site, make sure you do all the standard checks to make sure it's 'SEO-friendly' so you don't run into any issues not directly related with moving content to a new domain.

Overall, goal should be to keep the old and new pages as similar as possible - unless you are making improvements!

Cheers,

David

Sounds like they are wanting to make turtlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale/ their homepage, which is quite strange. "Keyword stuffing" URLs like this will not help SEO in any way. I would advise against it and leave the homepage as turtlesforsale.com.

eg. for other pages on the site: turtlesforsale.com/state/city/ is better than turlesforsale.com/turtles-for-sale-in-state/turtles-for-sale-in-city/

Like most things in SEO, think of what is better for humans. The first example is much cleaner and easier to read, and for SEO purposes, there would be no difference between the two if all other factors were the same.

A similar question was asked (and answered very well) here: http://moz.com/community/q/url-seo-better-directory-structure-vs-exact-keyword-phrase

Hi Chris,

I quickly ran your site through Screaming Frog and found that this new page is not linking from your site anywhere - it's what's known as an "orphan page".

By not linking from the site, it is not receiving any "authority" from your domain and you will have a hard time getting it to rank for anything.

The first thing I would do is to make sure it's linking from your site and check how it's going in a few weeks.

Cheers,

David

Hi Luke,

The onsite SEO for both sites actually looks pretty good - looks like Moz has helped you optimize the pages well!

Where both sites are not doing so well appears to be with the links pointing to them.

On the Document Management Software site, there really aren't any good links pointing to the site. It looks like there are a few really old businesses linking to it, but that's about it. Not enough "quality" links for it to be competing with the top sites for "document management software".

On the physio site, it looks like there are a lot of old "SEO links" pointing to the site which would be doing more harm than good (hopefully these are disavowed), eg:
http://sportsinjurycentre.net/sports-physiotherapy-kippax-expert-sports-injury-management/
http://diagnosisneckpain.com/neck-ache-sufferers-talk-to-a-deakin-physio-for-fast-relief/

In summary, onsite SEO is looking good but I think you should focus your efforts on improving the offsite SEO for both sites.

Cheers,

David

Hi Alex,

I think you are talking about featured snippets here, not rich snippets.

There is no structured data markup that will help you get featured snippets. Google uses an algorithm to determine which page it thinks answers the search query the best and pulls through a snippet from that page into the SERPs.

If you are not familiar with featured snippets and how to optimize your content to increase your chances of getting them, I would suggest reading/listening to the following resources:

• What We Learned From Analyzing 1.4 Million Featured Snippets
• Ahrefs’ Study Of 2 Million Featured Snippets: 10 Important Takeaways
• Seizing The Featured Snippet Gold Rush w/Rob Bucci [Podcast]

I also wrote an in-depth guide on how to find easy featured snippet opportunities for you website, which might help you.

Cheers,

David

Hi Luke,

I don't think you have anything to worry about with making the improvements in one go.

As long as you are improving your titles to make them more relevant to the content on the page (and not just jamming them keywords), you won't be upsetting Google and you would only see positive results.

Cheers,

David

Hi jacleaves,

The problem here is with your canonical tags (more info on canonical tags here).

This page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4

Has a canonical tag pointing to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/

The same thing is happening on all of your product pages.

I would change all of your product pages to use "SEO-friendly" URLs and have a self-referring canonical tag.

Eg. your example page: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/?mfgID=A-1&catID=4
Would become: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset
And the canonical tag would point to: http://amishdirectplaysets.com/playset-details/a-1-standard-climber-vinyl-playset

Cheers,

David

Yes, you can link to other sites in text (anchor text will be the linking text) wherever you like, but if you are using their content you should use a canonical tag to acknowledge them as the original source.

Hi Francisco,

I think you're focus is a little bit misdirected here.

To see the real impact of your backlinks, I would be checking Google Analytics for increases in organic traffic or Search Analytics data in Google Search Console.

Don't put too much focus on DA and don't be surprised to see it go up and down with different indexes (and don't freak out when it goes down).

Overall, my advice would be to focus on real metrics rather than third party metrics.

Cheers,

David

Hi sdaily,

I'd definitely keep the existing GA property so you can see the full history in that one property. That way, you'll still be able to compare y/y traffic, etc.

With a new property, you'll be starting your data from scratch and comparing different date ranges will be more difficult.

Just create an annotation so you can keep track of the changeover date.

Cheers,

David

Using the rewrite rule is fine.

There is no issue with domain.com/non-existant-page.html 301 redirecting to domain.com/non-existant-page which would then return a 404 status. If you go to anydomain.com/any-non-existing-page you will return a 404 page but this endless amount of possible pages will not be crawled by search engines because they do not exist and you (or anyone else) should not be linking to them.

With your old, legit 404 error pages, I would recommend 301 redirecting them to a relevant new page, a relevant category page, or the homepage if nothing else is suitable.

There was a great case study released by Reboot Online Marketing last week on exactly this topic: https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/hidden-text-experiment/

Basically, sites with visible text performed better; text in a textarea was treated as visible; and sites with text 'hidden' with CSS and JavaScript 'Read More' buttons didn't perform as well.

As Logan says above, Google is looking to give hidden content full weight with the release of the mobile first algorithm, but this algorithm hasn't been released yet and is likely not to be released this year: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-first-index-2017-23663.html

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

David

Hi Renia,

I'm not sure what they mean when they say "I wonder if MOZ is not reading the infinite scrolling pages the way that Google does"...
Pagination (rel="next" and rel="prev") and canonical tags are not in place so each page is being indexed individually, and would be causing some issues, as Moz reports. Without these tags in place, Google will not understand that the pages are a series, as your web team suggests.

You can see that they are indexed by doing a Google search for site:https://www.whiteheadindustrial.com/c-104-abrasives.aspx

Or site:whiteheadindustrial.com inurl:pagenum to see that there are over 2,000 in total of these pages indexed.

You could easily overcome this issue by getting the developers to implement pagination and canonical tags on these types of pages.

Your second issue, I think, will always be reported as duplicates in Moz because they use the same overall page template (which is taken into consideration when assessing duplicate content) and there is little unique content on them - this is common on e-commerce sites when there isn't much product information available or products are very similar.

However, I don't think you need to worry about this too much. Google is pretty generous when it comes to product pages like this and you shouldn't be negatively impacted by it.

Your third issue with title tags should be resolved once pagination and canonical tags are implemented correctly throughout the site.

Hope this helps

Cheers,

David

Hi Matt,

Just to clarify what Martin said, adding alt text to your images won't actually help your images get indexed, but they will help improve your rankings in image search - so they are two separate things.

If you do an image "site:" search, you'll see that 40+ of your images have been indexed: https://www.google.com.au/search?q=site:bayareahomebirth.org&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5_LfJ0qDUAhVIlJQKHQeFCVIQ_AUICigB&biw=1280&bih=590&gws_rd=cr&ei=HCEyWemYKcib0gS3jIzYBw 

It's only been two weeks, so the rest of the images may just take a little bit longer.

I can also see that a lot of your images are not hosted on your domain (they're hosted with Squarespace).

If you are looking at indexed images in your Search Console account, these images will not be reported as indexed in your SC account because they are not hosted on the same SC domain - but they are actually indexed.

You can check to see if an image is indexed by pasting the image URL into image search, eg. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56b65664b09f955cb8aed482/t/56ba99d5555986520338de96/1455069653711/big%2Bpoo%2Bbig%2Bbath.jpg&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZnOif1aDUAhXFH5QKHT0PDrcQ_AUIBigB&biw=1280&bih=590

Overall, I don't think you have any issues with images being indexed - just reporting accuracy issues because some of them aren't hosted on your domain.

Cheers,

David