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What you've submitted is your sitemap for human visitors - not a sitemap for search engines.

The sitemap that you submit to Webmaster Tools for search engines will be a .xml file. Eg. instead of https://www.zenory.co.nz/sitemap it would be https://www.zenory.co.nz/sitemap.xml

There are a few ways you can create a sitemap.xml for your site. You can use a program like Screaming Frog to crawl the site and generate a static sitemap. That is, a sitemap file that won't update automatically when you add new pages or posts - you will have to generate a new sitemap every time you add new content.

Depending on which CMS you are using you should be able to generate your sitemap.xml dynamically. That is, a sitemap file that updates itself as you add new content, which makes things a lot easier - especially on large sites!

You can find out more about XML Sitemaps and see a sample here: http://www.web-site-map.com/

It is important that you only include URLs in your sitemap that you want search engines to crawl. Don't include any pages that are no indexed or blocked by robots.txt.

The canonical tag should point to the URL of the site that you want indexed.

If you want denenapoints.com to be the indexed site the canonical tag on denenapoints.com must point to itself: http://www.denenapoints.com/

NOT http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/

I would 301 redirect the http://houston-injury-lawyers.com/ domain to prevent possible duplicate issues.

If your pages are correctly marked up with Schema you don't don't need to submit them to anything and even if it marked up correctly, it's still up to Google to decide if they give you the rich snippets, or not.

ie. Simply having the correct markup does not guarantee you the rich snippets!

Hi Monu,

It's most likely because Moz hasn't crawled your shortened URLs before - anything that Moz hasn't crawled will report as PA 1.

But don't be too concerned about PA and how long it takes Moz to crawl your links!

And don't think that going through a URL shortener is going to "boost" the link value because it's reported as a higher DA/PA link - it doesn't quite work like that

Cheers,

David

Hi 1stOTLJK,

I own a site that's in Google News and have worked on getting more dozens of client's sites into Google News.

While it's not mentioned in Google's News guidelines anymore, I believe that you still need to have at least 3 regular authors publishing news content on the site. How many writers does the site currently have?

You also need to make sure that the content you are submitting to G News is actually newsworthy. If the site posts basic blog content like "10 tips to improve X" or "10 best X for you", this needs to separated from what you are submitting to G News.

If you have to, create a 'News' category on the site and only add newsworthy articles to this category. Then, when submitting to G News, only submit this category.

Eg. submit yoursite.com/news/ instead of yoursite.com

And don't worry about being knocked back with your submission attempts - it won't leave a "stain" on the site that will prevent you from being successful with a future submission.

If you can PM me the site, I'd be happy to take a quick look at it and provide you with some more specific tips.

Cheers,

David

Hi Inevo,

Canonical tags are being used correctly and it doesn't actually look like any of the URLs with query strings are indexed in Google.

I'm going to go off the topic of canonicals now, but still related to the crawl and index of the site:

Has the site changed CMS in the last year or two? It's possible that some of the 400k URLs indexed are old or were not canonicalized properly at some point in time, so they were indexed.

The problem with how the site it currently setup is that it is basically impossible for search engines to crawl because of the product filter. I wrote an article about this a while ago (link), specifically to do with product filters in Magento. Product filters can turn your site into a 'black hole' for search engines - which is definitely happening in this case (try crawling it with Screaming Frog).

I'd recommend blocking product filter URLs from being crawled so that search engines are only crawling important pages on the site.

You should be able to fix this be adding these 3 lines to your Robots.txt:

Disallow: *?
Disallow: *+
Allow: *?p=

(Note: please check that you don't need to add more parameters to Allow)

These changes will make crawling your site much more efficient - from millions of crawlable URLs, to probably 30-35k.

Let me know how this goes for you

Cheers,

David

To add to this, you will also probably never get star ratings to appear for your homepage. I've never seen star ratings appear on a homepage but would love to see any proof of it ever happening!

John Mueller said back in 2014 that "review rich snippets should only be used in cases where "the main topic of the page needs to be about a specific product or service." -- using them on your homepage in general wouldn't be like that."

Article on SE Roundtable here.

I'd think you'd have a much better chance of getting them to display in SERPs if you moved the ratings markup to relevant service pages on your site.

Cheers,

David

Hi David,

I have to disagree with Dmitrii a bit here.

I would say the answer to your question depends on the size of your site and how many articles and tags you are talking about - on bigger sites with more tags, they can become quite an issue.

On a big-ish news site that I own and run (14,000+ articles), I added "noindex" to all tag pages (2,000+) and then blocked them in robots.txt a few months later (once Google had crawled and removed them all from index).

The reason for removing and blocking them for search engines is that tag pages generally don't offer anything unique or of substantial value when compared to other pages on your site site, and they can also use up a lot of your "crawl budget".

For the site mentioned, I saw around a 30% organic traffic increase after implementing these changes.

The tags are still there for users, but they are not visible to search engines and means that search engines are now only crawling pages that we want indexed and ranking, instead of wasting their time crawling thousands of links to thousands of tag pages.

Basically, don't think of tags as a way to "help your SEO" because they probably won't and they have the potential to do the opposite.

If you think creating a particular tag will help you get long-tail traffic, write an article about that topic instead! I guarantee you it will perform a lot better than a tag page.

Cheers,

David

No.

Just to add a bit more information to this, Screaming Frog in default 'Spider' mode will identify old URLs and their status code only if it picks up links to the old URLs in the crawl (in which case you should update all internally redirected links to point to their new location), but if the old URLs are now 'orphaned', you won't find them in the Screaming Frog crawl report.

BUT, if you have a list of all of your old URLs (hopefully you ran a crawl before changing the site over!) you can use Screaming Frog in 'List' mode to find the status code of all of your old URLs and easily identify anything that needs fixing.

Cheers,

David

Hi Jamie,

It sounds like the dev site has been removed from index, which is good, but I would check two things straight away on the proper site:

1. Make sure your site doesn't have a meta robots "noindex" tags on each page
2. Make sure your site isn't blocking crawlers (including search engines) in robots.txt

If this is a WordPress site, check Settings > Reading and make sure that the box that says 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' is unchecked.

If you aren't sure how to do any of this, send me a PM with the domain names and I'd be happy to take a quick look.

Cheers,

David

Hi Lesley,

I think Google would be pretty good at handling things like this on e-commerce sites, so I wouldn't worry about it (as long as those page elements are plain text and not using heading tags, for some reason).

Also, google:off/on tags are only used by Google Search Appliance, and are ignored by Google Bot. You will still have content within off/on tags indexed in normal Google search.

Cheers,

David

If you want to leave a legitimate blog comment to engage with the author and the community, go for it!

If you're only leaving blog comments to get links to "help your SEO" - don't do it.

It's spam and it won't help you at all.

Hi Tim,

I agree with Laura on the canonical tags. I've worked on several large Magento sites and I've never seen any issue with the way Magento handles it - by canonicalizing product URLs to the root directory.

In fact, I actually prefer this was over assigning a product to a 'primary' category and using that as the canonical.

As Laura said, a reduction in the total number of indexed pages might actually be a really big positive here! More pages indexed does not mean it's better. If they are low quality/duplicate pages that have been removed from index, that's a really good thing.

I did find some issues with your robots.txt file:

• Disallow: /media/ - should be removed because it's blocking images from being crawled (this is a default Magento thing and they should remove it!)
• Disallow: /? - this basically means that any URLs containing a ? will not be crawled and with the way pagination is setup on the site, this means that any pages after 1 are not being crawled.
  This could be impacting how many product pages you have indexed - which would definitely be a bad thing! You would obviously want your product pages to be crawled and indexed.

Solution: I would leave Disallow: /? in robots.txt because it stops a product filter URLs being crawled, but I would add the following line:

Allow: */?p=

This line will allow your paginated pages to be crawled, which will also allow products linked from those pages to be crawled.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

David

https://moz.com/blog/comprehensive-analysis-domain-authority

https://moz.com/blog/domain-authority-seo

Hi Luke,

For that site, it looks like some pages are resolving to https and some are not.

It's possible that they are in the middle of a transition to https and are rolling it out slowly over the entire site - it's hard to know.

Asking why a companies wouldn't automatically redirect http to https - again, it's hard to say. It might be that they are also in the middle of a transition to https, or it might be that they simply don't know any better/are using an SEO service that doesn't know any better.

Google will probably be able to figure it out and it shouldn't really hurt them, but if we want things to be perfect and want to make things easier for search engines, then the then URLs should definitely resolve to https, if it's available.

Cheers,

David

Hi Ricky,

Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on 'How to Optimize for Competitors' Branded Keywords' in February this year that I think you'll find helpful

Both options you suggested could be successful.

I think it really comes down to two things:

1. How much your client is willing to spend.
2. If they want their company site openly targeting competitor terms.

If they have no issue with openly targeting competitor brand names, I'd say do it on the current site. This will also be the cheaper option.

If they want it to appear as an anonymous product comparison, obviously, you will have to build a separate site - which will require more budget.

You don't need to worry about a Google penalty with either of these options.

Cheers,

David

Hi Luke,

Don't worry too much about your DA.

Have you lost rankings? Have you lost organic traffic? If the answer is "no" to both questions, you're doing fine.

DA will fluctuate with each update because there are different volumes of links crawled by Moz each time. Maybe they crawled less links pointing to your domain or maybe some sites have stopped linking to you.

If you haven't lost any links, you might see your DA increase in the next Moz update.

If you have lost links, try to reclaim those links or create new links to replace them.

Hopefully you'll see an upwards trend in your DA over time, but don't be surprised if it's a bit up and down along the way - and don't stress if it happens to be down. Focus on more important metrics like organic traffic and keyword rankings.

Cheers,

David

Hi Julian,

The reason your GSC account isn't reporting your images as indexed is that they are on a different subdomain to your GSC account - GSC will only report indexed URLs that are on the exact subdomain of that account.

And are the images actually used on the site? None of them showed up in a Screaming Frog crawl...

Cheers,

David

Hi bridhard8,

In your example, "SHOP NIKE SHOES" is the anchor text because it's the text between the <a>tags.</a>

<a>Change that button text and you change the anchor text.

Cheers,

David</a>