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Hi Justin

The how-to of Patrick is correct - but as you are generating your sitemap using Screaming Frog there is really no need to go through this manual processing.

If you only need to create the sitemap:

Go to Configuration > Spider -
Tab: Basic settings: uncheck everything apart from "Crawl Canonicals" (unchecking Images/CSS/JS/External links is not strictly necessary but speeds up the crawl)

Advanced: Check "Always Follow redirects" / "Respect Noindex" / "Respect Canonical"

After the crawl - generate the sitemap - it will now only contain the "final" url's - after the redirects.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

PS Try to avoid internal links which are redirected - better to replace these links by links to the final destination

Not too many options available:

• Screaming Frog can detect whether the tag is available on all pages - but this is only a very basic check

• Google Webmastertools lists the errors under Search Traffic > International targeting

• Deepcrawl can probably do the trick - but it's not exactly a cheap solution (https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/hreflang-101-how-to-avoid-international-duplication/)

Alternative would be to use the href lang generator (http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool) and compare the results this tool generates with your current code.

On Moz - you can also find this practical guide on common mistakes - but you probably already have read that one.

Hope this helps,

Dirk

You can use a relative canonical but the example you give is wrong, it should be href="/page1.html" The example you give looks like mis take 2 on this page http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

Do you get a lot of traffic coming through image search? Most of the images you use on the site seem to be stock images, so normally the % of image search traffic shouldn't be that big.

If you receive limited or no search traffic from image search, you don't really have to do anything special. There 404 errors in WMT will disappear after a while & the new images will get indexed. Normally the 404's will have no impact on search traffic.

If all CDN's contain all the images, you could always redirect the original image folder to one of the cdn's - but it not strictly necessary.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Patrick,

Your method is a good one - I use more or less the same trick to retrieve url's from a sitemap in xls  (it's even faster if you sort the url's in alphabetical order & delete the rows containing priority / lastmod /.. - then you only need to do a find/replace on the <loc>/</loc> )

It's just in this specific case as the sitemap was generated in Screaming Frog that it's easier to eliminate these redirected url's upfront.

Dirk

I guess that most of these people just heard that SEO is all about link building. As the price is extremely low, most of these customers will probably reason they don't have much to loose and a lot to gain if they try the offer. They are probably completely unaware of things like Penguin & manual penalties.

An easy road to success is what a lot of people are looking for, the same reason why crash diets & get rich schemes are very popular, even if they seem to good to be true...

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

On the desktop version you have to put:

href="http://m.example.com/page-1" >

On your mobile page you put:

Source: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls - check also https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/common-mistakes/?hl=en

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Peter,

Don't really understand your question about permalink & url - as far as I know a permalink is just an url which remains permanent. Could you give an example of what you mean?

GWT is checking if pages exist - it's not showing you errors if only a part of the page (like the image is missing) - Screaming Frog is much better to help you with this. If Screaming Frog is detecting the issues, it implies that there are links to these images. When you go to the "Response Code" tab - filter on 4xx errors and click on the image url - you can see in the window below under "inlinks" which pages are linking to this image.

Dirk

Hi,

From what I read it looks similar to these cases - https://moz.com/community/q/getting-different-search-queries-in-google-webmaster & http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack

In these cases - sites where hacked using a vulnerability in a Wordpress slider - they copied sites they wanted to target on to some of the hacked domains and used other hacked domains to point links to them. At that point they were trying to redirect traffic from genuine e-commerce sites to bogus ones.

You could try to contact the site owners & tell them they have been hacked. At the same time file a complaint @Google 

rgds,

Dirk

With Penguin in mind, a link like this doesn't look real natural to me. Even if you don't pay for it, it still looks like paid link.

It would be different if this pizza place would have a blog, where they would discuss about their legal troubles with their neighbours, and they would mention what a terrific job your lawyer has done to defend them.

I refer again to the beginner's guide (sorry for that). Link techniques that used to be good and are considered bad practice now are

• Blog comments that are not moderated
• Press releases with optimized anchor text
• Article directories
• Guest post signatures
• Advertorials
• Embeddable widgets
• Infographic embeds
• User profile pages
• Guestbooks
• Forum signatures
• Directories that are not moderated

Source: https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building/types-of-links

You also might want to check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en - one of the (negative) examples is quite close to what you would like to do

• Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature, for example:
  _Thanks, that’s great info!
  • Paul
    paul’s pizza san diego pizza best pizza san diego_

My advice would be - don't do it.

rgds

Dirk

If the pdf's are in a separate folder on your site - you could mark that folder as noindex in robots.txt

As far as I know, it's not possible to add a noindex to a link.

rgds

Dirk

Hi,

Don't think that there is a plugin for this (most people need it the other way round).If you have access to htaccess you could add a rewrite rule which is redirecting all https request to http - see https://sites.google.com/site/onlyvalidation/page/301-redirect-https-to-http-on-apache-server.

Options +FollowSymlinks 
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} ^443$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The other option would be to check if you can optimise the https to render faster - you could check this article (especially the part on SPDY): https://yoast.com/move-website-https-ssl/

Hope this helps,

Dirk

Hi

you asked a very similar  question two weeks ago? https://moz.com/community/q/local-printing-company-moving-to-a-new-ip-will-our-rankings-change

Normally a folder would be better than a subdomain - technically it is possible to have a folder which points to a different server/ IP address than the other folders so you could explore this option. Regarding the load time you already got the reply last time - location is one thing - speed of the application itself is something you should take into account.

regardless the option you chose (folder/subdomain) - check that your current url's are properly redirected to the new ones - screaming frog will do miracles here.

Dirk

If you would see this links as generators of traffic or to increase awareness it could be a valid strategy  (check this article:https://moz.com/blog/the-hidden-power-of-nofollow-links )- however if you need these links from an "pure" SEO perspective to increase your page rank you can forget about it - the links on Youtube are nofollow.

(apart from that - Google doesn't really approve paid links...)

rgds,

Dirk

You could try this solution and then do the mobile check https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ with the desktop url - if it passes the solution is ok, if not - you'll just have to put more pressure on your supplier.

rgds,

Dirk

The way you structure the url has no impact on SEO performance (unless the url becomes very long & unreadable).

The depth of a site has an impact (how many clicks do I need from the homepage to get to a page) but this is completely unrelated to the folder structure. A good article on why it's good to have a certain structure in your url can be found here: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/structured-urls/

As changing URL's always carries a risk & doesn't bring SEO benefit I wouldn't change them just for the sake of changing them.

Dirk

More technical info on how to have a folder with different ip can be found here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2405845/redirect-folder-to-different-server

That's a literal reproduction of the post from John Mu

Hi,

Did you properly set-up the configuration of both sites (see https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls?hl=en)?

Unless the links are specifically made to the mobile version, they will not appear in Webmastertools. The links from the desktop version will however count as well for the mobile version as Google considers both url's as the same entity (if set-up is done as described above)

rgds,

Dirk

To add to the previous comment - crawl delay is ignored by Googlebot. Check http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/

It can be used to limit the speed for the bots - it is however not part of the original robots.txt specification. Since this value is not part of the standard, its interpretation is dependent on the crawler reading it

Yandex: https://yandex.com/support/webmaster/controlling-robot/robots-txt.xml#crawl-delay

Didn't find more info for Bing (they mention it here but do not provide additional info: https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-create-a-robots-txt-file-cb7c31ec

If you want to limit the speed for Google bot you have to do it in Webmastertools.

Dirk