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Yep - you'll have to upload the file to the server first.

Bob's suggestion to generate the sitemap via the Yoast plugin is an excellent idea.

rgds

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Are the url's going to change when you update the design? If they are not changing you can already update now.

It's not really abnormal to have only a certain % of the sitemap indexed - it could be that Google judges that a certain number of pages is too light in content to be indexed. 55% of url's indexed seems rather low.

Sitemap errors - check the url's that are listed as errors. If I am not mistaken, you use an external tool to generate the sitemaps. It could be that this tools puts all the internal links in the the sitemap; regardless of their status (200, 301, 404) - normally only url's with status 200 should be put in the sitemap. Check the configuration of the tool you use & see if you can only add url's with status 200. Alternatively, you can check the internal linking on your site & make sure that no links exist to 404 pages (Screaming Frog is the tool to use - it can also generate the sitemap).

For the wrong sitemap- as your sites are exact duplicates, probably hosted on the same server, it could be that the .co.nz sitemap overwrites the .com sitemap , as they have the same name. You could rename your sitemap like sitemap_au.xml, sitemap_us.xml & sitemap_nz.xml. This way, if you add a new sitemap for .nz it will not overwrite the .com version. You submit these to Google & you delete the old ones (both on the server & in Google WMT).

Hope this helps.

Dirk

PS. If your design is also changing the url's - don't forget to put redirects in place that lead the old to the new url's.

Marcel,

When you contact the site owners - a good guideline on 'how to clean' can be found here: https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked (specifically for Wordpress) - more in general: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/ - it could be that the hackers gained access by a security issue with the slider (http://wptavern.com/critical-security-vulnerability-found-in-wordpress-slider-revolution-plugin-immediate-update-advised) so they should certainly check that Wordpress & it's plugins are up-to-date.

Good luck!

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 Marcel,

I have the impression that soft-solutions.nl already discovered that they have been hacked & have cleaned their site in the mean time.

It's possible that the hacker only copied 1/2 pages - it's however more likely that they copied the full site but that the other pages haven't been indexed yet. Idem for copyscape - if the hack only occurred recently, these tools (and Google) haven't been able to pickup all pages yet.

When I search for 'iphone 6 hoesje' I get the planchemag.com site. As all these pages are duplicates, it's Google who's deciding which page it's going to show. Google decided that in some cases the hacked version is the preferred one, for other queries people will still get to your site. It probably depends on the anchors the hackers used to the hacked site. The volume of iphone 6 is probably higher than iphone 5 queries, so they will probably have used anchors containing 'iphone 6' to point to the site.

Dirk

Hi Marcel,

If I do a site:www.wearemash.com there seem to be only 2 pages from your site indexed at the moment - possible that the other ones haven't been picked-up by Google yet. Quite ironical that the domain wearemash.com belongs to a web design company.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Marcel,

Don't think that it will change a lot. If the hack is done in the same way as the other cases (which seems to be the case), they copied your entire site into the site which has been hacked. They present this version to Google (cloaking - as you can see in the cached version) - but "normal" visitors are redirected to a different e-commerce site. To make sure the hacked site is positioned well, they point hundreds of links from other hacked sites to the cloned version of your site. So whatever you change on your site, will not impact the cloned version, which will keep it's position, until Google takes action.

It's a quite a simple trick, and to be very honest, I am surprised that Google is not capable to detect it.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

You could put a 301 redirect of the old image folder to the new location. The easiest alternative is to keep the images in both places for a while, until Google has indexed the new location (which can take a few weeks/months). Normally, if all the internal links have been updated, there should be no links to old location, so these images will disappear from the index and replaced by the ones in the new location. Once they are indexed on their new location, you can delete them in the old location

rgds,

Dirk

Hi

If the template is marked as responsive it should pass the mobile friendly test. Main issue with these templates is that they are very often stuffed with a lot of features that you're not going to use (resulting in heavy css / js files). This could have a negative impact on the load time of your page. That said, I guess most people just buy Wordpress themes rather than develop themselves.

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Marcel,

It seems to be a plague recently- there where similar cases on Moz the last two weeks: http://moz.com/community/q/chinese-site-ranking-for-our-brand-name-possible-hack (similar situation as you) - a site being hacked http://moz.com/community/q/getting-different-search-queries-in-google-webmaster. It seems the hackers are exploiting a vulnerability in the slider used on these Wordpress site.

Apart from filing spam reports there is not much more you can do. You could inform the site owners that their site has been hacked & ask them to clean it, but I fear that these hackers are capable to switch sites quite fast.

Good luck,

Dirk

Hi Justin,

Next Tuesday is the 21/4 - the day the Mobile Friendly update is launched. You can find more info about it here: http://moz.com/community/q/google-s-mobile-update-what-we-know-so-far-updated-3-25

rgds,

Dirk

If Fetch like Google is also giving a 301 - I would mark them as solved in WMT & check if they re-appear.
If you click on the i next to the redirect message in Fetch like Google - it shows the type of redirect & the page it's redirecting to. I assume you checked that this is also a 301.

I have a similar issue on one of my sites - if a user gets to a non-existing url - the server first tries to find out if the page exists - if it doesn't it's redirected to a 404 page. Although technically it is a 301 - WMT sees them as a soft 404 as the destination page is a "Page not found" type of page (called 404.php) - which (quite ironically) renders a 200 status.

On the destination page - do you mention somewhere a message like "page not found" or is it just a plain category page?

The SEO impact is difficult to assess - Google says these pages are mainly wasting the bot's time as it's indexing pages that do no longer exist, not sure if it is also affecting rankings. As you did the crawl with Screaming Frog, I guess you are also removing all internal links to these redirected pages? If these links disappear, and as the content was thin, I suspect you don't have many external links pointing to them, so the problem should disappear after a while.

rgds,

Dirk

Maybe an obvious question but did you check that the url's are indeed properly redirected - checking them with 'Fetch like Google' in WMT or by using a tool like web-sniffer.net?

rgds,

Dirk

Unrelated to the original question - you might want to invest in a tool like Screaming Frog - there are several other issues with your site

• about 50 5xx errors
• a lot of 301 in your internal links.
• most meta descriptions / H1 titles seem to be missing
• load time issues
• mixed www/non-www urls - better to stick with one & redirect the other to the chosen version (duplicate content issue as content exists on 2 url's)

rgds,

Dirk

Hi Donna,

Will check with them (hope that they didn't program everything from scratch) - will be for beginning of next week, weekend already started in Europe...

rgds,

Dirk

Hi,

Point 1 - you mix relative & absolute links in your source code. Example on your homepage - line 429 - you put  which leads to https://compleetverkleed.nl/www.compleetverkleed.nl - I guess it's the same thing on these other pages.

[Point 2 - these sitemaps are probably generated by the Yoast SEO plugin - see https://compleetverkleed.nl/sitemap_index.xml You will have to check the configuration of the sitemap module of Yoast - it could also be related to this Bug https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/2172

rgds,

Dirk](www.compleetverkleed.nl)

Hi Donna,

The general principles are also applicable for Drupal - which normally is quite flexible to fine tune in terms of SEO. It is however a bit more complex to setup & configure compared to a Wordpress site.

You should check the tools mentioned in this article https://www.acquia.com/blog/4-steps-optimize-your-drupal-site-increase-traffic (step 2 list some modules that can help - the rest will be quite obvious for you). Acquia is the company founded by the guy who started Drupal - so the modules that are suggested should be ok.

We use Drupal as well - but as it's implemented by a technical partner we just give the requirements, we don't know which modules they use to deliver what we ask.

Hope this helps

Dirk

Try to check the pages which are currently 1-1 - do the mobile friendly check for the desktop version. If it passes - you should be ok. If not - you'll have to hand it over to the technical dept & ask them to search for a solution. If necessary, escalate (depends on the % of mobile searches you currently have & the importance of the website for your business)

rgds,

Dirk

In that case I would certainly not redirect to home - but just keep the desktop page. It's better to serve a non-optimised desktop page with the appropriate content than to send visitors to a non-related mobile homepage. If you have limited time - I would concentrate on your main search landing pages and your most popular pages in general- try to make mobile versions of these ones. You can always work on the rest of the content after Apr. 21st.

For the pages where you have the 1-1 I would do the rel alternate as advised by Google.

rgds,

Dirk

As the widget is on each page of your site, it is generating a lot of internal links to these articles. If these articles have value for search, it could help them to get better positions.

On the other side, widgets like these are very ofter positioned in the same column as advertising, newsletter subscriptionboxes, ...etc - so I am not sure if Google attributes the same value to these links as to the links which are really embedded/integrated in your content.

If you can replace it by higher value content I would do it - but you'll have to make sure that the new content has indeed a higher value for your visits (try some A/B testing and check vitals stats like bouncerate, avg time on site, pageviews/visit, clickrates,..)

Hope this helps,

Dirk