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The main reason to use internal "nofollow" links on your site if the links would go to technical pages like login pages, or links to pages that you don't want to have indexed. As Ryan says - if you link to other relevant articles there is no reason to use nofollow.
Dirk
Hi,
The message you get from the seobook tool is quite straightforward - trying the url https://www.equipashop.ie/shop-fittings-retail-equipment/gridwall/gridwall-shelves/flat-gridwall-shelf.html generates a 302
Then the tool tries the redirect url (https://www.equipashop.ie/flat-gridwall-shelf.html) - which gives status 200.
When I visited the site myself - on first visit - I was redirected to https://www.equipashop.ie/flat-gridwall-shelf.html - when I tried a second visit - I remained on https://www.equipashop.ie/shop-fittings-retail-equipment/gridwall/gridwall-shelves/flat-gridwall-shelf.html
I tried again using Incognito browsing - and again I was redirected. I think it has something to do with your cookie settings - when I disable cookies I am always redirected.
Hope this solves your question. Apart from that, if you want to redirect the URL - it's better to use a 301 than a 302
rgds,
Dirk
Yes - you have to update the sitemap with the new url's.
If you don't do it - you'll see that Webmaster tools will generate warnings for every url that is redirected.
Dirk
That's correct. If possible - try to do the change on a test server - and try all your existing url's on this test url to be sure that everything is properly redirected (while testing - make sure that the test server doesn't get indexed)
So for domain.com/old-url1 you check if test-server.com/new-url1 is accessible & working - idem for the remainder (screaming frog can do this for you). If everything is properly redirected - you do the change on the production server.
Dirk
That was the worst advice somebody could give you... redirecting all old url's to home is the best way for SEO disasters. Glad you double checked!
Forgot to mention - there is also a topic on moz on redirects: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection - and I also was a bit to fast with my first answer - the rule I gave was if you only change the domain & keep the remainder of the url.
If you also change the directory and the article name, than I hope there is a certain logic between your old structure and the new one. Redirections in htaccess can get quite messy if you have to use many rules inside (they can be in conflict and have an impact on performance).
In each case - you should test all the url's of your old site on the new one (before launch) to be sure that they are all properly redirected. A crawl tool like Screaming Frog can do miracles for testing.
If you're on Linux - probably the best way it to change the htaccess file on the old domain:
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name.
In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website.
Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.
Disclosure - I didn't invent this myself - source can be found here: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php (this page give all the different options on how to redirect)
rgds,
Dirk
I fully agree with Egol - the moment you start "manipulating" traffic just to please Google, you're taking the wrong direction. I can maybe work for a few months, even years, but in the end it's always a bad strategy.
The only valid strategy is trying to figure out how to please your visitors, and traffic & Google will follow. It's not always easy to cope with the pressure for to change things, because your competitors are doing it that way, or because you have certain targets, but you'll win in the long run.
I would also do a full crawl of the site - to see if all internal links are still working properly. Visit your site with javascript disabled - check if you can still access all pages. Did you see any other problems after migration (less search traffic, decrease of positions in search results in Webmaster tools, more 4xx errors, crawl issues,...etc)
I agree with Ryan that without the site it's difficult to guess what the cause could be.
Dirk
Could you check these "problem" url's with a tool like web-sniffer.net of http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/ to be sure that the pages are really returning the correct status. I encountered similar problems with 404 before - while visually the correct page was rendered - the header returned a 404 status. You could also try "Fetch like google" in Webmaster tools.
Would be helpful to have an actual url - if you don't want to disclose the site - you could send it via private message.
rgds,
Dirk
As with all kinds of certifications - it can help convince others (your boss, potential clients,...) of your skills. Doing the tests for the certification also forces you to check if your knowledge is still up-to-date. Apart from that, it's just a piece of paper.
Dirk
You could also track the average position & the keywords in the Landing page report of GWT - as GWT only keeps data for the last two months - you could download the data on a regular basis and check if there is an impact (keywords used to get to the page / avg. position)
As mentioned by Chris - you can also use the Google Analytics Landing page report and check if there is an increase in organic traffic on the page and if other vital parameters (like bouncerate, time on page, pageviews/visit,...evolve in the right direction)
rgds
Dirk
I missed one question you asked - as Google is unable to index content which is only available for registered users I might be a good idea to create a preview page - showing part of the content even when not logged-in. This only makes sense however if the content remains interesting enough for visitors even if only part of it is accessible. You risk to get a high bounce rate on these pages, as the content really needs to be very unique and valuable for the users in order to go through the complicated process of registration. Personally, I always get frustrated when landing on these kind of pages, and unless it's a site that also seems useful for future visits, I always go back to the search results and try to find other sites which provide the info without registration.
Hi,
The best way to find the source of the redirect loops is to perform a crawl with Screaming Frog - the moment you see these endless url's appearing - you stop the crawl - click on the url - right mouse button "Crawl Path Report" => this will lead you all the way back to the url where the error starts.
In your case, it could be sufficient to check the source of registration page and look for relative links containing /register-login - probably it's one small link hidden somewhere which is causing the problem. The crawl would be good to check if other loops exist.
The best way to avoid redirect loops is to use absolute rather than relative url's in your code - which makes it (almost) impossible to get these loops. Normally this should be something you can configure in your CMS.
If it's a login page - I would not put a canonical - it has no value for search engines (and for users who would land on this page), so I would put a noindex on these pages and nofollow on the links that point to this page.
rgds
Dirk
Hi Gerald,
Without the url it's difficult to check what's wrong with your site. You could try to use tools like http://web-sniffer.net/ or http://webpagetest.org/ to check what is happening with your pages. If you don't want to disclose your url you could send me a private message so I could have a look & check.
rgds,
Dirk
Do a full crawl of your site with a tool like Screaming Frog. If you configure the spider to respect robots.txt & canonicals it will behave like google bot you will see if all your pages are indexed properly. The tool also gives you valuable info on things like H1, Title, Meta descriptions (and standard filters to check if they are missing, duplicates, too long/short,...). It shows your internal site structure (number of clicks needed to get to each page) and the size of your images. You can even use it to check if the analytics tag is present on each page using a custom filter.
It's not free if you use it in spider mode (the free version only spiders 500 URI's) - but if you have a sitemap, you could also do a crawl based on the list of your url's (which is free, regardless the number of url's). Limitation is that you don't get the structure and the internal links, but if it is a brand new site and not too big, that shouldn't really be a problem.
rgds
Dirk
Hi Thomas,
I fear there is some additional clean up work to do. If I do a site:yourdomain.com - there are more than 5000 results. A bit surprising, because your site only has 30 pages that can be indexed.
If I go to page 4 of the results I see some strange stuff appearing like "madame alexander "travel with style" alex doll - yourdomain" - the link goes to a 400 Bad Request page. If you click on the Google message 'show similar results' at the bottom of the results - there seem to be several hundred of these pages. The vast majority of links in the index seem to be these old urls. As they all seem to be in one folder -you should request removal of this folder in Webmaster tools.
Apart from that, and probably less important, I would also consider removing your slogan in your page title - I fear you're overdoing it a bit with one of your keywords which also appears twice in your slogan. Check also the images - a lot of them are quite heave & could slow down the site.
Difficult to tell if you should continue on this domain or put it on another - I would first try to remove this light pages from the index, wait a month & see what it brings;
rgds,
Dirk
Hi Fraser,
I doubt that it is the dummy content which is causing the troubles. You use the x-robots-tag to put noindex/nofollow on all your pages. Probably this a setting in the config of your Wordpress site. More info on the tag can be found here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?hl=en
Apart from that :
rgds,
DIrk
Hi Don,
Normally it's not really necessary to put a canonical on each the pages with different pageid - the most important reason to put a canonical url on a page is to let Google know that if the same content is published under different url's which url needs to be indexed. In your example - a canonical url on http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3 would be needed if the same content would also be available under http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3&sessionid=123456 (or any other additional parameter). Strictly speaking the canonical is not to indicate Google that the content is unique but to indicate on which preferred url you want the content to be indexed. That is also the reason why you can implement both together.
If you check the example from Google - they use the rel next/previous to indicate that the different pages belong together - the canonical is basically used to indicate that the session id needs to be ignored when indexing the page.
If you are sure that there is only one version of http://www.example.co.uk/Product.aspx?p=2692&pageid=3 the canonical url is not really necessary. Note that e-commerce platforms have a tendency to add additional parameters to url's depending on the view - example when sorting on price etc - if this is the case the canonical would be needed.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Hi Figen,
I fear that will be difficult to find - I did a quick google search & first result was this topic on Moz from Jan. 2013 (http://moz.com/community/q/how-do-you-check-the-outbound-links-of-a-site) . The answers basically are the same - it's possible to to a check outgoing links on one page using tools- however if you want to do it on a full domain - you'll need a tool like Screaming Frog (or alternative Xenu LinkSleuth).
If Google isn't providing the info, all the other potential solutions would require crawling sites - most of the tools available on the market give information about who is linking to your site (or you competitor's site for that matter) - but not the other way.
Dirk