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Sajio is right on this one. The best thing to do with tags in general is noindex them. Then they won't show up in search results, and the duplicate titles won't even matter

To noindex tags with Yoast, go to "SEO->Tiles & Meta->Taxonomies" and check off the box "noindex" under Tags.

But, as Prestashop said, if you do ever need to edit the robots.txt in the future, Yoast allows you to do this without FTP access. You go to 'edit files'.

Hey There

Google's webmaster documentation says;

"Generally, 404 errors don’t impact your site’s ranking in Google, and you can safely ignore them."

When Google says "generally" this tends to mean "in most cases" or "not directly" or "there may be secondary effects"... you get the idea.

But I think they are assuming you need to be smart enough to know if the 404 was intentional, and if not why it happened. For example - if you had a really popular piece of content with back links directly to that URL, and then the URL 404s - you supposed may lose the "link juice" pointing into that article. So in that regard 404s can hurt rankings secondarily.

But as other have said, you can redirect your 404s to a similar page (Google recommends not the homepage).

I am not sure why the Moz report puts them in "high priority" - perhaps they mean "high priority" from a general web best practice point of view, and not strictly SEO.

It appears they already have multiple pages (teen gifts for example).

So I was going to say, run them all through the on-page optimization tool, and the SERP analysis tool (run a full report), get all the ranking factors of Gifts.com and then improve their own for each page.

Thoughts on that?

-Dan

Hi - this was an interesting one! But I think I have found some of the issues.

1. I'd really let Google crawl the categories. They are currently blocked from crawling in robots.txt - http://www.lifeionizers.com/robots.txt - this is an issue because I suspected part of the problem may be due to crawl efficiency. One reason I say this, is because Google has yet to index a blog post from about 2-3 days ago.
2. This is a small thing, but link to the 200 OK version of the blog from your main menu. Right now, it links to /blog but then redirects to /blog/ with the trailing slash. Any little bit friction you can reduce the better.
3. Because you have a lot of things in that robots.txt file - I would definitely perform some fetch and render tests in webmaster tools. Here's the thing, Google has said if you block CSS or JS from being crawled it will harm your sites ranking - so definitely do fetch and render and make sure that's not the case.
4. The order of "Recent Articles" in the main content area in the blog homepage: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/ - don't seem to be "recent" at all. At least they are not in chronological order. This is confusing for me (and others users probably) so likely very confusing for Google. Most would expect the /blog/ homepage to list the most recent posts by published date. Especially since it is labled "recent". If these are supposed to be maybe "popular" I would label it as such.
5. Lastly, with this much old content I would do a thorough content audit (directions here or here) of your blog. You should prune old, poor, outdated, low-traffic content just like you'd prune a plant - this will certainly help user metrics signals and keep your indexed:trafficked ratio healthy!

Those are just some of the immediate things I saw. I'd start there.

Hi Robert

Some others have given some great ideas. Wanted to chime in and ask if you can give any more info? It's tough to say what's going on in such a general context. Anything would help - industry, a URL, keywords.

Also, as Andy suggested - do you have other sources of data to back this up? I would suggest actually looking in Search Console (Webmaster Tools) for your query and landing page data and see if you can tell how much it's happening one way or the other. You can filter by country, device and time period to segment things even more.

Let us know if you can provide more info or find any more data!

Hi - I wouldn't focus too much on that - I would take the suggestions made in my first answer and start with those! You really don't want to block crawling of categories!

Hello!

I would suspect the homepage drop was unrelated to the login page changes. As Michael says, it was probably just a coincidence!

How big is the site? If it's say, under a few hundred pages then you can just leave the structured URLs, and I usually prefer this for good UX and architecture. If the site is much bigger, it might be a little more complex and the specifics could affect things a little.

Hi Andrew

Here a few things to check or rule out:

• Are those pages accessible to be crawled (not blocked with robots.txt etc)

• Are they also internally linked? (ie;s crawl with Screaming Frog, starting at the homepage and see if they turn up)

• Is the page actually indexed (search the URL in Google) but just not showing up in Search Console?

• How long are you waiting before resubmitting - also does it literally get half way down the list, or do you mean 50% are not indexed?

Overall, I would just submit the sitemap and you don't need to keep resubmitting. I would rather do some crosschecks to make sure the URL is accessible (crawlable) and even maybe indexed already, just not showing in the report. Usually, there's some other issue with the URL besides a sitemap issue - and like you mentioned, I'm not sure how long you're waiting, but it can indeed take weeks for them to show up.

Hi Monica

Basically you need to edit/update your links in the footer for blog categories. Depending on your setup there'd be a few ways to do this. Some guesses:

• I would try checking your widgets. Often, themes will allow the setting of footer links in the widgets. Just update the links to point to the correct pages. You may want to be sure you don't have unique widgets for category pages.
• Menu - go to Appearance -> Menus - and perhaps you have a footer menu. Check the links there and see if you can update them.
• Finally, it's possible the links are coded into the categories.php page template. You can find this by going to Appearance -> Editor and looking for the file. Unless you are comfortable with a little bit of code, you may need someone to help you with this option.

So that's it - you just need to know where to update your footer links. It might be something you would want to ask a dev or someone experienced with wordpress to help you with.

Robert

Ha, thanks! I honestly can't take much credit - a few folks in the more grey/black hat realms have been talking about exploiting YouTube's authority and Google's preference to YT for a while. Glen from ViperChill has talked about it a lot: http://www.viperchill.com/new-seo/ - great post, I'd highly recommend anyone check it out!

-Dan

Hi David

Yes 2-3 weeks is fairly young for a site. Image indexation can lag behind a little bit from what I've seen. Unless you're super dependent on images for traffic (which is unlikely) I would give it 2-3 months honestly. I don't see any issues from what I can tell crawling etc. So I wouldn't take it as a sign of a problem, just probably Google's normal timeframe. Definitely write back or follow up if it's 3 months and there hasn't been much more indexed.

Hey There

I would probably focus on "bigger things" - for example

Unless these pages are all super unique/add value aside from just having different town names, it's not the best practice to have thin/overlapping content;

• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/dentist-st-albans
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/dentist-burnside
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/dentist-cairnlea
• ...etc

Also, when crawling the site I found example placeholder content like;

• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/a-monk-walks-his-path/
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/a-stylish-stud/
• http://stalbansdentist.com.au/hip-young-woman/
• ...etc

You may want to delete those

Onto the questions;

• I'm not sure what Moz is seeing wrong with the canonical, it looks good.
• This one seems fine to me as well.
• There are 2 H1's currently - see this --> http://screencast.com/t/qRBG5jbW3EYx

Also, the titles are a little long / keyword stuffed;

Dentist Cairnlea, Dental Care, Braces Fillings, Orthodontist Dentistry | Family Dental Care

Maybe make that something like;

Dental Care in Cairnlea - Family Dental Care

Hi There

Just to clarify, only the YouTube or Wistia video embeds will be in iFrames? The text will just be normal text on the page (check out a Moz Whiteboard Friday video for example - the transcription is actual text in the page)?

This is pretty normal - everyone uses YouTube and Wistia with the standard embed codes.

You can use Video Sitemaps to give search engines more info about the videos on your site. You can also use schema for videos. But even if you don't, if it's just normal video embeds this would be fine.

Hi There

So were you getting 404's on your posts themselves? Or 404 errors on weird/extraneous pages? I should mention that 404 errors on extraneous pages will not hurt your search rankings. But it is an issue that should be worked on.

The report has a LOT of different headings, which in particular would you like definitions on?

-Dan

Patrick's answer is solid. Just to explain a little further about internal links

• Run a crawl on your site with Screaming Frog or the Moz Crawler. Look for 301/302's in internal links. You want to absolutely be linking internally to the final 200 URLs. If you did not update internal links to point to the new URLs, that's what could be happening there.

• Semi-related - I'd link internally with absolute URLs (the full URL path) - because if you have one link to the http blog, and http does not redirect to https - now you have double the crawling going on.

• Which reminds me ... is https for the blog enforced? ie: does http blog redirect to httpS blog URLs? And vice versa? httpS for Magento redirects to http URLs?

• Lastly - look for redirect chains to undo - which is explained in my article. There's lost link equity and crawl efficiency with redirect chains.

Hi Matt

I'm afraid this might have to be something custom. I hunted around and couldn't find anything that does this by default. You might want to check WPMU's plugins or Code Canyon. Sorry we can't find anything pre-made - but good luck!

-Dan

Thanks for the reply!

#3 - that's not an issue as long as it's set up correctly in terms of internal linking etc

#4 - Thanks, yeah again I don't think you need to move things all back around again - just follow these basic principles:

• Internally links to 200s (not 301s)
• When you do set up 301s, try to avoid "chains" (like my post describes)
• Internally link with absolute URLs when possible so you don't accidentally link to the wrong thing (https instead of http etc)
• Force redirect http to https when you're preferring to load https and vice versa - in other words, users should only be able to access a singular consistent version of the URL.
• The blog on https and store on http is fine as long as you follow the above.

Lastly - don't forget to be registering the exact version of each 'site' in Webmaster Tools (Search Console). You need to register the blog as 'https://torontovaporizer.ca/blog/' individually and the store as 'http://torontovaporizer.ca' otherwise you won't see all the data for each.

Hi Riccardo

Yes to confirm the site is indexed and crawlable. Checking the number of URLs from a sitemap that are indexed isn't the most reliable way to see if you content is indexed. You can do a site: search on your domain in Google like this as probably one of the most reliable ways. Also, you can try jus crawling the site with a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider - and if the tool can crawl everything, there may be just a delay on Google's end. But in your case now, all looks good!

-Dan