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Thanks for the follow up! There was also some indexing issues going on with google last week (pages were taking hours to get indexed, even using the fetch and render tool) so maybe this was somehow related. Glad it's resolved for now!

Hello!

Were you able to fix it? To sum up the other answers, this could be a few things:

• a redirect in your .htaccess file

• a redirect in a plugin (yoast, or a separate redirects plugin - some plugins even create redirects automatically)

• or autogenerated by your theme/wordpress

I would work in that order looking for it,

Hi Jamie

There could be a number of reasons this is happening. It's tough to say for sure without knowing the site and taking a look (feel free to mention that if you can).

But I would check all the basic accessibility stuff first, ie:

• Make sure you are allowing crawling of the old site and new site (not blocking with robots.txt)
• Be sure your 301s are setup for 1:1 content/page matches - in other words - don't 301 a bunch of old pages to the homepage, because this can confuse google and also it doesn't pass any value anyway (references here and here)
• Check that your canonical tag usage is correct - ie: a canonical if used incorrectly can point the wrong signals at the wrong page)
• Make sure you have the old site/property registered in search console, and see if the indexed page #'s are going down.

ALSO: What you're seeing in SERPs might be based upon old anchor text and links (off-site signals) - you may want to see if you can update old back links from an anchor text standpoint.

But any details you could provide would be helpful!

Hi Jocelyn

First thing, is missing meta description (especially on those pages) are not an issue really.

I also just crawled your whole site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and didn't find those links or pages internally either. And I also don't see any of them indexed in Google.

I would maybe wait a few weeks and see if the error sin the Moz report go away. It could have been something temporary.

-Dan

Yes there can be big impacts, as template changes may result in any of the following changes:

• Design and UX
• Site Architecture
• Internal Linking
• Page Speed
• Other possible inconsistencies between themes, depending on your WordPress setup in general (title tags, structured data, etc)

In general, to mitigate against these, I would do the following:

• Design and UX - at minimum take a 'gut check' and be sure the new theme is a design and UX improvement - ie: is content still above the fold? Are there any weird scrolling issues (I see this sometimes with themes that try to be too fancy), are the menus still easy to navigate?
• Architecture - make sure the new theme doesn't break anything like your URL structure, or pagination links to archive pages etc.
• Internal linking - aim to keep your menus (main nav, drop downs, footer, sidebars) exactly the same at least for now - if your footer nav has links to important pages for example and those links go away, this might hurt the performance of those pages.
• Page Speed - as Donald astutely noted, make sure the new theme is at least the same in page speed, or better an improvement. You can use a few tools like WebPageTest or GTMetrix to test.
• Other - also as noted, try to get your SEO settings situated correctly before making the switch, and use the Yoast plugin. Then when you switch your theme, be sure the Yoast plugin settings are still primary and your new theme has not overridden anything.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hello!

I wanted to make you a screen video as it's a bit more nuanced, here's the link:

https://www.useloom.com/share/ebddf32363444e6a9cbc2ddfab639612

(Sorry for my voice- had a cold!)

It's 5mins, definitely watch!

But in very brief summary - Google is ranking two types of content: property listing style pages, and articles. You can have two pages - one of each type and they won't cannibalize each other.

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 Roxanne

There's two general ways you go can:

1. Will the pages be exactly the same or very similar (like 95% or more)? If so, and you want to be 100% sure Google ranks the right one and consolidates their signals, you can use a Canonical tag. Point it from the page you don't want to rank to the page you do want to rank.

2. If the pages are different - different content, menus, functionality (can you purchase on one but not the other?) etc... then don't use a canonical - but do everything you can to

a) make them different,

b) make it clear to users the products exist in both places,

c) cross-link them if you can,

d) try consistently promote one over the other.

I also _highly _recommend you check out this great new post on duplicate content by Alexis - it's one of the best I've seen!

Hello

I was able to find your site and took a look at it. Indeed some pages are not indexed.

It seems like it's because they are very similar in content. Your Location pages don't offer much unique value besides just changing the city name and some of the content a little bit. I'm sure Google is looking at it as low quality content, that duplicates the same purpose.

If you want to index and rank separate city pages they need to be super unique and specifically add value for the user in each location. The content feels spun (created programmatically) even though it might be manually created, there is still a lot of just copy/pasting etc. Think about what it would take to have a 100% unique page, with unique content for each location (testimonials, photos, information, maps, service info etc).

If they are not the city pages that you're referring to, please link to an example so I (and others) can take a closer look!

Hope this helps!

Hi Alex

If I understand this, you're changing the literal file folder on your server, but to the user and in the browser the URLs and folders stay the same?

If so, there's no danger here. Just redirect and URLs that do change.

-Dan

PS (I think James, understandably, misunderstood the question - you only need to worry if URLs in the browser change.)

Hello! Roman's answers are really good, but thought I would add some info as well.

Article or BlogPosting Schema can help in some of the following ways (vs hentry)

• Give search engines backend / structured info about the contents of the page
• Google's reference on Article schema shows all the snippet and SERP features
• Using article schema is the only way to get into 'in depth' article spots on Google
• I've had luck with Google showing the 'Last Updated' date in search results, which shows a newer date when using it in conjunction with article schema

So even though you'd technically be doing a 'blog post' I would use the parent Article schema as it's more widely recognized.

Hello! Actually, often having more results can sometimes increase the CTR to either result

But either way I wouldn't be concerned about CTR in that sense. I would worry again about if users are enjoying your pages once they land on them.

You can, however, still work on improving CTR in general to both pages by making your titles and descriptions better - more clicks = more traffic anyway!

Hi! The Moz tool is not being more specific as to what element is a duplicate? (ie: description, title, H1, etc)?

I ran it through Screaming Frog and it only found a few H1s that are a duplicate, which is not even a big issue really.

If Google is currently ranking both, I would actually leave it and let both of them be indexed and rank. I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Instead, I would be sure you're cross-linking between the two, and focus on user engagement for the traffic you are already getting (ie: goal completions, time on page etc) and focus on really satisfying the users who are landing on each result.

I think it's your handling of the /ar/ version and multilingual setup.

On https://new-waves.net/ you have:

• rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" href="https://new-waves.net/ar/" />

But you should self reference the English version:

• <code>https://new-waves.net/" /></code>
  

And you should also add that to the /ar/ version of every page.

Here's Google full documentation on hreflang:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hi Corey

Don pretty much nailed this answer. I'll make sure to answer your specific questions:

• You're not negatively affecting your ability to show in search by noindexing tags. They almost never rank or get traffic since they are just pages of thin content. Noindexing them does not affect your other pages.

• No other repercussions - unless you have a random tag archive getting traffic. Check your analytics, and if so, you can individually leave specific tags indexed with the Yoast plugin. I wrote a post all about this a while back: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/

• You would have to figure out how to have unique title tags on each page - which is honestly more effort than is worth it. The Moz tool is showing an 'error' of duplicate content but the issue is just more that tag pages don't have much value and can just be noindexed and then ignored.

Hi Roman!

Honestly, this depends a little on:

• What the product is
• How competitive it is

Because in some cases, if it's a clear/straightforward product and there's not super high competition, you could possibly rank with one page. But if the product has a lot of search query variations, is complicated, and has high competition, you may need more content.

As Martin pointed out, you can build the authority of these pages through other content - whether that's internal content linking users to the product, or external.

You can actually also try running facebook or instagram ads for the product - perhaps for some direct traffic benefits - but also because this can sometimes boost the rank of the page you're advertising.

A final detail - make sure your top targeted keyword in the title tag Not a huge boost, but will help a tiny bit!

Hello!

You should check the actual status code of your custom 404 page - does it actually return a 404 Not Found?

You can check in a variety of places:

• https://urivalet.com/
• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

Or install the Redirect Path plugin and it will show the status code in your browser.

Hello!

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