Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Christine

Can you tell us (or me via PM) the site? The Yoast plugin is bulletproof unless something else is messing with it. I won't reveal the site if you don't want me to, but will post an answer back here in the Q&A.

Thanks!

-Dan

Hi Christine

Just checking in here - are you still having trouble?

I would advise running the site through Screaming Frog and checking Webmaster Tools for the presence of the same crawl errors.

Screaming Frog should tell you if/where you currently have bad links on the site. Always good to double check with another tool.

Let us know, thanks!

Hi Sophia

I just checked and see your homepage indexed in google.co.uk with a cache date of April 26th. You should be all set!

-Dan

Hi Sofia

I just ran the same validator on your sitemap and it went through fine - see screenshot

I intended to mean that you should just be sure Google Webmaster Tools accepts the sitemap as valid - if so, there's no need to run through a 3rd party validator. Apologies if I didn't state it clearly!

Let me know, but from what I can see it looks good!

-Dan

EDIT - Looking more closely, it looks like your ran the homepage through the validator - you would actually enter the sitemap address its self in the validator - http://containerforsale.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Sofia

You are using Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, so use the XML sitemap within Yoast. You don't need a separate plugin for the XML sitemap. And yes, within Yoast turn the sitemap on.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Thanks guys for all the responses and helping!

Three Things to try

1.Fix Robots.txt

Sofia - I just checked your robots.txt now and it reads;

User-agent: *

Disallow: Sitemap: http://containerforsale.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz

• with the sitemap on the same line as disallow - I'd check on that and make sure its on a separate line.
• ALSO, you don't need the .gz on the sitemap file just sitemap.xml

2. Re-submit Sitemap

• RESUBMIT your sitemap to webmaster tools and make sure its valid.

3. Submit URL to Webmaster Tools (only last resort)

this is only last case scenario, shouldn't have to do this on the homepage if everything is correct.

• go to fetch as googlebot ->run the fetch ->then submit URL
• do this for the homepage
• see article on google blog for reference

Let us know if you're all set, thanks!

-Dan

Hey Ryan

Just finally getting to this, thanks for reaching out on Twitter and asking for my input. It seems like everyone here has already helped you out, and I do agree

Only thing I'd add, is remember 301 redirects are not only for engines but for the users so always be sure they make sense from a UX point of view.

And also, be sure this doesn't create a chain of redirects. If 301s were already in place on the site you're redirecting from, always try to redirect from the original source, like this;

DO THIS:

www.one.com/original-page.html ----> www.two.com/real-page/

www.one.com/new-same-as-original/ ----> www.two.com/real-page/

NOT THIS:

www.one.com/original-page.html ---> www.one.com/new-same-as-original/ ----> www.two.com/real-page/

Communicate this to IT as best as you can, as its been said by Cutts to avoid chains of 301s if possible.

Hope this all helps, let us know!

-Dan

Hi

Great responses Matt and Ben, thanks!!  Only things I could add are;

Webmaster Tools

• Check google webmaster tools every few days for the first 2-3 weeks.
• You may turn up some 404s or other types of errors that should be corrected.
• And keep your eyes out for any other warnings

Analytics

• You're going to spike your traffic (potentially, hopefully) in analytics big time, or at least skew the data
• Use filters and advanced segments to separate blog traffic so you can still analyze things even after a potential spike in blog search traffic.
• At minimum make an annotation of the date you made it indexable.

Dates

• Regarding the dates, I did come across this recently - I have not tested, so please take it with a grain of salt - removing dates from the SERPs - I would only recommend trying it if the content was not "time sensitive" (like a cooking recipe).

Hope all this helps!

-Dan

Hi Ben

No problem... thanks for clarifying.  Seems like the only way to do it and have anything "redirect" is to have some sort of intermediate step.

This is a little wild, but you could;

1. Create your middle blog with matching content
2. Redirect wordpress.com to the middle blog with matching URLs and content
3. Then cross domain rel=canonical the middle blog to the final destination with the same content.

Maybe that's worth a try, I don't see any dup penalties cause only the final site is being "credited" by you as the source, but you end up with a chain of redirects, which is not recommended, but Matt Cutts has said they can handle 2-3 most of the time.

-Dan

Hi Ben

Highland's response is definitely a good "poor man's" way, and there's nothing wrong with it at all.

WordPress now offers site redirects through the wordpress store - I believe it's like $12 a year.

There is also this domain mapping trick, which seems like it would still work, but they do say its a little complicated.

-Dan

Hi! Looks like Rand beat us to this one, but just a few quick things to add for ya.

I did a quick crawl of the site in Screaming Frog.

Looks like most of the duplicates titles are due to two things;

1. Your tag pages all of the same name. There must be away to set your titles for tag pages to reflect the tag name.
2. Its counting every page twice - one with the slash at the end (ie: /contact-us/) and without (ie: /contact-us)

(note: seems like the same for your descriptions and pages headers - this could be the "duplicate page content error")

So, fix your tag pages and see about why the pages are loading with a slash and without.

The 404s are there, but they look like some sort of squarspace issue with how images are cached or something - not actual pages on the site. Looks like one of your links to wikipedia has a stray character in it causing it to be a broken link.

I would verify/cross check these errors in Google Webmaster Tools and then Rand's suggestion is perfect for the 404s.

Hope between all of that it helps!

-Dan