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Google Search Console is telling us that there are 5,193 sitemap "issues" - URLs that are present on the XML sitemap that are blocked by robots.txt

However, there are only 1,222 total URLs submitted on the XML sitemap. I only found 83 instances of URLs that fit their example description.

Why is the number of "issues" so high?

Does it compound over time as Google re-crawls the sitemap?

I am working with a client who migrated their site prior to starting their SEO work with us. In a crawl of broken backlinks, I found some old image files with links. Ideally, I would like to redirect to an appropriate image, but I have no way of knowing what the image was because the page it was on is now dead. Does anyone have a way to identify and handle broken image files from a site that has already been migrated?

Hi there,

We understand that hreflang tagging can be incorporated into an existing XML sitemap. That said, is there any inherent issue with having two sitemaps - your regular XML sitemap plus an international XML sitemap which lists off many of the same URLs as your original XML sitemap?

For example, one of our clients has an XML sitemap file they don't want to have to edit, but we want to implement international hreflang xml sitemaps for them. Can we add an "English" XML sitemap with the proper hreflang tagging even though this new sitemap contains many duplicates as the existing XML sitemap file?

Thank you!

If a site has about 100 pages offering specific discounts for employees at various companies, for example...

mysite.com/discounts/target

mysite.com/discounts/kohls

mysite.com/discounts/jcpenney

and all these pages are nearly 100% duplicates, how would you handle them?

My recommendation to my client was to use noindex, follow. These pages tend to receive backlinks from the actual companies receiving the discounts, so obviously they are valuable from a linking standpoint. But say the content is nearly identical between each page; should they be indexed? Is there any value for someone at Kohl's, for example, to be able to find this landing page in the search results?

Here is a live example of what I am talking about:

https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=active&rlz=1C1WPZB_enUS735US735&q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpoi8.petinsurance.com%2Fbenefits%2F&oq=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpoi8.petinsurance.com%2Fbenefits%2F&gs_l=serp.3...7812.8453.0.8643.6.6.0.0.0.0.174.646.3j3.6.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..0.5.586...0j35i39k1j0i131k1j0i67k1j0i131i67k1j0i131i46k1j46i131k1j0i20k1j0i10i3k1.RyIhsU0Yz4E

I have a site with a few hundred thousand backlinks and many of these are are legitimate, but the source site of the backlink often has a low authority and is broken, causing a spiral of bad backlinks from pagination, comment replies, etc. For example one site may have 4 legitimate backlinks with a spiral of 400+ bad backlinks, this is happening across dozens of domains.

My site is more authoritative than these broken backlinks and regularly receives highly authoritative backlinks, because of this would it be best to disavow these spiraling low authority domains, attempt to contact the webmaster and add a nofollow, or any other solution?

My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects.

Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site.

However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site.

We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place.

We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site?

FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.

I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this:

/cart.php

/quote

/checkout.php

/finishorder.php

/login.php

In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google.

These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page?

How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?

I am working with a major beauty client who owns an exact-match domain name related to their product that brings in a ton of traffic. They offer great content on this website that is inherently valuable. The catch is that the call-to-action brings users back to the main company site (a different URL). So if they want to "buy the product" or "learn more," they are taken to a different domain (the main company domain). There are 47 links to the main site on the EMD site.

There are some slight mentions of the main brand on the EMD site, but it's hardly noticeable. It mostly appears to be a standalone site not affiliated with a major brand.

My gut tells me this is black-hat but I can't find a fitting description of this strategy online, and why they shouldn't be doing this. Is this considered a doorway page / doorway site? Is this considered a link scheme? What would you call this strategy? Or is this actually not even black hat?

I have an e-commerce client who sells shoes. There is a main page for "Kids" shoes, and then right under it on the top-navigation bar there is a link to "Boys Shoes" and "Girls Shoes." All 3 of these links are on the same level - 1 click off the home page. (And linked to from every page on the website via the top nav bar). All 3 are perfectly optimized for their targeted term.

However, when you search for "boys shoes" or "girls shoes" + the brand, the "Kids" page is the one that shows up in the #1 position. There are sitelinks beneath the listing pointing to "Girls" and "Boys." All the other results in Google are resellers of the "brand + girls" or "brand + boys" shoes. So our listing is the only one that's "brand + kids shoes."

Our "boys" shoes page and "girls" shoes page don't even rank on the 1st page for "brand + boys shoes" or "brand + girls shoes."

The only real difference is that "kids shoes" contains both girls and boys shoes on the page, and then "boys" obviously contains boys' shoes only, "girls" contains girls' shoes only. So in that sense there is more content on the "kids" page.

So my question is - WHY is the kids page outranking the boys/girls page? How can we make the boys/girls pages be the ones that show up when people specifically search for boys/girls shoes?

I think so too. But in the rare event that a genius out there sees our conundrum and knows a crazy trick, that'd be nice. Some kind of site migration loophole that allows you to map and redirect old URLs without ownership of a site. That's wishful thinking though.

I don't disagree. The legal part is not SEO-related. The SEO question that's posed is what to do in the meantime to preserve the rankings. Bear in mind that there are 2 possible outcomes (getting site back vs. not getting it back and starting fresh) and there's also not necessarily a good solution. Perhaps waiting and starting over is the answer. I don't know.

Someone's squatting on that one. Perhaps we can try to buy that one somehow now that the opportunity presented itself...

I phrased the question incorrectly originally. Turns out the guy owned the domain all along and during his exit no one had him sign the rights over. He took full advantage of it. Definitely a blunder.

The domain name is only a partial match of the brand name. It's [brand's name]blah.com so probably won't hold up in court or at least won't be an open and shut case.

Thanks so much for the input, Dmitrii. Greatly appreciated.

A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage.

Here's the breakdown:

-Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code

-The site is out of our control

-The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back

-The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email.

The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your additional thoughts.

So turns out I just checked again today and my client is back at position 6.

I guess Google was just "re-calibrating?"

Very strange...

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your help.

I have a hard time believing it's the result of any of these algorithm updates because this is a very high-quality site with fantastic content. The keyword I am focusing on is a head term in the medical industry with very high volume. We were #1 several weeks ago. The ranking page offers about 750 words of excellent content structured sort of like Wikipedia or Web MD, with helpful internal links and medical sources listed on the bottom.

I did have the client make one or two revisions and update the date associated to the article, as it was 2011, and now it's 2015.

I'm still concerned because today it looks like the page fell even deeper in the index.

Any thoughts?

Hi there,

One of my client's sites, a very large and successful ecommerce website with great SEO performance, has seen a significant drop in rankings in the past 2 weeks. The rankings have begun to somewhat stabilize today, except one particular keyword with a search volume of 74k has gone from 1 to 100.

Here is what has taken place in 2 weeks, sitewide:

• I revised and improved upon title tags and meta descriptions to make them more user-friendly and contain more optimized terms. Following all of Google's best practices, as always. Google still appears to be indexing these changes (has anyone seen an initial drop in rankings while this takes place?)
• The site has seen a very significant increase in 404 errors due to one feature of the site breaking. We got a message about it in Webmaster Tools, and this appears to coincide with when overall rankings dropped. The development team is working quickly to get this resolved.
• As of today, I am seeing the highest page-load time than any other day in 2015.

With regard to the particular page/keyword in question:

• The keyword is no longer "exact match" at the beginning of the title tag, but rather broken up throughout the title tag so the whole title sounds better for users. **Have you found that this type of change is sufficient for a keyword rank to move down ~100 positions?? **(Either way, I have asked the client to revise the title to start with the exact match keyword, once again.)
• Google has indexed the page 2 days ago, but is still displaying the old title tag in search results.
• I have not found any instances of internal or external links to this page being removed.

With all this information, does anyone see anything that seems like it could have reasonably caused such a huge tank in rankings? Is this a blip in time? Is there anything I am not considering? Should I just be patient?

Awesome, thank you!

Thanks for your help. I'm still seeing so much evidence that 'exact match' optimizations really move the needle in organic search, which is the only reason I have hesitations. While I fully endorse the idea that your site's language should be well-written and user-friendly, I don't want to lose out on any opportunity to target the best keyword.

Hi all,

So I have a question about "best practices" when you have two unique, but highly similar keywords you are targeting.

Let's use the examples of "raincoats for women," which gets 9,900 searches a month, and "rain jackets for women," which gets 4,400. I am in the process of selecting keywords for my client's "keyword portfolio" and need to come up with a strategy when faced with two similar keywords that use different terminology.

I'm well aware that there should only be one page for "women's raincoats" but there is no doubt in my mind that Google will give preferential treatment to whichever version of the keyword (raincoats/rain jackets) I include in my title tag, meta description, content, etc. I know that the modern philosophy is that Google is sophisticated enough to understand that the two words are essentially synonymous. That said, would you

A) only pick "raincoats for women" for your client's keyword portfolio and focus exclusively on that term in your optimizations?

b) pick both terms and try to strike an even balance between both in your optimizations?

c) pick both terms and only optimize for "raincoats for women" and hope that "rain jackets for women" gets some peripheral benefit from your optimizations via Google's understanding of synonyms?

Thanks!