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So - we pushed back a bit because we seriously couldn't fathom why we'd need to remove all of the 304 functionality from the website due to a directive from the Google Ads team. Turns out, our gut instinct was right. The client's PPC agency ended up giving the Google Ads team a call, and then they learned that there was actually a 404 error happening (face palm) for one page. Not a 304. Leaving this post here for good measure in case this ever happens to anyone else. Watch out for typos!

Hi Daniel, Yes, I have read the entire article. Instead continuing to debate how much link equity in particular would pass through a homepage 301, or how reliable Google's "official stance" is, my goal is rather to evaluate the how the homepage holistically relates to the overall international SEO and corporate branding strategy, in tandem with a complex redesign that is already going to require us to switch up a ton of pages. Thanks!

Thanks! I also got a tip from the Screaming Frog team that if you use the Javascript spidering option, that can also grab all of the images: https://twitter.com/mirabilemac/status/1114249330116968448 The one additional thing I realised is that if you host images externally (cloud etc.), screaming frog will not provide the image size of those.  So if you're doing an audit and need to know image size too, that won't be included if hosted externally. Still, it's wayyy better than not having a list of images at all.

So glad if it's useful!

So - after digging around a lot and reading and re-reading every article that popped up for "screaming frog alternative", I've come to the conclusion that for the price, there really is nothing better than Screaming Frog right now. I was impressed, however, with the incredibly helpful team from Deep Crawl.  This enterprise tool is designed for larger websites - whereas Screaming Frog can crap out of your local machine runs out of memory.  Because it's a more powerful tool, it's more expensive than Screaming Frog - but if you need an enterprise solution, it's definitely worth looking into.  Another big differentiator is that Deep Crawl has no limit to the number of users, which is our primary pain point with Screaming Frog.

This is not an SEO function, this has to do with how your site is coded and how that code interacts with the app.  You will need to bring in a Dev to troubleshoot your code and find a solution.

OH MY GOD.  It was so hard to find.  Thanks for enlightening me.

Update: I just tweeted Gary Illyes about this, and he confirmed that even though Google will index desktop content, desktop versions will be devalued in favor of the mobile version.   So if your mobile version is smaller than desktop, that's a big problem.

Thanks for the clarification! I've looked at quite a few different Twitter follower tools and ran this by a couple of other people on the community team and I've pretty much come to conclusions #2 or #3 that you mentioned. Unfortunately, there's just not really a clear cut way to figure out what happened.   Sorry I don't have a more definitive answer. You might want to consider tracking your account in Followerwonk going forward if you aren't already. It's a good way to see if you've lost a bunch of followers, who those followers were, and look at the date to see if you posted something in particular that could have led to a dramatic follower loss. Doesn't really help your current situation, but might help if anything strange happens in the future.

Sure, I haven't heard of read about any impact in terms of SEO. I do hope that the new browser from MS can keep up with the expectations! Just let IE die already You could also try stackoverflow.com and get a more technical aspect of the HTML5 tag and what it could mean in terms of structure and faster code.

Thanks Ryan!  It sounds like we'll have to go the manual route for cover and profile photos, but we'll also def plan to upload other images via bulk upload as well.

Thank you for the tips Miriam! I will definitely keep all that that in mind, and if we still can't seem to get things fixed after taking these basic steps (some of which we indeed do need to follow up on), will consider reaching out to Andrew as I'm sure he's also an amazing source of knowledge.

Thanks guys - yes, we're using canonical tags already to help resolve this, but I'd like even better if we didn't have to resort to this. It also makes me nervous that these characters are technically classified as "unsafe", but I haven't been able to find any official word from Google on whether or not they will index URLs with brackets or not.  It's definitely not the web standard....