Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Rebuilding in Angular will effective nuke all search visibility of this site. I'm not kidding. You can see similar question here:
https://moz.com/community/q/index-problem
and answers there. Just open site in this question and see it's source (not DOM! Just HTML source that bot get). And you also will be shocked.
PS: I'm not saying that site with Angular can't rank and index. But it's relative harder comparing with pure HTML site.
Text will be indexed but definitely will be "less-valued" than non-hidden text. So please put text to be visible to user without interaction if you wish all text to be indexed and searchable. There are many experiments in internet for this and here is link to some:
http://dejanseo.com.au/experiment-results-can-hidden-content-rank-well/
However it’s still the best and safest practice to show any important content and keywords in the visible part of the page.
The best is to keep them 404. But fast is to 410 them.
All you need is to place this topmost somewhere of .htaccess:
Redirect 410 /dir/url1/
Redirect 410 /dir/url2/
Redirect 410 /dir1/url3/
Redirect 410 /dir1/url4/
But this won't help you if your URLs have parameters somewhere like index.php?spamword1-blah-blah. For this you need extended version like this:
RewriteEngine on
#RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} spamword
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /404.html? [R=410,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} spamword1
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /404.html? [R=410,L]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} spamword2
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /404.html? [R=410,L]
So why 410? 410 act much faster than 404 but it's DANGEROUS! If you sent 410 to normal URL this is effective nuking it. I found that with 410 bot visit this url 1-2-3 times, but with 404 bot keep visiting over and over eating your crawling budget. URL removal in SearchConsole is OK, but it's fast but works only for 30 days. And will eat almost same time as building list for 404/410s. Hint: You can speedup crawling if you do "fetch and render" then submit to index.
I check quick your site both desktop and mobile. Only that seems you missing is last step with sitemap. Please see here:
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls
how Google recommend to annotate mobile webpages in sitemap.
Rest is ok - you have alternate pages on desktop to mobile; you have proper canonical from mobile to desktop; you have some JavaScript redirect based on window.width that works too. Just sitemap links are missing.
There are many SEO plugins in WordPress:
But only two get huge market share - Yoast and AIO. And many authors are compare them side-by-side:
http://www.evolvingseo.com/2014/02/14/all-in-one-vs-yoast-seo-test-drive/
https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/wordpress-seo-vs-all-in-one-seo-pack-which-is-the-best-seo-plugin
http://wpscoop.com/comparisons/wordpress-seo-plugins-comparison/wordpress-seo-by-yoast-vs-all-in-one-seo-pack-comparison/
There is even Lynda course for both of them:
http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-tutorials/WordPress-Plugins-SEO/140779-2.html
of course there are also many videos in Youtube.
Yes, there is!
https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey
https://moz.com/blog/is-optimizing-photos-more-important-than-you-think
https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors
https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips
https://yoast.com/image-seo/
http://www.koozai.com/blog/content-marketing-seo/increase-traffic-with-images/
That's why you MUST include ALT attribute to each image that you didn't use for design purposes in HTML.
So - this is normal. Any site can have few "bad" links or links that wasn't created from it. They can be also created from scrappers, competitors, previous SEO agencies, and/or other.
But you should constantly watch them in SC and update your disavow file keeping them out. Because in long them they can (if wasn't already) hurt your rankings.
This could be issue called "sandbox" and here you can see more about it: https://moz.com/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom https://moz.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-google-sandbox https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-sandbox-2-0-know/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_effect
So i think that this could be your problem with site launched on 1st Dec. How to make show in SERP and escaping sandbox isn't possible with some "cheats". Fastest site appearing was 3 days, normal timeframe is between week-10 days. If site didn't appear after 2 weeks then this could be due some crawler problem.
Now you could do two things:
I hope that this will give you ideas why new sites didn't show from day 1 in SERP pages.
1. If you read SEO blogs and industry needs then you already know that what is SEO and how it's maded. Basically this is onpage + offpage + content + outreach + few more. Some companies are specialized in onpage optimizations, other in offpage (links), 3rd are content creators.
2. True - links + outreach + social media sharing. You also need to update your content to be actual.
3. You can find Moz recommendations here: https://moz.com//article/recommended
Alexa uses toolbar installed to users computer to scan for links and sent them to their cloud as "backlinks". There isn't way to index someone other inbox folder for links as far as i know.
I have installed on mine site Linkstant and here is similar "backlinks":
http://mail2.daum.net/hanmailex/Top.daum (this is korean mail)
http://www.notprovided.eu/wp-admin/edit-comments.php (heh, seems that someone visit mine website just to check is comment legit or don't) http://foreman2.cnet.com:9058/rb-foreman/flows.html?_flowId=edit-item-flow&id=75852664&versionCnt=0 (ups, i don't have access to this server)
http://www.reddit.com/message/unread/ (reddit inbox)
http://mail.naver.com/?n=1415975274556 (another mailbox)
http://1.1.1.1/login.html (probably internal network)
So LinkStant show this as inbound links to me in their report and i'm almost 99% sure that there IS links somewhere. Same happens with Alexa - he detect links and upload them to their reporting engine. And this engine count link as legit.
You also can use JSON-LD to add this in site w/o messing with HTML. Just refer to their documentation because it can be placed everywhere - in HEAD or in BODY but wasn't visible.
I see that you're on WordPress.
This CMS create "virtual" robots.txt. You can see this here:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization
But on your website there is error in robots.txt and you should see in web server log files (access and error) why this is happening. Also you may need looking .htaccess because something preventing this text file to be accessed.
There is alternative way for using robots.txt in WordPress. All you need is to create new and blank robots.txt in same folder and put this there:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Then save file and that's all. Now bad news - WP can't control indexing and crawling anymore.
There is bug on rel=alternate. It should be as:
only.
Anyway - get this URL and try in your SearchConsole to "Fetch and Render" probably this will help you fixing your web error.
You have few more things to do:
change redirect from 302 to 301 between HTTP and HTTPS sites
you need to verify in SearchConsole HTTPS site too and then do "change of address". Change of address can be used also if you switch protocols.
you need to change in your pages - canonical, assets, images so everything to point to HTTPS pages/elements. Also internal linking should be only to HTTPS pages. I check 2-3 pages of your site and they're still pointing to HTTP. This give bots wrong signal.
setup HSTS header. This will prevent browsers/bots to visit anymore HTTP site for one year:
Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains; preload" put this in .htaccess
about errors.txt I think that it's much better if you enable indexing at all. Here is example of mine site:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://peter.nikolow.me/sitemap_index.xml
as you can see i enable bot to crawl everything within WordPress folders.
Current you make half moving to HTTPS and this sent to bots wrong signals because site isn't moved proper. Fix everything to avoid wasting of crawling budget.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
But using Yoast - categories, tags, most of archives and other generated pages are disabled for indexing.
Well including sitemap in robots.txt is good praticle but isn't required. You can add sitemap in SearchConsole (or Bing WMT) and bots will index site again. Even bots can index site w/o sitemap but sitemap helps them.
That's why don't worry. You can edit your robots.txt at anytime and add sitemap if it's possible.
This is tricky question and i will give shot with mine own testings:
But this is with mine own testing where links are visible, counted in OSE. Probably 0-25 is near 75% (and over!) from whole WWW.
Yes - large scale 404 can trigger Panda:
http://themoralconcept.net/pandalist.html
But don't 301 them. Just fix links from source pages where clicking lead to 404 - replace them with other pages similar to missing one.
Last element:
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/breadcrumbs?hl=en
"The breadcrumb trail may include or omit a breadcrumb for the page on which it appears.".
So both works. I have seen breadcrumbs with last element and w/o last element that point to current page.