Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Simon,

Quick question which I think I can guess the answer, does the current canonical page rank for anything at all?

Can't the developers make the canonical a static page (which currently redirects) default to the most popular and or a vanilla combination of product attributes?

That would of course be the best option, failing that you would have to just canonicalise to the most popular product variation and do so in a way that doesn't create a redirect chain.

I literally just referenced SiteBulb in another post, and I don't want to come across like a shill but there's a great explanation of it your issue here: https://sitebulb.com/hints/indexability/canonical-hints/canonical-points-to-a-redirecting-url/

Easier said than done for sure with some CMS and E-Commerce sites, but as the aforementioned link says...it's generally dealt with on a case by case basis.

Appreciate this is isn't a definitive answer but I hope it helps!

Nick

Great answer Alex!

I'm not too familiar with ASP and the CMS which powers your website but if it is a case of hardcoded reference, it's definitely worth asking a developer if they can run "a bulk find and replace."

As Alex says, using relative links is preferred these days but a quick but if your developer doesn't feel up to it or doesn't want to dabble in too much regex, what I said should be a quick and dirty solution.

Good luck!

Nick

Hi Matt,

Sorry to hear you're having issues with your website, am I right in reading it is  www.imodular.com?

I'm making a massive assumption here but perhaps you disavowed too many links?

Robots.txt for the aforementioned domain doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Forgive my ignorance but I wasn't even aware you could edit this using Blogger - That is your CMS right?

I've also just done a quick crawl of that site and can see a few on-page hygiene type stuff you might want to look at.

I'd be happy to export the report for you and email it to you but you would definitely derive more value by taking a free trial and exploring all of the hints!

Crawl stats wise I can see an abundance of 302 redirects and quite a lot of content 10 levels deep but it's ultimately meaningless without context behind the site which you have

Cheers,

Nick

P.S I have no affiliation with SiteBulb, I just think it's an awesome tool for getting a pretty comprehensive site audit for a very decent price. Moz Pro site explorer is also a great starting point which I also use but it's not quite as technical.

I can't make any judgement without looking at Analytics and much more data, but there's a possibility that you might have to consider making a version specifically for the US audience in order to tailor it for readers of that country.

You can learn more about Internationalization and Hreflang here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

Hi Jeannie,

Just throwing another wild theory into the mix, could this be related to a caching issue at all? I don't suppose you're seeing the latest version but Google/other people aren't yet?

I can see you're on Wordpress and use WP Rocket that's all

Kind regards,

Nick

Interesting development which may be of interest to you Ernst:

Google admitted just the other day that they "haven't supported rel=next/prev for years." https://searchengineland.com/google-apologizes-for-relnext-prev-mixup-314494

"Should you remove the markup? Probably not. Google has communicated this morning in a video hangout that while it may not use rel=next/prev for search, it can still be used by other search engines and by browsers, among other reasons. So while Google may not use it for search indexing, rel=prev/next can still be useful for users. Specifically some browsers might use those annotations for things like prefetching and accessibility purposes."

Hi Avaye,

Unfortunately "improving your SEO" is such an incredibly broad term, it's going to be hard to give a super specific answer within Moz's Q&A Forum.

What ZoZoMe was trying to say I believe is that the search engine results in Google are constantly changing as Google changes its algorithm and looks to improve its search results. Just because you previously ranked 1st place doesn't guarantee that you will in the future. In addition to Google changing, your competitors may have also improved the quality of their website and competing pages.

Here are a few tips:

• Check the top 5 search results and benchmark them against your website
• Do a site speed audit and see if you can improve the loading time of your webpage e.g GT Metix or Google Page Speed insights
• See if you can update the page you are trying to rank for and add new high quality information or optimise your meta data again
• Build new high quality bank links by doing some outreach

Hope this helps!

Nick

Hi there,

This is a tremendously complicated question to answer I'm afraid

The best thing I could advise you to do is to use Google Search Console and do some fetch and renders as Google.

Here are my thoughts:

• **Because SEO is critical to us, should we try to force SSR after a click ? **

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you basically mean, create additional page? If that's the case, then creating "static" pages would have make a lot of sense if you want to rank for these keywords.

• **How does the robot opens links ? Is it : open new tab behavior ? Because this would trigger SSR on our side. **

I'd suspect your best bet would be a combination of fetch and render from Search Console and checking your server logs; I don't personally think the "open new tab" behaviour is relevant here as a robot crawls the site after all.

Hopefully this starts the discussion so someone else can give you a better answer.

Nick

Hi Sam,

Please could you clarify which part of Moz you are looking at to see this? I can then check against some of my campaigns if need be.

I wasn't aware that Moz counted internal links as part of "Link Explorer" for example, however I appreciate they add new features all the time and I could have missed something!

Kind regards,

Nick

Also just to add the new search console won't necessarily solve anything just because it's new, however it will allow you to delete old sitemaps and to resubmit!

Hi there,

First question, which versions of the website have you verified within Search Console? I assume we're talking about the www and https version as per your link?

Second question, what is the URL of your sitemap and is it in .xml format? Do you use Yoast?

Kind regards,

Nick

Hi there,

I can't answer all of your questions but Google literally announced we can delete old sitemaps in new search console now: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-updates-the-sitemaps-report-in-search-console-adds-ability-to-delete-sitemaps/299495/

With this feature available, there's definitely more opportunities to test a few more sitemap submissions and to verify that all urls have been crawled.

If you could cross-reference this with serverlogs you would definitely be on to a winner; although to be fair Googlebot crawling a URL doesn't automatically mean indexation!

Good luck,

Nick

+1 for Serge's answer, their answer is textbook and really spot on! If you follow this advice it's impossible to go too far wrong

Keri is absolute correct, so thumbs up for her!

No domain type is inherently more powerful or more authoritative than others; I think the idea of .edu and university links is a bit of a relic from old-school linkbuilding days I'm afraid.

The best links are high quality, natural, unique and super relevant - don't worry too much about DA type metrics or what the domain extension is!

Both of these folks have it spot on and are correct in their recommendations, just remember to keep an eye on Search Console so you can verify the progress!

Hi OP,

Not sure what your developer is planning on using but you could easily have some sort of combination of a blog + shop using Wordpress and Woo-Commerce.

Why you would specifically want a blog on the homepage and then a shop within a folder is beyond me (surely the otherway round; e-commer site + a blog), but I know for a fact it would be very easy to do for the average Wordpress developer!

Kind regards and good luck!

Nick

Assuming they have 100% duplicate content and products then Alex and Effect's suggestion to just pick one and 301 redirect would make the most sense.

However, if there is only minor overlap between the two sites and both operate in different markets, then simply remove the offending products from one of the websites with the less relevancy!

Good luck Hazel, let us all know what you're planning to do and if there's any other questions

Fixing all crawl issues should undoubtedly help with SEO "across the board", however it can be unrealistic to expect this to fix the rankings for an unrelated page!

Put it this way, if you're page is already ranking 2nd place for your keyword, it already means Google "likes" it.

Don't get me wrong fixing site wide on-page technical issues definitely moves the needle, however if no internal links or content really changed then I wouldn't necessarily expect significant SERP movement.

Perhaps look to off-site factors e.g. backlinks and domain authority to position number 1 and do a Gap analysis.

Kind regards,

Nick

Hi Issa,

This is a great question and something I actually asked Gary Illyes of Google on his Google AMA.

For me the site:olddomain.com has been inconsistent; sometimes with domain name migrations everything tidies up within a few weeks, other times it lingers like Andreas' fantastic example of SEO Moz.

Anyway, Gary said "You don't need to do anything. We're simply surfacing the old URLs to... Not confuse users i guess? Honestly, that URL we show in the results are sometimes fairly useless, maybe we should test again what happens if we remove them" From the answer I think Gary is trying to imply that keeping rankings whilst showing old domain is done to keep things familiar for users.

Regarding the index returned during a site search, I understand this is historic.

Here's the link for the full question and context: https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/ao3fmk/i_am_gary_illyes_googles_chief_of_sunshine_and/eg1lps1/

Hope this helps slightly!

Nick

Amazing, glad that worked out for you!