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Morning,

So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries:

• Do these figures mean that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and blocking 3,331 other pages? Or does it mean that it's blocking 3,331 pages of the 3,511 indexed?
• As there are only 24 URLs being disallowed on robots.text, why are 3,331 pages being blocked? Will these be variations of the URLs we've submitted?
• Currently, we don't have a sitemap. I know, I know, it's pretty unforgivable but the old one didn't really work and the developers are working on the new one. Once submitted, will this help?
• I think I know the answer to this, but is there any way to ascertain which pages are being blocked?

Thanks in advance!

Lewis

I'd guess that WMT will simply pull duplicate titles from your site and not take rel-canonical tags into consideration.

Hi Hamilton,

There certainly has! Check out the update page over on Mozscape.

Cheers,

Lewis

Thanks for your time. I think you're right, I'm getting a little too hung up on the grader when, as you say, it's simply a guide.

Cheers!

Greetings!

I started a new position last week and the extremely supportive director promised to give me anything I required to make my job easier. Of course, my first port of call was MOZ Pro.

Having never used MOZ Pro before, I've just been getting to grips with it, fixing any pressing issues and giving the whole site a general SEO health check. A few fairly major issues have been flagged, which I'm in the process of fixing, and I'm currently putting our main landing pages through the MOZ Page Grader. After a little bit of tinkering, our iPhone 6 cases page has been graded B for the term 'iPhone 6 cases', but I have a few queries/concerns regarding some of the suggested fixes:

• **Avoid keyword stuffing in document **- The term 'iphone 6 cases' only appears thrice in the body, so it can't be that? The term, however, appears 23 times in the page's img alt tags. Could this be the issue? This is an ecommerce site that sells iPhone 6 cases, so the img alt tags are bound to contain that keyword. Each img alt tag is unique, so I don't really know what I can do here? "Show details for YouSave iPhone 6 0.6mm Clear Gel Case" is the example of the img alt tag of one of the products on that page, surely I can't remove the words 'iPhone 6 case'?
• Avoid too many internal links - MOZ suggests keeping the internal links to below 100 or, at a minimum, less than 100 links on the main navigation menu. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that page has more than 100 links, but not too many on the navigation menu. To me, this looks like a standard ecommerce page, with links to products and different pages via the top and bottom menus. Would I improve visibility if I reduced the amount of links by, say, reducing the number of products on the page? We currently have it set to 36, but can easily be reduced.
• Only One Canonical URL - We've put a fix in place for this issue and are just waiting for it to go live. For some reason rel=canonical tags have been duplicated on the majority of the pages. Like I say, this is being remedied, but I just wondered whether a duplicate tag negatively affect the page's visibility? The tags are identical and just point to the page they're on.

I think that's about it for now! Thanks in advance and keep up the good work!

Cheers,

Lewis (Andrew is the name of the director)

UPDATE Now I've sorted the rel=canonical issue, the pages are being graded A but still with the first two suggestions above.