Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

They have confirmed that this has no impact on your search ranking:

https://searchengineland.com/google-says-keywords-tld-part-url-ignored-ranking-purposes-251971

Cheers,

Sean

Hey Moz folks,

I'm in the process of getting a deck together to discuss 'Disruption in search' and I wondered if the community would be able to share any ideas of their own as to what they feel is/has/will be disrupting the search/search marketing industry?

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Sean

Awesome, thank you so much!

Hi,

If you go to sitemaps and then run the same report against your image sitemap, it should shed some more light. Make sure to click on 'excluded' before you post the next screenshot. This will then list out the reasons that the images are not being indexed.

Kind regards,

Sean

Hi There,

Press the 'go to new report' button in the top right. It should take you to the new Google Search Console report which will tell you the exact reasons why URLs that you're submitting aren't being indexed.

Feel free to post the screenshot of the results on here and I can help you figure out what to do next.

All the best,

Sean

Hi There,

First Question:

There are robots.txt files in these locations, however both don't reference a disallow for this page so this isn't the issue:

• https://www.brody.be/nl/robots.txt
• https://www.brody.be/robots.txt

I would use the new version of Google Search Console and use the URL inspection tool. This will let you know why the URL is being excluded and give you the option to manually submit it if everything is ok with it.

Second Question

Google can be a bit funny about meta descriptions, especially ones that contain emoji characters like the ticks you are showing within the Yoast meta description field. Sometimes if it deems the meta description irrelevant, it can rewrite it itself. If this has been changed recently, I would give it a bit more time to refresh and see what happens.

I hope that helps!

Kind regards,

Sean

Hi there,

This looks to be something to do with a URL generator that is dynamically creating URLs based on certain categories being present.

The downside being that those categories look to have been removed, hence the 'null' values being passed through.

I would push this back to your developers as a serious issue, there could be a large amount of duplication occurring if you're not careful.

All the best,

Sean

Hi There,

It all looks fine for me when I search for Sumy Designs. Is this your business?

https://postimg.cc/JHL7ZZMr

If so, this might have rectified itself.

All the best,

Sean

Hi Nikki,

You're absolutely right. There will be a domain level http > https redirect in place within the htaccess file and page to page redirects.

Any page to page redirects that sit below that rule can be put in manually and will be caught **after **the domain level rule and this will not conflict.

All the best,

Sean

Hi Alan,

If they're not willing to share their link/outreach targets with you, I would steer clear of them.

What they're saying about it being their 'intellectual property' is complete rubbish. At the end of the day, the site they're building links to is your business and it should be in your best interest to ensure that links that are being built to the website are of high quality. It sounds like they're being unnecessarily shady.

Find yourself an SEO that is transparent and working **with you **to create a solid link acquisition strategy, not working in isolation and secrecy.

All the best,

Sean

Hi there!

You're absolutely correct, you would just need a domain-level server redirect to take all http URLs to their https equivalent.

Best practice is to ensure you've also got the non-www. version of the website covered in that same redirect too, to avoid any chains. You'll see what I mean if you run your domain through this > https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/

Depending on what stack you're using, here are the 2 guides. One for htaccess and one for IIS:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10489895/http-to-https-through-htaccess
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kaushal/2013/05/22/http-to-https-redirects-on-iis-7-x-and-higher/

You shouldn't need to, but just to be on the safe side, I would also add canonical tags to the http pages, pointing to their https equivalent prior to putting the server level redirect in place. This is to ensure that you won't be causing yourself issues if the redirect fails for any reason. Details here:

• https://searchengineland.com/https-setup-causing-seo-issues-254236

Once you've got your redirection planned in, make sure you set up a Google Search Console account for the https version to ensure there are no crawl issues and to check that the http version of the site stops receiving traffic.

That should just about cover it!

Hope it all goes well,

Sean

Hi Daniel,

That does seem very odd!

There can be various different things at play here in my experience:

1. Publishing and un-publishing in the CMS - Sometimes clients and CMS users will switch the page publish status around which can make it difficult to keep track of whether the page exists or not
2. Removal of redirects - Much the same as above, there's the possibility that someone is adding/removing redirects. This could also be something to do with the removal of the server level redirects file, be that htaccess or IIS.
3. Crawling tool issue - If you're using a crawling tool (especially if doing so with JS rendering active), sometimes this can put a lot of pressure on the server and it can spit out the occasional error where there actually isn't one

It could also be a problem with how you're handing hard 404 errors vs soft 404s - i.e. actual not founds vs pages that don't function but the server is under the impression that they're fine.

Best of luck!

Sean

Awesome. Thanks!

Hi guys,

We're noticing a few alternate hostnames for a website rearing their ugly heads in search results and I was wondering how everyone else handles them. For example, we've seen:

• alt-www.(domain).com
• test.(domain).com
• uat.(domain).com

We're looking to ensure that these versions all canonical to their live page equivalent and we're adding meta robots noindex nofollow to all pages as an initial measure. Would you recommend a robots.txt crawler exclusion to these too?

All feedback welcome!

Cheers,

Sean

Hey there,

Personally, I'm not a fan of date subfolders, especially if they're split into three. It creates an abnormally deep URL structure that doesn't seem overly logical.

Google have stated that using 301 redirects no longer loses link equity (Check out the link below!) so you wouldn't be at risk of losing any link juice if you did go this way.

https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

In terms of SEO advantage, I would say that putting your articles into 'themed' folders (think /blog/shoes as an example) would help as it would assist search engines in understanding your content, whilst including important keywords within the URL. Gianluca refers to these types of content pods as 'Topical Hubs' and his video is quite entertaining!:

https://moz.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps,

Sean

Hey there,

In an ideal world, I would recommend maintaining the NAP (Name, Address & Postcode) you use anywhere else on the internet. This allows search engines (and users for that matter) to have some degree of continuity between your business listings.

Moz local is a decent tool for analysing your business listing and checking that your NAP is the same across the internet. It'll even highlight sites where this isn't the case so you can manually update them.

All the best,

Sean

Hi Christy - what's the best course of action for submitting ideas/posts for the main Moz blog now that YouMoz is being phased out? Or is this only for higher profile contributors?

To be honest, it all looks correct and that would have been the way I did it. If Google is currently not ranking the correct URL, it'll likely update when they take the 301 into account when they next recrawl the page.

It might be a factor in why rankings have dropped but it's likely to pick back up again when their index is updated. My advice is to hold tight and hope it all fixes itself soon.

All the best,

Sean

Hi Mozzers,

I was about to start looking into writing some posts for the YouMoz blog but it looks like it hasn't been active in months - what's going on?

All the best,

Sean

Reducing the number of pages that search engines need to crawl is definitely the right way to go, so yeah I would definitely get a uniform URL structure in place if possible. Reduce that crawl budget