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Same here, they look like old product pages that no longer exist but no idea where Google dug them up.

Not sure if this is related but myself and someone else have seen something similar around the same time happen, see here: https://moz.com/community/q/strange-increase-of-pages-not-found-gwt

Hi Marcel, will do. For now I am just marking all the errors in Search Console as fixed as I cannot actually find them linked from anywhere and I will see if they come back.

This isn't going to answer your question, but we have experienced the same issue. Ours used to sit at between 300-400 (also an ecommerce website) - on the 27th August it went up to 2.2k and then on the 30th it jumped to 7.8k and then a day later to 10.2k. These are also just desktop, not smartphone.

Would be very interested if anyone else has also seen this? We did make some minor changes to our website on the 27th and 29th but nothing that would explain this. So I'd be very interested in any replies as well.

Thanks.

Yes, this can happen but you can ask Google not to use the description from a directory such as DMOZ by using the "noodp" meta robot tag:

We have the exact same issue, and I found this reply from Dr. Pete helpful regarding this (assuming that what he says is still true): https://moz.com/community/q/pagination-issues-on-e-commerce-site-duplicate-page-title-and-content-on-moz-crawl

His reply:

Unfortunately, Moz Analytics/PRO don't process rel=prev/next properly at this time, so we may give false alarms on those pages, even if the tags are properly implemented.

It can be tricky, but Google recommends a combination of rel=canonical and rel=prev/next. Use the canonical tag to keep sorts from getting indexed, and then use rel=prev/next for the pagination itself. Your 3rd example (page=2...) should rel=prev/next to the URLs before and after it but then canonical to the page=2 variation with no sort parameter. It can get complicated fast, unfortunately, but typically rel=canonical can be implemented in the template. So, once you've got it figured out, it'll work for the entire site.

As far as I am aware, there is nothing wrong with using both canonicals and pagination on the same page. Google says this as well here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

We have pagination and canonicals set up as suggested in the Google article and also have some issues with Moz saying we have duplicate content, which the pagination should "fix" as far as I understand it.

From the article:

rel="next" and rel="prev" are orthogonal concepts to rel="canonical". You can include both declarations. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:

I'd suggest adding a noindex robots meta tag to the affected pages (see how to do this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en) and until Google recrawls use the remove URLs tool (see how to use this here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en).

If you use the noindex robots meta tag, don't disallow the pages through your robots.txt or Google won't even see the tag. Disallowing Google from crawling a page doesn't mean it won't be indexed (or removed from the index), it just means Google won't crawl the page.

You could use URL parameter settings in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools - if all ?start= URLs can be treated the same way by Google.

You could use a user-agent switcher plugin to see what Google (and other search engines) can see. If all they can see is the log-in page it wouldn't be worth it for SEO purposes, but it might still be beneficial if this is an active website with many members who may be more likely to visit your client's website because of this link.

Hi Igor, thanks for the reply, I will check out Serpstat.

I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for free or inexpensive backlink audit tools? Of course I have access to Search Console and to the OSE but it seems they don't offer a complete picture of our backlink profiles.

I have previous experience using Link Research Tools for this but this is too expensive for the amount of use we would get out of it so I am looking for (much) cheaper alternatives. I look after 8 websites, however very little active link building was done for these in the past so we are not experiencing any issues due to bad links, but I would still like to get a better picture of our complete backlink profile.

I've considered just using a trial of Majestic or Ahrefs for this, but this would only be a one off solution.

I would welcome any suggestions. Thanks!

Hi, thanks for your reply. Both locations are actually owned by the same Google account, however, I am aware there are some issues with duplication due to the use of the same address and phone number. Think I might bring it up again internally whether we should merge the two listings.

While strictly speaking the corporate GMB listing is probably a better fit for the GMB guidelines and we get a lot more views of it, we actually get more clicks through the other one, despite only having half the views, so it'd be a shame to lose that one.

Does anyone have any advice regarding the use of shop codes? I've read the Google documentation on them but am still a bit unclear as to what they are for. My understanding is that they serve to distinguish listings when using bulk uploads but we don't use bulk uploads, so would it still make sense to use them and if so how would you format them?

Thanks!

We currently have two verified GMB listings at the same address - I "inherited" these when I joined the company, and was considering merging them, as I am aware it is generally not recommended to have more than one listing per company per location. However, the two listings highlight two different sectors of our company so I decided to keep both and optimised them as best as possible by completing the information, adding pictures etc.

One of the listings uses our legal company name, one uses our name that we trade under as an e-commerce business. The listing with our legal company name links to our corporate website and focuses on installations we do, while the listing with our e-commerce business name links to our ecommerce website and focuses on products we sell through there so they differ a bit from each other. Both serve the entire country, so they are not targeted specifically toward local searches.

The following differ: Business name, sector, website
The following are the same: Address, phone number, opening hours

So far we haven't had any issues, both are verified and show up in Google, but recently, we have had the following notification pop up:

Fix locations with duplicate addresses__Use shop codes to differentiate locations that have the same address. Click each location and give it a unique address or shop code, or remove it.

I'd appreciate some advice as to what would be best in this situation. Should I just add shop codes to differentiate the two listings in order to be able to keep them both? If so, what purpose do these shop codes have, how should I format these and will these be publicly visible within our listings?

If you would suggest merging them, how could I ensure that it shows up whether people search for our e-commerce business name or for our legal business name as these are different?

Thanks in advance!

In your campaign settings you can manually change the pages to as low as 10,000. From here: https://analytics.moz.com/manage-campaigns click on the tool icon to access your settings, click "View Campaign settings". Then under General and Site Basics, you can change your Site Crawl Limit and pick from between 10,000 and 780,000.

I use Screaming Frog for this. It'a s spider that does a crawl of your website and then (among others) provides a list of pages without (and pages with multiple) H1 tags. It's a fantastic tool, really useful for all sorts of stuff (like checking for missing / too long / too short page titles and meta descriptions etc etc) and fairly inexpensive (free for crawling up to 500 URLs) at £99 per year for one license. This is their website: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

I hope this helps.

I think the problem is that in theory any page that is indexed will rank for some keyword or other, especially long-tail keywords, so there will be too many possibilities. The only way to link them up for sure (as far as I am aware) is to track the keywords.

But you may be able to make some connections by checking your top organic landing pages and top organic keywords. I.e. if you are getting a lot of visits to your landing page "/thekeyword" and a lot of visits (or impressions) from "keywordz", then it might be worth checking whether it is that page that ranks well for the keyword "keywordz". The avg. position in the Search Console might be helpful as well to give you an idea for how well a page on your website ranks for the keywords you are getting traffic from.

Your organic landing pages report from Google Analytics and search analytics report from Search Console might be helpful for that.

If you export your Keyword Rankings to Excel, you can sort them by the Ranking URL so all the keywords that one URL ranks for will be grouped together.

You can also use labels to organise keywords into different groups but this might have been easier to do when you first uploaded them.

I hope this helps!