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Category: Technical SEO

Discuss site health, structure, and other technical SEO strategies.

  • Trazo


    I have already added the .xml to Robots. But should I also add the html version?

    | Trazo
    0
  • movingbusinessestothecloud


    How long do I wait before redirecting the purchased company's webpages to the equivalent pages on our site? Do I need to keep some sort of announcement about the merger live on their website for a while first?

    | movingbusinessestothecloud
    0
  • cbathd


    Having a difficult time on our site and looking for some advice. Our site pages are indexed perfectly, however, we have a subdomain where we have all of our images and PDF's. We only have the main domain set-up in Search Console with our sitemap. We can't seem to get any of our images indexed by Google that are in the subdomain however all the PDF's are indexed. My thought is to add the subdomain to SC and create a new sitemap that is just for the subdomain. Assuming we are not blocking any folders or files with our robots.txt can anyone think of any other reasons why the images wouldn't get indexed.
    Thanks

    | cbathd
    0
  • LK-61


    I'm adding itemprops to data in a table. They are all the same type of data, but each row has different specifications. Is it best to put the data under one tag? Or separate each row into it's own tag?

    | LK-61
    0
  • lfrazer123


    Hello, Revamping an out-of-date website and am wondering if I need to include the folders (categories) in the url structure? The proposed structure has 8 main folders. I've been reading that Google is ok if the folder is not included in the url, but is it really? The hesitation I have is that the urls are getting long and the main folder only has only a sub folder beneath it. So, /folder-name/facility-name/treatment-overview. This looks too long, doesn't it? Thanks!

    | lfrazer123
    0
  • marktheshark10


    Hi guys, In Google's webmaster tool it says that the URL has been indexed but not submitted to the sitemap. Is it necessary that the URL be submitted to the sitemap if it has already been indexed? Appreciate your help with this. Mark

    | marktheshark10
    0
  • semcheck1


    Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't! We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword. I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds. I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax. Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied. Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh! So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas? Thanks.

    | semcheck1
    1
  • icebergsal


    I Am Trying To Remove A Robots.txt code i put in my root domain a while back because i didn't know what i was doing. everytime i enter my domain (domain.com/robots.txt) i get a fatal error message. How do I fix this fatal error message? ipALV2z

    | icebergsal
    0
  • RaquelSaiz


    Hi Everyone, I have a lot of Marketo landing pages that I don't want to show in SERP. Adding the noindex meta tag for each page will be too much, I have thousands of pages. Blocking it in roborts.txt could have been an option, BUT, the subdomain homepage is redirected to my main domain (with a 302) so I may confuse search engines ( should they follow the redirect or should they block) marketo.mydomain.com is redirected to www.mydomain.com disallow: / (I think this will be confusing with the redirect) I don't have folders, all pages are under the subdomain, so I can't block folders in Robots.txt also Would anyone had this scenario or any suggestions? I appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you Rachel

    | RaquelSaiz
    0
  • RickyShockley


    Hi all! I rarely work with businesses who target countries outside of the US so I wanted to see if I'm missing anything here on the URL/translation front. I'm no developer, so this is crossing over a bit beyond my realm of expertise... From what I understand (and after briefly review Google's documentation) we should be good to go after having implemented the following two line items... We used a plugin to create different version of our site pages in multiple languages..those live at URLS like this https://www.exfreight.com/fr/ That plugin also implements the hreflang tag and I did check to see that it was actually in the site code Is there anything else we need to do to ensure proper indexing / organization by Google? Should we take the step of creating and adding sitemaps for each language version to our Webmaster account? K6nIhvD

    | RickyShockley
    0
  • dhananjay.kumar1


    Hi, i have a website with http but now i moved to https. when i apply 301 redirection from http to https & check in semrush it shows unable to connect with https & similar other tool shows & when i remove redirection all other tools working fine but my https version doesn't get indexed in google. can anybosy help what could be the issue?

    | dhananjay.kumar1
    0
  • Tom3_15


    Hello, I would like my website to remain crawlable to bots, but to block my wp content and media. Does the following robots.txt work? I worry that the * user agent may conflict with the others. User-agent: *
    Disallow: /wp-admin/
    Disallow: /wp-includes/
    Disallow: /wp-content/ User-agent: GoogleBot
    Allow: / User-agent: GoogleBot-Mobile
    Allow: / User-agent: GoogleBot-Image
    Allow: / User-agent: Bingbot
    Allow: / User-agent: Slurp
    Allow: /

    | Tom3_15
    0
  • WTH


    I have lots of paginated pages which are being indexed. Should I add the noindex tag to page 2 onwards? The pages currently have previous and next tags in place. Page one also has a self-referencing canonical.

    | WTH
    0
  • Marketing_Optimist


    New client website https://yorkshirefoodguide.co.uk/ has for some key phrase searches the URL for an image showing above or as well as the url for the landing page. I'd be happy for it to show in the image pack but I want to url to rank in the main serp. The site is in WordPress and I'm sure this is just a setting I need to manage. Can you help please?

    | Marketing_Optimist
    0
  • aplnzoctober18


    I work for a company that makes products for the construction sector, we have approximately 80 independent companies who solely sell our products.  We are looking to create websites for each of them (some have pre-existing sites that will be redesigned) They will be reasonably basic with quite few having a single page and none requiring online selling. I’m mindful that we will be essentially optimizing them all for the same words phrases. Is there anything I need to be mindful of when undertaking a project. Is it ok to optimize for the same keys words and  terms etc?

    | aplnzoctober18
    0
  • Mat_C


    Hi, We are migrating an old website to a new one built in Wordpress soon. We also added an SSL to change to https:// Most of the url's stay the same. Can we just migrate from http to https on server level, and for the url's that do change just set a 301 redirect? Or are there other things we should take into account?

    | Mat_C
    0
  • jordanayresaira


    Hello, So I'm helping out some friends with their SEO. I've just run a Screaming Frog crawl of their entire site (which took hours and hours I might add). They used to have a forum connected to the site, which is no longer active. Google is still indexing all of the old URLs, which unsurprisingly return 404 errors. What should they do to prevent Google from indexing these pages? That's assuming they need to do anything at all. They don't have access to these old forum posts and therefore won't be able to fix the URL or resource adding a 301 redirect pointing to the most relevant alternate page. I'm new to SEO but my instinct is that they need to have the page return a 410 ‘Gone’ response code to give search engines a clear signal that the page no longer exists and won’t be returning, and removing the internal links to that URL or resource. 1. Is this interpretation correct?
    2. What is the impact of leaving these 404s? There are over a thousand, so there's a lot 3. What should I recommend?

    | jordanayresaira
    0
  • Sammyh


    Avoid landing page redirects for the following chain of redirected URLs. http://domainname.com/ https://domainname.com/ https://www.domainname.com/ Anyone know how to solve this issue the correct way?

    | Sammyh
    0
  • KJH-HAC


    Hi all, I've been checking these forums for an answer on how to find orphaned pages on my site and I can see a lot of people are saying that I should cross check the my XML sitemap against a Screaming Frog crawl of my site. However, the sitemap is created using Screaming Frog in the first place... (I'm sure this is the case for a lot of people too). Are there any other ways to get a full list of orphaned pages? I assume it would be a developer request but where can I ask them to look / extract? Thanks!

    | KJH-HAC
    1
  • dig_ad_austin


    I'm just starting out in freelance SEO & I've taken on a client who is using Craft CMS (version 2.0ish) for their site. I am not even close to being competent enough to manually code via Twig, but I had the main developer install the SEOmatic plugin for me. My question from here is - are there any resources or tips I should be aware of starting out? I just started by updating meta title/descriptions via "New Template Meta(s)" but I'm a bit concerned i'm doing the "template path" thing right - I haven't seen any visible changes in browser, and the SERP preview I'm getting is giving me a broken link. But i'm doing a fresh Moz crawl right now to see if the changes took place or not. so 1. Am I on the right track? 2. How long does it typically take for changes to start to show? 3. Is there anything I should be aware of? any follow up questions just let me know, I'll be following this thread!

    | dig_ad_austin
    0
  • rodv


    Hey Guys! I'm building links for my page and happened upon the "Hoth" link building page. I tried it out and it built some no follow links and some links on several sub domains. I know that, when back linking via guest posting, no follow links do not juice my site. My question is, does building links on a subdomain from another company juice my site? If it's not helpful, could you explain why? Does it juice my site in any way? If you could link sources, I would really appreciate it. Also, do any of you have input on Hoth or platforms like it? Are they worth it? Thank you!

    | rodv
    0
  • gosheen


    We re-launched our new site and put in the re-directs. Our site is https://www.fico.com/en. When I search for "fico" in Google. I see the privacy policy getting indexed as meta descriptions instead of our actual meta description. I have edited the meta description, requested Google to re-index our site. Not sure what to do next? Thanks for your advise.

    | gosheen
    0
  • vikrantrathore


    Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues

    | vikrantrathore
    0
  • Kingalan1


    Last April we migrated our old domain www.nyc-officespace-leader.com to a new domain www.metro-manhattan.com. The old domain has been receiving numerous links from very spammy sites such as these: -adinternet.net/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958.htm <colgroup><col width="263"></colgroup>
    | -www.online-advertisement.net/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958.html | <colgroup><col width="263"></colgroup>
    | www.webfind.org/the_worlds_most_visited_web_pages_958/ | Since the old domain redirects to our new domain we are concerned this could be very detrimental. Oddly enough the 50-100 spammy domains that link to us all are a site called: "http://theglobe.se/start/" when the linking domain is entered in the browser. What should we do? Should we disavow these links? Is this some kind of an attack? Would very much appreciate some input/advice. Thank, 
    Alan

    | Kingalan1
    1
  • 21centuryweb


    Google search console tells that only '58 out of the 3553' images in the images sitemap are indexed. But if I search "site:example.com" in Google images there seem to be lots of images. There are no errors in the sitemap and I am still getting reasonable number of image search hits daily. Are the webmaster tools stats for images indexed accurate? When I click on the Sitemap Errors & Index Errors this is what i get - Error details: No errors found. https://www.screencast.com/t/pqL62pIc

    | 21centuryweb
    0
  • GregLB


    If we were to deploy schema and noindex tags to our website via Google tag manager, would these tags be viewed and respected by other search engines?

    | GregLB
    0
  • 21centuryweb


    Hi, I would like to ask why our website images not indexing in Google. I have shared the following screenshot of the search console.  https://www.screencast.com/t/yKoCBT6Q8Upw Last week (Friday 14 Sept 2018) it was showing 23.5K out 31K were submitted and indexed by Google. But now, it is showing only 1K 😞 Can you please let me know why might this happen, why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster.

    | 21centuryweb
    0
  • Dan-Lawrence


    Hi My clients dev has added custom fields for adding hreflang tags to head of pages such as: "Rel Type", "The URL", and "Language Code" Am i right in thinking that until a different language/country version of the site is created these can remain empty or should they still be populated once added say with some sort of global reference or best left blank since will leave the head content global by default ? Also how important is it to add charset to the language code ? since seems optional ? Also this set up is on WP multi-site with Yoast and devs asked me the below: _One thing to note is that Yoast generates its own "canonical" tags - so if _
    _you are going to use hreflang tags and canonical tags then you don't need to _
    _add a canonical using the custom fields I have set up - Yoast has that _
    sorted. _But if you are going down the route of NOT having any canonical tags - and _
    _using a x-defult for the hreflang tags, I will need to try and suppress the _
    _Yoast canonical tag so you can do this. Much depends on your approach and _
    what you think is best. So how do i know if using canonicals or x-default, i take it best simplest to leverage Yoast and hence not add canonicals to custom fields ? Isnt x-default just for indicating language selectors/redirector not specific to 1 region? So long as havnt got those then good to proceed with Yoasts generated canonicals ? Cheers dan

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0
  • ruislip18


    Hi All My Moz Crawl for my domain brings up 7 redirect chain errors. In each case, the original source is our old website. Strangely, only 7 of the pages show up as having redirect chains, as there are many more examples. We have added redirects from the old pages via the redirection tool in wordpress. The redirects themselves are working as expected. The redirects are from the old website, so the address http://www.oursite.co.uk/example.html to https:www.oursite.co.uk/new-page/ The chain seems to go from the original site and address to https and then onto the new domain. Screenshot link to the Moz Report https://imgur.com/a/eXRSFcD Any assistance here would be greatly appreciated. The hosts says there is nothing wrong with the.htaccess file, but I'm thinking this must be the issue. Many Thanks

    | ruislip18
    0
  • sumydesigns


    As of 9/12, my homepage has dropped out of the SERPs. If you google my business name (Sumy Designs) it shows other pages in my site, my Facebook page, etc, but not the homepage. My sitelinks are gone too. It IS still indexed, which you can see if you do site:sumydesigns.com I had been ranking for about 15 keywords that have all been lost since my homepage has disappeared. Here's what I know: There are no manual actions. The homepage is still being indexed, it's just not showing up for any keywords, even my brand Nothing has changed in terms of content, I have been a near daily blogger for several years There's no indication of a problem in search console The drop only appears to be affecting desktop searches, mobile search it still shows up which seems pretty weird. I would love any ideas as to what could be causing this disappearance.

    | sumydesigns
    0
  • vinaso96


    Hello This is Maqbul, from India. I have a jobs portal blog [ bharatrecruit.com]. It was getting around 50K to 100K Views a Day and made me $100 a day. But after a few months, my competitor made negative SEO with 12,000 Spammy backlinks. Suddenly my site was hit by Google and now it is getting 200 to 300 Pageviews a day. So the question is I did not disavow bad links for a long time like 3 to 4 months. Now I disavow all the bad links but the website is not ranking. Can we re-rank this site or create another website. Please reply must. None of the bloggers can answer this. Thanks, Regards Maqbul

    | vinaso96
    0
  • glassh0use


    I just built a new site for a client and the new site has pretty links like domain.com/about-us. The old site has been around for a VERY long time and had links like domain.com/aboutus. I want to do 301 redirects because from my understanding, it minimizes the negative SEO impact. But the client wants to keep the permalinks without the hyphens to match the old links. What is the best route, considering SEO? BTW, the site is still on the same domain. Thanks in advance for your help! Neik

    | glassh0use
    0
  • surf1234


    We are a global brand & have each regional site setup as a sub-domain. au.mybrand.com
    eu.mybrand.com
    us.mybrand.com I have noticed for branded searches in Australia the SERP is showing the regional site (au.mybrand.com) as the first listing = great BUT the sitelinks below are showing for the USA site us.mybrand.com = incorrect Any ideas how to resolve by marking up the code or in Search Console? Chris

    | surf1234
    0
  • dalapayal


    Hello everyone. My problem is SSL certificate... Send all links to google, after google shows https link no problem. But a few  minutes ago my home page link not have an SSL..
    Please check this page : https://www.bodrumtransfermarket.com Where do I make a mistake? Thanks for all...

    | dalapayal
    0
  • RaquelSaiz


    Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages,  example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel

    | RaquelSaiz
    0
  • remkoallertz


    We want to use some movement in our designs, charts etc. what format is the most SEO friendly?

    | remkoallertz
    1
  • MarketingRumors


    Hi there, I was reading this article: https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter as I am experiencing a lot of visitors from Ukraine and Germany as direct website visitors with only 1 pageview, a huge bounce rate (of course) and little time spend, so I am convinced its spam. In the article, it explains how to find the hostname to set up a filter but if I do so, I see that the highest amount of website visitors with this behavior come from the hostname that has my own domain name in it, so I can't exclude this. What should I do?

    | MarketingRumors
    0
  • Ideas-Collide


    We just migrated a site and built a redirect map for Site A to B. If there were old redirects made for site A that weren't pulled when pulling internal links for site A, do those also need to be redirected to site B to eliminate a Redirect chain? Cannot figure out why old links are still showing up, does it take a few days for google to figure out these are not real pages?

    | Ideas-Collide
    0
  • mfrgolfgti


    A client wanted to change their domain name, which we have now done. The site content itself is exactly the same. We put 301 redirect links in so that Google searchers would redirect from the old site to the new one. However Moz then said that it couldn't crawl the old domain because of the redirects and advised creating a brand new campaign for the new domain. We have done this but now Moz says that the domain authority of the new site is 2 (it was 14 on the old domain). Specifics are:
    old domain: https://ryemeadcleaning.co.uk
    new domain: https://ryemeadgroup.co.uk So basically it seems like we're starting again from scratch with the new domain and all the SEO from the old domain has been lost? Have we done it wrong?

    | mfrgolfgti
    0
  • bwb


    Hi, I have a site about to go online that users can run a free report that connects to their calendar app to get 12 months of statistics for their meetings, and then it shoots out a report. So they go to a.com/freereport and they get back a.zom/freereport/report/xxxxxx The content of those reports is different, but the structure is the same as it is a fun way to show off meeting stats to co-workers and friends. I don't see the point of Google indexing those as the traffic to those pages is going to be from social networks and viral, but I do want the backlink credit. Will I get backlink credit if I nofollow that folder? I am having a hard time deciding what to do seo wise and would love some thoughts and advice, what would you recommend? Do nothing fancy. Mark the report folder no follow. Try to do something with rel=cannonical to point those pages to the root page? Thoughts?

    | bwb
    0
  • DanWrightson


    About a year ago I rebuilt our website and changed our domain name. We rent villas in Tuscany, we used to be 'invitationtotuscany.com'. Then I started doing the same in Provence, and in the italian lakes, so i had further sites called invitationtoprovence.com and invitationtotheitalianlakes.com. But maintaining them was awkward and I wanted to have one site. So I put them all onto invitationto.com and did 301s from the old domains and sites. Now I'd dropped off organic search results and I've also realised that invitationto.com is far less clear as a business address. My inclination is to go back to invitationtotuscany.com  - Tuscany is still 80% of our business and have the other areas in there too - optimised for SEO for Provence etc. I'm being told its a really bad idea to change domain, 301 the old one, and then revert to the original domain. But I'm suffering anyway, so I wonder if I sjhouldn't just bite the bullet. A lot of my old good backlinks still point to invitationtotuscany.com (BBC, Sunday Times, etc) and the DA is 33 against 22 on the new one.. All help gratefully received! : )

    | DanWrightson
    0
  • nassim19


    Will transferring my blog https://www.techgape.com/ from blogger to wordpress benefit me economically?

    | nassim19
    1
  • RaquelSaiz


    Hi All, I have 9 different subdirectories for languages in the same domain example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages.  I know it is better to translate URLs, but we won't for now, because all the NON-ASCII characters.  But we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at least for the main domain URLs? www.example.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel

    | RaquelSaiz
    0
  • SEOCT


    Hi there, Can anyone answer whether having duplicate title tags on the blog listing page (e.g.https://blog.companyname.com/)  and the blog date archive pages (e.g.https://blog.companyname.com/archive/2017/10) is an issue? If so why is it an issue and what are the best practices of dealing with this? Thanks! John

    | SEOCT
    1
  • ruislip18


    Hi All Currently my site has a mixture of relative and absolute links for internal links. Could I just ask two questions? 1. Is it better for SEO for the site to feature only one method of internal links?
    2. If this is the case, is it better for the links to be absolute? I'm reaching the conclusion that I should review all internal links and set them to be absolute, but wanted to check. Including blog posts, this is a 70-80 page wordpress site, it wouldn't take too long to check the links Many Thanks

    | ruislip18
    0
  • moztabliq1


    my website will index good،and its top on some few keywords but its not top for many keywords . << some time it showed on results but will be hidden after some time >> what you thing??? url is https://android-apk.org

    | moztabliq1
    0
  • Tom3_15


    Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.

    | Tom3_15
    0
  • Dante_Alighieri


    Hi guys, During the link building strategy, which version should i prefer as a destination between: to the normal version (php page) to the Amp page of the Website to the Amp page of Google Cache The main doubt is between AMP of the website or standard Version. Does the canonical meta equals the situation or there is a better solution? Thank you so mutch!

    | Dante_Alighieri
    0
  • Webpresence


    Hi, Our clients are adamant that they have set up 301 permanent redirects on their websites, but when we check using Screaming Frog and various online HTTP status code checkers they are showing as 307 temporary redirects. Examples;
    http://www.lifestylelifts.co.uk/home-lifts/ 
    http://www.terrylifts.co.uk/ Again, the client says they are seeing 301 redirects. Why are we seeing 307's? Who is right? Very puzzling, any theories would be very much appreciated 🙂 Thanks in advance. Lee.

    | Webpresence
    0
  • JamesHancocks1


    I've looked in the robots.txt Tester and I can see 3 warnings: There is a 'syntax not understood' warning for each of these. XML Sitemaps:
    https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
    https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml How do I fix or reformat these to remove the warnings? Many thanks in advance.
    Jim

    | JamesHancocks1
    0

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