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Category: Technical SEO

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


  • I'm looking to influence the sitelinks that appear under my main website. I found a Google article here about how to mark up the sitelinks: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/sitelinks-searchbox. Then I found another Google article about how the sitelinks are automated: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en. Which is it? Can I influence the sitelinks or not? And is there a maximum number? I can't find any up to date articles that are accurate, because most still reference the remove sitelinks tool in Google Search Console which is no longer available.

    | DigitalMarketingSEO
    0

  • Hi, I have an e-commerce site where I sell greeting cards. Products are under different categories (birthday, Christmas etc) with subcategories (for Mother, for Sister etc) and same product can be under 3 or 6 subcategories, for example: url: .../greeting-cards/Christmas/product1/for-mother
    url:.../greeting-cards/Christmas/product1/for-sister
    etc On the CMS I have one description record per each card (product1) with multiple subcategories attached that naturally creates URLs for subcategories. Moz system (and Google for sure) picks these urls (and content) as duplicated. 
    Any ideas how to solve this problem?
    Thank you very much!

    | jurginga
    0

  • Whenever I put our URL into markup helper, it returns not found 404.
    I've tried this for different pages, different categories and it all returns the same "not found 404" - I did also trial other websites to see if it was an issue with the markup helper but everything returned fine.
    Has anyone else had this issue or know how to resolve?

    | RayflexGroup
    0

  • Hi, need help. I notice Google always , on all my pages (about 30), index wrong title tag. If I try to use "my-keywords-here | my_company_name" Google always index "my_company_name: my-keywords-here" and can't figure why is that :(
    The problem is always only with "my-keywords-here | my_company_name".
    If I use "my-keywords-here - my_company_name" or "my-keywords-here my_company_name" (without sign | ) everything is fine
    Is anybody having any reasonable explanation?
    Is anybody having Joomla page with "my-keywords-here | my_company_name" in the title and have indexed by Google like that? one example is www.ferometal-prerada.hr Thank you

    | MirkoL
    1

  • Hey there, In the beginning of this year I've made complete site migration from Dutch language to English. All the old Dutch URL's were 301 redirected to the English versions. I naturally lost rankings for all Dutch keywords during the next month. On the website there is no Dutch content anymore. But what happened now is that five months later the website started to rank for the Dutch keywords again. The page snippets in SERP are in English but the URL's shown are in Dutch (ending with .nl) and whenever a user clicks on the snippet he/she gets 301 to the correct English version. Any ideas what could be the reason for re-ranking of non-existing pages which gets 301 in SERP?

    | benesmartin
    0

  • I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding   Disallow: /clkn/   in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?

    | UnbounceVan
    0

  • Hi there, at the bottom of my website's blog posts the rel=prev and rel=next tags are used on links that point to the previous article that was posted and the next article that was posted. Often these articles are not 'linked' in terms of their content or message. Is this the correct use of rel=next/prev and if not what are the possible negative effects. Many thanks.

    | Bee159
    0

  • According to Miles Rank tracking I have a keyword that is fluctuating by 5 or 6 positions in a 24-hour period every time it goes 10 down to 15 and back to 10 again with very little stopping point in between and keeps fluctuating like that. As far as I know the website is stable it uses Magento 1.9 and is a fixed category page. The page URL is relatively new as we migrated from an old site with a different URL structure I added 301s at server level from the old page URL to the new one. There is only two things I can think that can be the problem -
    1. Lack of links directly to the page (there is literally only one or two)
    2. Loading speed problem But I don't see any of these would cause a 5 position fluctuation regularly every day. But do you have any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

    | seoman10
    0

  • So, to cut a long story short, on our website we have a /product page that is very similar to our homepage and doesn't really serve much of a purpose. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the website and our directors want to get rid of it and focus our efforts on our homepage. Problem is, the /product page has a little bit of PA and links to other important pages on the website. I personally don't want to completely cut this page off. Would a 301 redirect to the homepage be a good option or would I be better off redirecting users to our course library page (Our course pages are what bring in most of our organic traffic)? Any help or other suggestions would be appreciated here! http://www.ihasco.co.uk/

    | iHasco
    1

  • This is a bit of an unusual structure and I'm having difficulty explaining the question so pardon my being a 'noob', haha. The website I'm working on has some content under Forums that is hosted on another domain. The main website is https://yournorthside.org.au/ and if you select under the main Nav > Forums > Lived Experience it will take you to https://yournorthside.saneforums.org/t5/Lived-Experience-Forum/ct-p/lived-experience-forum. So it's as if it's a subdomain. (notice even the appearance of the main menu changes, weird) Apparently, saneforums.org has a requirement for that content to be on that subdomain. So therefore it's not part of my sitemap and now crawled or indexed. My question is is this structure okay? What are the implications for SEO? Should I be looking to implement some type of no follow link or something? Or is it actually beneficial in terms of all their content gives us 'link juice'? Can you link me to any resources / articles that give further insight?

    | kelseyc
    0

  • Dear, Moz community We are an online advertising website / direcotry. Lately we discovered that our website due to technical error was in English rather than Spanish and was not ranking in the local Spanish google.es at all. After changing the main language we quickly climbed to 2nd page with rankings in google.es . **My question is on top of regular SEO (Link building, content, blog) what could we do to help us rank quicker in local google.es. ** The same keyword ranks in google.com as #3 but not in Spain. Should we put in the effort to work with local directories? Google MyBusiness is not an option as we are not a bricks and mortar business.

    | advertisingcloud
    0

  • [Spammy content removed by moderator.] Abdullah-Al-Asif-1.jpg?fit=177%2C177&ssl=1 tEjk20Fs_400x400.jpg

    | Abdullah-Al-Asif
    0

  • My site currently ranks for over 2000 of which 92 are in the number 1 position. Im very active with this site. My Main  keyword is a two word keyword ,I have never been below the position #30. Has always been at best 3rd and fourth page. I rank primarily for mostly 3 part keywords and 4 part keywords. However , I noticed about a month ago,The main keyword no longer showing up on serp tools .Moz included. At first i was getting wierd results using keyword tool .Not moz serp tool. I would get different result every time i checked it. When i tried to verify these results ,Only to   find my site not at the projected page and rank. After more than a month now this particular keyword is no where in site. Im still getting traffic fom all the other keywords but im a bit confused over this. I thought my main keyword was about to be on the bottom of the 2nd page but instead seems to be completely gone.

    | Yellow2000
    0

  • hi guys, I have had to reset my site from www to non-www. via htacces and this worked out just fine.However, the /blog WordPress section will not redirect to the non-www. I have changed the config.php to non-www. However, the /blog WordPress section will not redirect to the non-www. I have changed the config.php to non-www. Does anyone have an idea as to what I need to do to force the non-www in a folder installed blog http://5starweddingdirectory.com/ http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/blog/ Regards T

    | Taiger
    0

  • Hi, My webpage url is indexed in Google but don't show when searching the Main Keyword. How can i index it with keyword. It should show on any SERP when the keyword is searched. Any suggestions.

    | green.h
    1

  • We are changing our brand name & hence our URL should change as well What is the best way to do that keeping in view we donot want to take a hit on the existing traffic to our ecommerce site as we get a good revenue from the site. Can someone give me the best strategy to approach this or share there experience with a similar issue they have dealt earlier

    | sharp_instincts
    1

  • Hi Mozers, I want to keep the HTTP xml sitemape live on my http site to keep track of indexation during the HTTPS migration. I'm not sure if this is doable since once our tech. team forces the redirects every http page will become https. Any ideas? Thanks

    | znotes
    0

  • Hi support, I checked my search console. It said that 8344 pages from www.printcious.com/au/sitemap.xml are indexed by google. however, if i search for site:www.printcious.com/au it only returned me 79 results. See http://imgur.com/a/FUOY2 https://www.google.com/search?num=100&safe=off&biw=1366&bih=638&q=site%3Awww.printcious.com%2Fau&oq=site%3Awww.printcious.com%2Fau&gs_l=serp.3...109843.110225.0.110430.4.4.0.0.0.0.102.275.1j2.3.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..1.0.0.htlbSGrS8p8 Could you please advise why there is discrepancy? Thanks.

    | Printcious
    0

  • I'm getting a lot of local host referral traffic  from an unknown source.I want to get rid of this from my google analytics reports. I've tried this filter  - but the traffic still appears. Filtername = local host Filtertype= custom Exclude = filter field referral Filter pattern  (.?localhost.?) Any ideas ? thanks in advance.

    | ThomasErb
    0

  • Hi all, I have moved my site from http to https. I current have two profiles in Google Search Console: http://mysite.com
    http://www.mysite.com Do I need to set up the same but with https and if so, what do I then do with the http profiles? Do I delete them? Or just remove the sitemaps? Confused.

    | Bee159
    0

  • I have a few pages on my site that Google won't index, and I can't understand why. I've looked into possible issues with Robots, noindex, redirects, canonicals, and Search Console rules. I've got nothing. Example: I want this page to index https://tour.franchisebusinessreview.com/services/franchisee-satisfaction-surveys/ When I Google the full URL, I get results including the non-subdomain homepage, and various pages on the subdomain, including a child page of the page I want, but not the page itself. Any ideas? Thanks for the help!

    | ericstites
    0

  • A site I may take over has a plugin that adds .html to the pages. I searched online but I’ve only found how to add it rather than why to add it. Is it needed? If I remove it, I’ll have to be careful with SEO / indexed pages and redirects.  The site is running 3.x.x and 90% of the plugins have not been updated in over 5 years including this one. Before I update to 4.7.x, I am trying to understand the landscape (pros / cons) on why something could be used and if I need to find a suitable replacement for it.

    | acktivate
    2

  • A friend of mine runs a B&B and asked me to check his freshly built website to see if it was <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> compliant. 
    The B&B is based in France and he's targeting a UK and French audience. To do so, he built content in english and french under the same domain:
    https://www.la-besace.fr/ When I run a crawl through screamingfrog only the French content based URLs seem to come up and I am not sure why. Can anyone enlighten me please? To maximise his business local visibility my recommendation would be to build two different websites (1 FR and 1 .co.uk) , build content in the respective language version sites and do all the link building work in respective country sites. Do you think this is the best approach or should he stick with his current solution? Many thanks

    | coolhandluc
    1

  • Hi there, I can access the following site with http and https making me think that there will be a duplicate content issue. How can I work out if this is the case? http://ionadebarge.com https://ionadebarge.com Thanks.

    | Bee159
    1

  • Hi Moz Community, Recently our tech team has been taking steps to switch our site from http to https. The tech team has looked at all SEO redirect requirements and we're confident about this switch, we're not planning to roll anything out until a month from now. However, I recently noticed a few https versions of our landing pages showing up in search. We haven't pushed any changes out to production yet so this shouldn't be happening. Not all of the landing pages are https, only a select few and I can't see a pattern. This is messing up our GA and Search Console tracking since we haven't fully set up https tracking yet because we were not expecting some of these pages to change. HTTPS has always been supported on our site but never indexed so it's never shown up in the search results. I looked at our current site and it looks like landing page canonicals are already pointing to their https version, this may be the problem. Anyone have any other ideas?

    | znotes
    0

  • We have been using this plugin for years: https://wordpress.org/plugins/ziplist-recipe-plugin/ and it appears that it's causing us serious problems in Google. So we're looking for either a new plugin or possible directions on if we should custom build an option into our site. Ultimately we're looking for the best setup for the Recipes on our site to obtain a Featured Snippet. Thank you!

    | FabulesslyFrugal
    0

  • Our site recently switched from http to https. If you type in the http://www.websitename.com then it will automatically go to https://www.websitename.com ... my question is... do I still need to create a redirect in the htaccess file to ensure we don't lose all the links currently pointing to the http version of the website?

    | ninel_P
    0

  • Buzzsumo charge and not sure it's worth it. didn't find Quora helpful. Any others?

    | SwanseaMedicine
    2

  • Client wants to change URL structure from underscores to hyphens - reason for doing this is a cosmetic move. What is the risk of changing underscores to hyphens for URLs that  that have been around since 2012 and have a lot of keywords ranking in the top 5 in the SERPS? When the created the site - they structured the URL using dashes and underscores. Here is an example of what an URL looks like: /programs-degrees**/clinical-psychology/clinical_phd_kansas****-city****/** *This page ranks for many high volume keywords in the top 5 of the SERPS. I have started to compile a list on why the URL should not be changed... Building trust and authority from scratch 301 redirects do not pass 100% of the link juice 301 redirecting from underscored to hyphenated versions of the same content is an unnecessary risk to some of that link equity. Good chance rankings/traffic will drop because of the URL change

    | The-frank-Agency
    0

  • A client previously had their most important landing page at domain.com/example.htm They carried out the sort of link building that was commonplace a few years back (exact match anchors, paid blog links etc) targeting this URL, but they also got a bunch of legitimate decent quality links here. I believe they may have had a number of issues when link quality algo updates were rolled out, so rather than try and get links removed and go through the disavow process they instead decided to abandon this URL, let it 404 and start afresh at domain.com/example.html - updating all internal navigation, XML sitemaps etc. So fast forward to today. What is the best practice for this URL these days do we think? Is it now possible to 301 domain.com/example.htm > domain.com/example.html and recover whatever value may be left here? The argument for not doing so may be that you could pass over the negative metrics associated with the old URL, but would this not be handled by the real-time penguin update and the poor links just devalued rather than actually harming? And could this just be tested - i.e. add in the 301, monitor the impact and if things don't go the way we'd want then just remove the 301 again? Would be keen to get a few opinions on this. TIA

    | Salience_Search_Marketing
    0

  • Hello, My client had purchased a few domains and 301 re-directed them, pointing to our main website. As far as I am aware the 'empty domains' are brand related but no content has ever been displayed on them, and I doubt they have much authority. The issue here is that we took a dive in ranking for our main keyword, I had a look on ahrefs and found the below: | www.empty-domain/our-keyword | 30 | 19 | 1 | fb 0
    G+ 0
    in 4 | REDIRECT 301 TO www.main-domain/our-keyword | 8 Feb '175 d | The ranking dip happened at the same time as the re-direct was re-discovered / re-crawled. Could the 'empty' URL in question been causing us any issues? I understand that this is terrible practice for 301 redirects, I was hoping someone in the community could shed light on any possible solution for this.

    | SO_UK
    0

  • Hi all, When I try to crawl a website, I got next error message: "java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal cookie name" For the moment, I found next explanation: The errors indicate that one of the web servers within the same cookie domain as the server is setting a cookie for your domain with the name "path", as well as another cookie with the name "domain" Does anyone has experience with this problem, knows what it means and knows how to solve it? Thanks in advance! Jens

    | WeAreDigital_BE
    0

  • Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.

    | gheh2013
    0

  • Hello! I have a recipe website with over 1000 posts. Currently I have the month and year in the permalink that everyone is hinting off to me is bad. On the same front people tell me if I change the permalinks to just the post name it's going to significantly slow down my site. I'm torn on this one about changing. From Google's standpoint is it better to change to the post name and if so should I be fearing I'm going to run into trouble with the change? Any suggestions you have would be appreciated. Thanks!!!

    | Rich-DC
    1

  • I have a Wordpress site and we are using WPML for making it bilingual. The domain is: https://www.designerfreelance.net and for Spanish https://www.designerfreelance.net/es Do I have to add to Google search console the /es version? And the no www: https://www.designerfreelance.net https://www.designerfreelance.net/es https://designerfreelance.net https://designerfreelance.net/es and do I have to add the non ssl version? http://www.designerfreelance.net http://www.designerfreelance.net/es http://designerfreelance.net http://designerfreelance.net/es Thanks

    | Trazo
    0

  • I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags   ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem.  My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS.  The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles.  It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles.   So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?

    | Prop65
    0

  • Hi Moz Community, I am launching a series of new e-commerce websites and wanted to know before I started the content writing what are the TOP 3 strategy/research practices and techniques I should be doing before building my website? Bonus points for those who can give me a Top 5! Thanks,
    Luca

    | xlucax
    0

  • Client has an ecommerce website on Adobe Business Catalyst and they are currently not able to move websites onto https. They have announced this won't be available until late June. What are the expected implications of this in terms of site visibility and conversions etc?

    | Kerry_Jones
    0

  • Hi I notice today that a few of my clients GSC profiles are devoid of link data (that did have before) Anyone know if this is a bug with Google or other potential issue ? All Best
    Dan Links to Your Site | Total links |
    | No data available. | | Who links the most No data available. |

    | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • Hi, I have a Product Page, say www.example.com/product-title/.
    Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title/ I want to change its URL to www.example.com/product-title-2/
    Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title-2/
    Can't do 301 Redirect. Is SEO Juice passed from www.example.com/product-title/ to www.example.com/product-title-2/ ? Thanks,

    | viatrading1
    0

  • Hi, We have moved one of our domain https://www.mycity4kids.com/ in angular js and after that, i observed the major drop in the number of indexed pages. I crosschecked the coding and other important parameters but didn't find any major issue. What could be the reason behind the drop?

    | ResultFirst
    0

  • We'll be uploading a sitemap to google search console for a new site.  We have ~70-80 static pages that don't really chance much (some may change as we modify a couple pages over the course of the year).  But we have a separate blog on the site which we will be adding content to frequently. How can I set up the sitemap to make sure that "future" blog posts will get picked up and indexed. I used a sitemap generator and it picked up the first blog post that's on the site, but am wondering what happens with future ones?  I don't want to resubmit a new sitemap each time that has a link to a new blog post we posted.

    | vikasnwu
    0

  • Hi everyone, A user is complaining that her name is appearing in google search through our job ads site, so I removed such ads through Search Console, but the problem is not the ads anymore but our internal search results. The ads are no longer live but our searches has been indexed by google back then, We have been manually taking over 500 pages that included such name but more and more keep coming through pagination, we haven't found a pattern yet so pretty much any search result might have contained such name. We might get some legal issues here, did you guys got into anything similar before? We have just set some rules so that this doesn't happen again, but still can't find a way to deal with this one. Thanks in advance. PD: Not sure if this is the right category to fit it.

    | JoaoCJ
    0

  • When I searched for "mapping software", a carousel of images which displayed a variety of different companies appeared above the results list. Does anyone know what this is and how you go about getting your company into this carousel? The attached image displays the carousel. gRjF1

    | eSpatial
    0

  • I am looking forward to create a solid link building campaign for my affiliate blog. But, what I want is completely GENUINE and effective link building. Could anyone please suggest what strategies should I opt for. I am planning to get Guest Blogging done? But, is it effective anymore. I have read so much about companies posting on Private networks.
    Are there actually companies out there that actually outreach blogs? it would be helpful if somebody could refer based upon personal experience. Much Appreciated!

    | scott_eastman
    1

  • Hello Team, I have a post on my blog which was ranking on #1 in SERP. I always tried to update it with new content.On 31-Mar-2017, I made a big update in it. Like, it was a list of 20 tips and I made it to 50+. I thought it will help me to increase it's CTR. And, I changed its URL and redirect old one to new one.But when I checked today, it was totally disappeared from SERP 😞 it's nowhere. But it is indexed I have checked but not ranking now. I did this thing (Content Upgrade) before and it always gave good results but I don't know what happened now.Any suggestions or help?Old URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2015/12/21-useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/New URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2017/03/useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/-With love and respect,Puneet Gogia

    | ManAPR
    0

  • We recently launched a new site that doesn't have any ads, but in Webmaster Tools under "Fetch as Google" under the rendering of the page I see: Googlebot couldn't get all resources for this page. Here's a list: URL Type Reason Severity https://static.doubleclick.net/instream/ad_status.js Script Blocked Low robots.txt https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/id AJAX Blocked Low robots.txt Not sure where that would be coming from as we don't have any ads running on our site? Also, it's stating the the fetch is a "partial" fetch. Any insight is appreciated.

    | vikasnwu
    0

  • Hello Mozers I'm just checking whether it is good practice to 301 the main homepage url to its https version.  Will this have any detrimental effect on ranking and DA?

    | Catherine_Selectaglaze
    0

  • I have a client site with 200+ landing pages. We implemented AMP and many of the pages lost a lot of key elements including, sidebars, Calls to Action and footers. Our developer claims that we need to customize each of the 200+ pages for AMP to show those things (don't 100% believe him). So the questions are: a. How important is AMP? if we dump AMP will that hurt us? The site is already mobile friendly and clean, loads fast. 
    b.Does it sound fishy that he says each page needs to be cusotomized to show sidebar, footer content, CTAs?

    | dk7
    0

  • Hey Moz Community We are running 4 domains at the moment. www.rapturecamps.com www.surfcamp.travel www.surfcampbali.com www.surfcampinportugal.com We started of our business with 1. after a view years in business we got the option to buy the other 3 domains which have ranked quite well with certain keywords. As its quite allot of work maintaining all these websites with two languages, we where thinking of actually moving number 2, 3 ,4 all to number 1. All domains receive still some good rankings as well as daily hits. So we kinda like would like to keep the SEO Juice. Therefore we where researching for some time what would be the best practice todo so. For us there are two possible options We go trough all posts/pages on the domain 2,3,4 and copy the content over to domain 1. After thats done we create 301 redirects on the domains 2,3,4 linking them back to domain 1 posts/pages. We do do so by manually adding the 301's into the htaccess file, so we are able to delete the Wordpress installations. Our we just copy the Pages/Posts from the domains 2,3,4 to the domain 1 and then kill the 2,3,4 domains afterwords, and let google index these Pages/Posts on the new domain. This way we think we would loose the whole SEO Juice from the old domains. The reason we are asking this one here, we have been reading that this method could lead to red flags at google if we redirect to much Pages/Post back to Domain 1. Hopefully someone here can help us answer that question.

    | 5Gates
    0

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