We recently fixed a Meta Refresh that was affecting our home page - But something still seems wrong. Any suggestions?
-
We recently fixed a meta refresh issue on our home page. Our store URL:
http://www.ccisolutions.com had a meta refresh on it that was going to:
www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain
The meta refresh is now gone, however there still seem to be some problems:
- Our IT Director has not been successful in trying to make www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain 301 redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com - so I believe we now have a duplicate content issue
- If you look at both of these URLs in OSE, you will see that www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain is getting credit for almost all of the Internal Followed Links, while http://www.ccisolutions.com is getting all the credit for External Followed links. Why doesn't http://www.ccisolutions.com show the same number of Internal Followed Links?
I realize this is more of a developer/webmaster question and would be very appreciative of any suggestions or advice. Thanks!
-
Thanks again Keri. It feels so good to finally have this particular issue resolved. The company has been struggling with it for more than 5 years, but until I came along (lucky them, lol!) - they had no idea what was wrong or where to even begin fixing it. I do have a follow up question I am going to post regarding how Google views this sudden massic increase in links....
-
Don't forget to add processing time. The data from this latest update is from crawls of mid-September to mid-October, then it takes another bit of time to process.
...but in any case, so glad to hear the good news!
-
Hah! Funny coincidence Well, nonetheless, the problem seems to be resolved. Here's what's interesting Keri. The meta refresh was actually fixed on September 23rd, before last month's linkscape/OSE update. If the meta refresh was the only problem, our link profile would have shown correctly back then. This mean it was either our canonical tags, the breadcrumbs, or both that were contributing to the problem.
I'm just happy it's fixed! Yay!
-
Dana, just a quick note that it wasn't an instant recalculation on DA and PA. You happened to check right as we rolled out the new OSE index today (see the main blog for a post about that).
-
Well, you just aren't going to believe it. It all had to do with our breadcrumbs. The breadcrumb for the homepage was still using the old homepage URL (the one in use when we had a meta refresh happening). I had my IT director update it and check out what happened to our link profile in one day:
Total External Links: Before - 2,757 After - **4,311 **Total Internal Links: Befpre - 125 After - 3,221
Total Links: Before - 2,882 After - 7,532Our Domain Authority and Page Authority also both went up by 3 points instantly. I want to thank you for hanging in with me and helping me get to the root of what was wrong. People like you are what makes SEOMoz such a great forum!
Dana
-
Hi Streamline - Thanks for answering
Yes, here is a link to what I am seeing in OSE. It includes the old homepage URL, the new homepage URL, and several interior pages for reference. Be patient, it takes a bit to load (I had to refresh it because it hung when I tried just now)
See how the old homepage URL is showing 3,174 internal links, while the new one is only showing 125? We fixed the meta refresh on September 23, in addition to correcting all canonical tags and making them absolute. I can't figure out why the new home page URL isn't getting credited with those 3,174 internal links. What do you think?
-
Hmm... I just looked up the site in OSE and I see that ccisolutions.com is being credited with the most internal links and I don't see the other URL anywhere in the top pages. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.ccisolutions.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0
Are you seeing the same thing? If not, can you let me know what you are seeing and where you are seeing it?
I see that you do have the rel=canonical tag set up correctly so even if you left the breadcrumb link to the old URL, eventually it shouldn't matter. However, if you're able to, I would recommend changing that breadcrumb link to point to the correct URL just to keep everything consistent.
-
Hi Streamline. The issue persists. I did discover (completely by accident) that the breadcrumb URL in our source code is the old home page URL. I've attached a screenshot. Could this be the reason we are not seeing those internal links being credited to the new homepage URL?
-
It will take some time before OSE updates its index. Let me know if you don't notice any changes once OSE has been updated.
-
Thanks so much for your comments and suggestions. I just checked and it looks like the canonical tag you suggested is in place. Still, OSE is showing our linking structure split between these two URLs. Is this just an idiosyncracy of OSE that I shouldn't worry about, or is Googlebot going to see the same thing and credit nearly all of our Internal Links to one URL and all of External links to the other? Isn't this eroding the potential Page Authority of both pages?
Because our homepage URL was this:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain
for a very long time. I am very concerned about that old URL not passing page authority ("link juice" - I hate that term, but just trying to be clear) to www.ccisolutions.com If I understand correctly, a 301-redirect will pass most of the page authority, but a canonical tag will not pass any.
Here is what OSE is seeing when comparing all possible versions of our homepage URL:
I thought fixing the meta refresh would fix the problem and show all the links credited to our desired URL www.ccisolutions.com ...but that doesn't appear to be what's happening.
Thoughts?
-
Hi Dana,
If all you are doing is adding the canonical tag, then it may take some time before Google picks up on it. Probably looking at a few days or maybe a week or so, but you should definitely notice an improvement (if you have in fact seen a negative impact in your rankings/organic traffic due to the meta refresh/duplicate content issue). My suggestion is to simply add the canonical tag and keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to see if you notice any changes. I'll keep an eye on this thread in case you have any more issues or questions.
-
I never thought about the TTL being an issue, but I suppose it could be? It's certainly a bone of contention between marketing and IT, I'd love to have a solid reason to get away from our whole "24-hour wait to see what you messed up" model.
I thought about your post when I put up this question. I even looked for "Webmaster" in the categories in hopes SEOMoz had added it. This is definitely a Webmaster issue. Thanks PolarKing!
-
Dana
I hope Seomoz adds the Webmaster catagory soon like you posted on my question a few days ago
Does the TTL have anything to do with it not working yet? I had a big issue with TTL and do not want you to have to go through what I did.
Have a great day otherwise
-
Thanks Streamline - I am going to have him try your suggestion. Since our site does not update immediately, we won't start seeing the redirect work until tomorrow morning. Is this something where we should see the effects right away, or will it take time for Google to recognize the change?
-
1. I'm betting you are having infinite loop issues when you are trying to add the redirect, am I right? If so, that's because both versions of the URL are both hitting the same page. Anyways, to fix this, simply add "<rel="canonical" href="<a href=" http:="" www.ccisolutions.com="" "="">http://www.ccisolutions.com/" /> to the head of both URLs to tell the search engines to only count that version of the URL in its index so you won't have a problem with duplicate content.</rel="canonical">
2. The canonical tag should fix this issue as well.
Hope that helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Redirect to Home Page or Sub-Page?
What do you think about 301 redirect of good expired domain to a sub-page instead of the home page? I'm doing this so I don't hurt my brand name. Let me know your thoughts please. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuanWork0 -
Menu interlinking Pages
Hello, I have my most important pages in my menu. Those pages are present on all my pages because they are on the menu. Are those pages considered to be linking between each other because they are in the menu or should I create links between those pages in my text if I want them to link with each other ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
Why does Google display the home page rather than a page which is better optimised to answer the query?
I have a page which (I believe) is well optimised for a specific keyword (URL, title tag, meta description, H1, etc). yet Google chooses to display the home page instead of the page more suited to the search query. Why is Google doing this and what can I do to stop it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
What is the impact of an off-topic page to other pages on the site?
We are working with a client who has one irrelevant, off-topic post ranking incredibly well and driving a lot of traffic. However, none of the other pages on the site, that are relevant to this client's business, are ranking. Links are good and in-line with competitors for the various terms. Oddly, very few external links reference this off-topic post, most are to the home page. Local profile is also in-line with competitors, including reviews, categorization, geo-targeting, pictures, etc. No spam issues exist and no warnings in Google Search Console. The only thing that seems weird is this off-topic post but that could affect rankings on other pages of the site? Would removing that off-topic post potentially help increase traffic and rankings for the other more relevant pages of the site? Appreciate any and all help or ideas of where to go from here. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
How should I deal with this page?
Hey Mozzers, I was looking for a little guidance and advice regarding a couple of pages on my website. I have used 'shoes' for this example. I have the current structure Parent Category - Shoes Sub Categories - Blue Shoes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
Hard Shoes
Soft Shoes
Big Shoes etc Supporting Article - Different Types of Shoe and Their Uses There are about 12 subcategories in total - each one links back to the Parent Category with the keyword "Shoes". Every sub category has gone from ranking 50+ to 10-30th for its main keyword which is a good start and as I release supporting articles im sure each one will climb. I am happy with this. The Article ranks no1 for about 20 longtails terms around "different shoes". This page attracts around 60% of my websites traffic but we know this traffic will not convert as most are people and children looking for information only for educational purposes and are not looking to buy. Many are also looking for a type of product we dont sell. My issue is ranking for the primary category "Shoes" keyword. When i first made the changes we went from ranking nowhere to around 28th on the parent category page targeted at "Shoes". Whilst not fantastic this was good as gave us something to work off. However a few weeks later, the article page ranked 40th for this term and the main page dropped off the scale. Then another week some of the sub category pages ranked for it. And now none of my pages rank in the top 50 for it. I am fairly sure this is due to some cannibalisation - simply because of various pages ranking for it at different times.
I also think that additional content added by products on the sub category pages is giving them more content and making them rank better. The Page Itself
The Shoes page itself contains 400 good unique words, with the keyword mentioned 8 times including headings. There is an image at the top of the page with its title and alt text targeted towards the keyword. The 12 sub categories are linked to on the left navigation bar, and then again below the 400 words of content via a picture and text link. This added the keyword to the page another 18 or so times in the form of links to longtail subcaterogies. This could introduce a spam problem i guess but its in the form of nav bars or navigation tables and i understood this to be a necessary evil on eCommerce websites. There are no actual products linked from this page. - a problem? With all the basic SEO covered. All sub pages linking back to the parent category, the only solution I can think of is to add more content by Adding all shoes products to the shoe page as it currently only links out the the sub categories Merging the "Different Type of Shoe and Their Uses" article into the shoe page to make a super page and make the article pages less like to produce cannibalistic problems. However, by doing solution 2, I remove a page bringing in a lot of traffic. The traffic it brings in however is of very little use and inflates the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate of my whole site by significant figures. It also distorts other useful reports to track my other progress. I hope i have explained well enough, thanks for sticking with me this far, i havn't posted links due to a reluctance by the company so hopefully my example will suffice. As always thanks for any input.0 -
SEO structure question: Better to add similar (but distinct) content to multiple unique pages or make one unique page?
Not sure which approach would be more SEO ranking friendly? As we are a music store, we do instrument repairs on all instruments. Currently, I don't have much of any content about our repairs on our website... so I'm considering a couple different approaches of adding this content: Let's take Trumpet Repair for example: 1. I can auto write to the HTML body (say, at the end of the body) of our 20 Trumpets (each having their own page) we have for sale on our site, the verbiage of all repairs, services, rates, and other repair related detail. In my mind, the effect of this may be that: This added information does uniquely pertain to Trumpets only (excludes all other instrument repair info), which Google likes... but it would be duplicate Trumpet repair information over 20 pages.... which Google may not like? 2. Or I could auto write the repair details to the Trumpet's Category Page - either in the Body, Header, or Footer. This definitely reduces the redundancy of the repeating Trumpet repair info per Trumpet page, but it also reduces each Trumpet pages content depth... so I'm not sure which out weighs the other? 3. Write it to both category page & individual pages? Possibly valuable because the information is anchoring all around itself and supporting... or is that super duplication? 4. Of course, create a category dedicated to repairs then add a subcategory for each instrument and have the repair info there be completely unique to that page...- then in the body of each 20 Trumpets, tag an internal link to Trumpet Repair? Any suggestions greatly appreciated? Thanks, Kevin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kevin_McLeish0 -
YouTube Page
Hi All, I am new here but already I can see that SEOmoz is a great place for SEO 🙂 I need advice... We have one client that have 100.000 views per day on their YouTube channel! Now they have about 15.000 per day and ask us what we can do with SEO for their YouTube channel. Thanks for help! All The Best, Sanel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FighterSpirit0