GWT and html improvements
-
Hi all
I am dealing with duplicate content issues on webmaster tool but I still don't understand what's happening as the number of issues keeps changing. Last week the duplicate meta description were 232, then went down to 170 now they are back to 218.
Same story for duplicate meta title, 110, then 70 now 114. These ups and downs have been going on for a while and in the past two weeks I stopped changing things to see what would have happened.
Also the issues reported on GWT are different from the ones shown in the Crawl Diagnostic on Moz.
Furthermore, most URL's have been changed (more than a year ago) and 301 redirects have been implemented but Google doesn't seem to recognize them.
Could anyone help me with this?
Also can you suggest a tool to check redirects?
Cheers
Oscar
-
Thank you guys for your answers, I will look into it, and try to solve the problems.
I think many pages are self canonicalized, but I see that many URL's haven't been redirect to the new ones so I will start fixing the redirects.
In the top pages report though shows just the new URL's.
Anyway, I will keep you update on this as I am not too sure how to tackle this.
Thanks a lot.
Cheers
-
Had a few minutes and wanted to help out...
Google doesn't always index/crawl the same # of pages week over week, so this could be the cause of your indexing/report problem with regards to the differences you are seeing. As well, if you are working on the site and making changes, you should be seeing these numbers improve (depending on site size of course Enterprise sites might take more time to go through and fix up, so these numbers might look like they are staying at the same rate - if your site is huge
To help with your 301 issue - I would definitely look up and download SEO Screaming Frog. It's a great tool to use to identify potential problems on the site. Very easy to download and use. Might take some getting used too, but the learning curve isn't very hard. Once you use it a few times to help diagnose problems, or see things you are working on improve through multiple crawling. It will allow you to see some other things that might not be working and get to planning fixes there too
As well, make sure to review your .htaccess file and how you have written up your 301's. If you are using Apache, this is a great resource to help you along. Read that 301 related article here
Make sure to manually check all 301 redirects using the data/URL's from the SEO Screaming Frog tool. Type them in and visually see if you get redirected to the new page/URL. If you do, it's working correctly, and I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before Google fixes their index and displays the right URL or 301. You can also check this tool for verifying your 301 redirects using the old URL and see how it performs (here)
Hope some of this helps to get you off to working/testing and fixing! Keep me posted if you are having trouble or need someone to run a few tests from another location.
Cheers!
-
We had the same issue on one of our sites. Here is how I understand it after looking into it and talking to some other SEOs.
The duplicate content Title and Meta description seem to lag any 301 redirects or canonicals that you might implement. We went through a massive site update and had 301s in place for over a year with still "duplicates" showing up in GWT for old and new URLs. Just to be clear, we had the old URLs 301ing to the new ones for over a year.
What we found too, was that if you look into GWT under the top landing pages, we would have old URLs listed there too.
The solution was to put self canonicalizing links on all pages that were not canonicaled to another one. This cleaned thing up over the next month or so. I had checked my 301 redirects. I removed all links to old content on my site, etc.
What is still find are a few more "duplicates" in GWT. This happens on two types of URLs
-
We have to change a URL for some reason - we put in the 301. It takes a while for Google to pick that up and apply it to the duplicate content report. This is even when we see it update in the index pretty quick. As, I said, the duplicate report seems to lag other reports.
-
We still have some very old URLs that it has taken Google a while to "circle back" and check them, see the 301 and the self canonical and fix.
I am honestly flabbergasted at how Google is so slow about this and surprised. I have talked with a bunch of people just to make sure we are not doing anything wrong with our 301s etc. So, while I understand what is happening, and see it improving, I still dont have a good "why" this happens when technically, I have everything straight (as far as I know). The self canonical was the solution, but it seems that a 301 should be enough. I know there are still old links to old content out there, that is the one thing I cannot update, but not sure why.
It is almost like Google has an old sitemap it keeps crawling, but again, I have that cleared out in Google as well
If you double check all your stuff and if you find anything new, I would love to know!
Cheers!
-
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
-
Vertical pip in HTML
How is it considered by google at the end of a sentence ? New paragraph or not ? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
GWT Duplicate Content and Canonical Tag - Annoying
Hello everyone! I run an e-commerce site and I had some problems with duplicate meta descriptions for product pages. I implemented the rel=canonical in order to address this problem, but after more than a week the number of errors showing in google webmaster tools hasn't changed and the site has been crawled already three times since I put the rel canonical. I didn't change any description as each error regards a set of pages that are identical, same products, same descriptions just different length/colour. I am pretty sure the rel=canonical has been implemented correctly so I can't understand why I still have these errors coming up. Any suggestions? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Alexa Ranking - Improvement
Hey Guys, I have very decent traffic for my website but the Alexa rank is fluctuating very frequently.If the traffic is growing I cant see any changes and if the traffic dips down a bit then my rankings are going high 😞 Please suggest me what to do for getting an Alexa rank of **7000. **At present I have 9859 Hers ie my website link : http://www.teluguone.com/ Thanks in Advance Saikiran
Technical SEO | | logobite0 -
How do you mark a quote HTML wise?
Hi, As far as I know, in the past Italic was used to emphasize (similar use to Bold). Now I've seen people use Italic for quotations. Is that the correct thing to do for an entire paragraph or is it a problem for Google wise? Thanks
Technical SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Will invalid HTML code generated by WordPress affect SEO efforts?
Hi all, I'm new to SEOmoz and SEO in general really. I run a small but well regarded freelance website and graphic design business, and until very recently had an employee who handled the SEO side of things. I'm now looking to step into this role myself and hopefully learn the in's and out's of SEO. I've no doubt there will be much to learn, but the SEOmoz tools and it's community seem excellent and helpful. My question then is basically, if WordPress generated HTML code can have an effect on SEO, when it's reported as invalid by tools such as the W3C HTML validator? I'm used to hand coding the majority of my websites for clients, where creating valid HTML and CSS code is something I can do with relative ease. A new client however wants to use WordPress - for ease of updating the site content themselves. The client does however consider any potential SEO implications to be a very important factor in choosing a hand coded vs. WordPress based website. I am aware that WordPress itself is just a means of generating HTML code, and that to the search engines there is no difference between this and the hand coded websites I usually produce. However if WordPress is generating HTML that is being reported as invalid, would this make the search engines penalise the site? On a second note, will the search engines look negatively on a WordPress site where it is being used as a standard website, and the content may not be updated as frequently, as say, a blog? Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing your suggestions.
Technical SEO | | SavilleWolf0 -
Removing GWT Geo-Targeting
Hi, if I have a website in Google Webmaster Tools > Geographic Target set to United States, but I want to promote it in other specific countries, 1. Do I have to change the geo-targeting in GWT so it does not target a specific country? (discarding the option of adding sub-domain to GWT) 2. If I remove the GWT geo-targeting would it affect my rankings in the US? Thank you
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0 -
Converse.com - flash and html version of site... bad idea?
I have a questions regarding Converse.com. I realize this ecommerce site is needs a lot of seo help. There’s plenty of obvious low hanging seo fruit. On a high level, I see a very large SEO issue with the site architecture. The site is a full page flash experience that uses a # in the URL. The search engines pretty much see every flash page as the home page. To help with issue a HTML version of the site was created. Google crawls the Home Page - Converse.com http://www.converse.com Marimekko category page (flash version) http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko Marimekko category page (html version, need to have flash disabled) http://www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko Here is the example of the issue. This site has a great post featuring Helen Marimekko shoes http://www.coolmompicks.com/2011/03/finnish_foot_prints.php The post links to the flash Marimekko catagory page (http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko) as I would expect (ninety something percent of visitors to converse.com have the required flash plug in). So the flash page is getting the link back juice. But the flash page is invisible to google. When I search for “converse marimekko” in google, the marimekko landing page is not in the top 500 results. So I then searched for “converse.com marimekko” and see the HTML version of the landing page listed as the 4<sup>th</sup> organic result. The result has the html version of the page. When I click the link I get redirected to the flash Marimekko category page but if I do not have flash I go to the html category page. ----- Marimekko - Converse All Star Marimekko Price: $85, Jack Purcell Helen Marimekko Price: $75 ... www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko - Cached So my issues are… Is converse skating on thin SEO ice by having a HTML and flash version of their site/product pages? Do you think it’s a huge drag on seo rankings to have a large % of back links linking to flash pages when google is crawling the html pages? Any recommendations on to what to do about this? Thanks, SEOsurfer
Technical SEO | | seosurfer-2883190 -
What has to be changed to improve rank?
What has to be changed to improve rank? We had "hip hop jewelry" keyword for a while, position 4. All of the sudden it dropped for position 6 and never went back. We did some on page optimization and got couple of links here and there... but so far we still at position 6. Please suggest us what has to be done?
Technical SEO | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0