Struggling with Google Bot Blocks - Please help!
-
I own a site called www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au
After months and months we still have a serious issue with all pages having blocked URLs according to Google Webmaster Tools.
The 404 errors are returning a 200 header code according to the email below. Do you agree that the 404.php code should be changed? Can you do that please ?
The current state:
Google webmaster tools Index Status shows:
26,000 pages indexed
44,000 pages blocked by robots.
In late March, we implemented a change recommended by an SEO expert and he provided a new robots.txt file, advised that we should amend sitemap.xml and other changes. We implemented those changes and then setup a re-index of the site by google. The no of blocked URLs eventually reduced in May and June to 1,000 for a few days – but now the problem has rapidly returned.
The no of pages that are displayed in a google search request of www.google.com.au where the query was ‘site:wheretobuybeauty.com.au’ is 37,000:
This new site has been re-crawled over last 4 weeks.
About the site
This is a Linux php site and has the following:
55,000 URLs in sitemap.xml submitted successfully to webmaster tools
robots.txt file has been modified several times:
Firstly we had none
Then we created one but were advised that it needed to have this current content:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
-
No problem my friend. You are most welcome and here at Moz, you will not only be able to get almost all your SEO related queries addressed and solved, you will also learn a great deal about digital marketing. I highly recommend to every aspiring digital marketer to be active on a community like Moz and I bet they will be able to save a great deal of time and money as well. Wish you all the very best.
Regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Thanks Devanur - trying out everything you have suggested.
-
Hi Alex,
Sorry, if I were not clear in my previous post. I meant that in general pages with cleaner code will have an edge over similar pages with bad code when it comes to SEO.
Just an example: Page A has cleaner code compared to page B with all other SEO factors being equal. In a scenario like this, page B might not be favored by Google because of issues arising from bad code like page loading performance, poor rendering in browsers etc,.
The issue at hand might not be because your pages do not pass W3 Validation but its not a bad idea to have a cleaner code on your website
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hi Devanur
My understanding is that Google does not have a problem with invalid XHTML or pages that are not W3C accessible. Please see a comment on this at SEOMOZ:
-
Hi Alex,
I did a code validation check for the following URL:
It gave 238 Errors and 538 Warnings!!
Search engines like Google favor pages with cleaner code. So, I strongly recommend to have the code cleaned on the website.
Here you go for validation check:
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hi Alex,
If the underscores constitute only 4% of the total URLs, then this can be safely kept aside in purview of the current issue.
Same goes with the keyword repetition in the page titles and URLs. However, if it is possible for you to revisit your URL structure and have it like the following, you should go for it:
www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/<brand< a=""> name>/<product name="">, e.g.</product></brand<>
http://www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/floris/royal-arms-diamond-edition-eau-de-parfum-spray-100ml-34oz
Same thing with the Page titles also.
Now we are left with two things, the page performance and URL canonicalization. Please have them fixed as early as possible.
Also, I checked your IP address and you have gone for a shared hosting. This is not at all recommended if you are a serious online business owner. Your IP, 103.9.170.75 is being shared by at least 250 other domains that include some bad websites.
Though there are different views about IP bad neighborhood and its impact on SEO, I have always been an advocate of clean IP and recommended it to all my clients always. You can go in for a dedicated IP which is very cheap these days and better yet if you go for a VPS.
For more about this, please check out the "Oops, your IP is either dirty or virtual" section on the following page:
http://www.bruceclay.com/in/seo-tech-tips/techtips.htm
And also, this section, "A Strong Foundation for Your Site to Operate On" on the following page:
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/04/the-seo-bucket-list-3-things-to-do-before-your-site-dies/
Lastly, I checked your domain's DNS health and here you go for the results:
http://intodns.com/wheretobuybeauty.com.au
Though these might not be causing the current issue, its good to sort everything as we should not leave any stone unturned in making our website a better one out there.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hey Devanur
please see our responses below:
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the info. Here are few issues that I observed with the website and I am very confident that if you can address and fix these, you should come out of the issue with flying colors:
1. URL canonicalization issue: Both the www and non-www versions of your website URLs return an HTTP header status code 200. You should ideally make all the non-www URLs to be redirected to their respective www versions via a 301 permanent redirection immediately.
**Response: We are asking the developer to correct this. **
2. Inconsistent URL structure: Your website is still using 'underscrores (_) in the URLs as word separators. There are underscores along with the recommended hyphens (-). This inconsistent usage can sometimes lead to issues. So please replace all the underscores with hyphens.
Response: This problem only occurs in a few pages where special characters have been replaced with underscores – probably in 4% of product pages. I can’t see that this has an impact on the SEO?
3. Google PageSpeed check: When I ran Google PageSpeed test on some of the URLs from your website along with the ones that you gave, I found the score varying between, 28 and 60. Please look at the recommendations that the PageSpeed tool gives and try to address the issues (especially the ones like, "Reduce blocking resources". For more: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rtt#PreferAsyncResources)
I suggest you to please run Google PageSpeed check for some of the URLs.
Note: The URLs from your website that are present in the Google's index may also give similar issues when run through PageSpeed test. This should not make you not addressing these issues.
Response: We will ask the developers to improve performance specifically with the highest value things that are showing up in Google PageSpeed check.
4. Heavy pages leading to higher page loading times and response times:
Many of the pages that I checked are more than 1.3 MB in size which is very huge.This can be a really big problem most of the times that will not only impacts your website from search engines' perspective but also leads to bad user experience which ultimately affects the SEO of your website. You can use tools like gtmetrix.com and fix the issues shown by them.
Response: We will ask the developers to improve performance specifically with the highest value things that are showing up in gtmetrix.com suggestions.
5. Repetition of keywords or phrases in page titles and URLs:
This issue might look like an over optimization effort and should be fixed as early as possible.
For example: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/acqua-di-parma/acqua-di-parma-acqua-di-parma-collezione-barbiere-shaving-cream-75ml_25oz
If you look at the above page, the phrase, 'acqua-di-parma' is present twice in both the URL and page title. This is something that you need to review seriously as it looks like keyword repetition that is not good from an SEO stand point.
Response: This occurs with approx 300 product pages out of 40,000 so a very small percentage. We will clean this up when we update our data. I can’t see that this has any impact on SEO considering the small no? Note however that every product page is constructed as follows:
http://www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/floris/floris-royal-arms-diamond-edition-eau-de-parfum-spray-100ml_34oz
Is there some risk that this will look like over optimisation?
By the way, your robots.txt file is clean and it should not be causing these issues.
Please have the issues mentioned above as soon as possible and you should be out of the woods soon after that.
I wish you good luck Alex.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the info. Here are few issues that I observed with the website and I am very confident that if you can address and fix these, you should come out of the issue with flying colors:
1. URL canonicalization issue: Both the www and non-www versions of your website URLs return an HTTP header status code 200. You should ideally make all the non-www URLs to be redirected to their respective www versions via a 301 permanent redirection immediately.
2. Inconsistent URL structure: Your website is still using 'underscrores (_) in the URLs as word separators. There are underscores along with the recommended hyphens (-). This inconsistent usage can sometimes lead to issues. So please replace all the underscores with hyphens.
3. Google PageSpeed check: When I ran Google PageSpeed test on some of the URLs from your website along with the ones that you gave, I found the score varying between, 28 and 60. Please look at the recommendations that the PageSpeed tool gives and try to address the issues (especially the ones like, "Reduce blocking resources". For more: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rtt#PreferAsyncResources)
I suggest you to please run Google PageSpeed check for some of the URLs.
Note: The URLs from your website that are present in the Google's index may also give similar issues when run through PageSpeed test. This should not make you not addressing these issues.
4. Heavy pages leading to higher page loading times and response times:
Many of the pages that I checked are more than 1.3 MB in size which is very huge.This can be a really big problem most of the times that not only impacts your website from search engines' perspective but also leads to bad user experience which ultimately affects the SEO of your website. You can use tools like gtmetrix.com and fix the issues shown by them.
5. Repetition of keywords or phrases in page titles and URLs:
This issue might look like an over optimization effort and should be fixed as early as possible.
For example: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/acqua-di-parma/acqua-di-parma-acqua-di-parma-collezione-barbiere-shaving-cream-75ml_25oz
It could have been like: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/acqua-di-parma/collezione-barbiere-shaving-cream-75ml-25oz
If you look at the above page, the phrase, 'acqua-di-parma' is present twice in both the URL and page title. This is something that you need to review seriously as it looks like keyword repetition that is not good from an SEO stand point.
By the way, your robots.txt file is clean and it should not be causing these issues.
Please have the issues mentioned above as soon as possible and you should be out of the woods soon after that.
I wish you good luck Alex.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
-
Thanks Devanur
I put this to my partners and he said he is addressing it but that the main issue still remains.
This is the critical issue where there are only a few pages visible to google search as almost all are blocked by the google bot. I am re-stating the problem in this email for you.
Can you please take a look at the whole problem and see if you can see what is causing this.
Is robots.txt causing this? It is the only change that we have made and at one point the problem was corrected but has now returned. I have read everything that I can about robots.txt on the google site and in forums.
Here are two examples (out of 44,000) that are blocked. It is easy to find other examples – simply test any of the product pages – only 200 out of 44,000 return any result.
Try searching using www.google.com.au and using the search query
Abercrombie & Fitch 1892 Cobalt Eau De Cologne Spray 50ml/1.7oz site:wheretobuybeauty.com.au
Second example:
Try searching using:
Acqua Di Parma Collezione Barbiere Shaving Cream 75ml/2.5oz site:wheretobuybeauty.com.au
The current state:
Google webmaster tools Index Status shows:
26,000 pages indexed
44,000 pages blocked by robots.
In late March, we implemented a change recommended by an SEO expert Harmeen and he provided a new robots.txt file, advised that we should amend sitemap.xml and other changes. We implemented those changes and then setup a re-index of the site by google. The no of blocked URLs eventually reduced in May and June to 1,000 for a few days – but now the problem has rapidly returned.
This new site has been re-crawled over last 4 weeks.
About the site
55,000 URLs in sitemap.xml submitted successfully to webmaster tools
robots.txt file has been modified several times:
Firstly we had none, then we created one but were advised that it needed to have this current content:
“User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/sitemap.xml”
I put this into robots.txt but was then advised yesterday that there should be no blank line between these lines and I removed them yesterday.
-
Hi Alex,
Without diving in to the issue of increased number of 404 errors being reported by Webmaster tools account, let us first look at the core issue where, 404 pages (non-existing resources) that return an HTTP header status code 200. These are called, 'soft 404 errors'. Ideally all the non-existing resources on the website should return an HTTP header status code 404 or 410 as per the situation and not a status 200 which is very confusing for search engines and a bad practice. This should be fixed immediately. Please have all such pages return 404 and not 200 as soon as possible.
Here you go for more about the soft 404 errors:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708?hl=en
and here to know more about when to return a 404 status code:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
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
-
Why Google changed our page-title suddenly which has been same for years
Hi all, I know Google shows a different page titles. Happens when over optimised or when we copied competitors page title. But we did neither. Suddenly Google changed our homepage page title in search results. Our page title suffix "brand name" has been moved to beginning. Our page title is still for years.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Ecommerce SEO help
Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Is there any way to prevent Google from using structured data on specific pages?
I've noticed that Google is now serving what looks like host-specific video cards on mobile for our site. Is there any way to control which videos are included in these lists without removing the structured data on those clip pages or user pages? We don't want to noindex those pages but we don't want content from those pages to appear as video cards. 1kzPW
Algorithm Updates | | Garrett570 -
Google update January 2015
Hello, In January 2015, google changed its European Algorithm. The change decreased the ranking of some of our keywords but not all. See article for more evidence in google changing its algorithm. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-maybe-19760.html The biggest change was the keyword phrase ‘Wholesale Silver Jewellery’ which we ranked 1 in SERP, but now we’re nowhere to be seen. However, the change didn’t affect our keyword phrase ‘Wholesale Jewellery Silver’, ’Wholesale Silver’ and ‘Wholesale Jewellery. We’ve been through our data and see that all of our ’Silver Jewellery’ keyword phrases are no longer showing in the SERP. Further research has shown that our competitors were also dropped down the rankings for the same keyword phrase. Our question is: Why has this update affected certain keyword phrases, such as ‘silver jewellery’ but not ‘jewellery silver’ and how should we over come this? Additional Information
Algorithm Updates | | SilverStar1
If you type in our company name ‘Mainly Silver’ or ‘mainlysilver’ were still showing in SERP, however if you type ‘mainlysilver jewellery’ we’re no where to be found. We’ve even checked ‘site:mainlysilver.co.uk silver jewellery’ in google search and it returns with ‘no results found’. If you switch the keyword phrase, all our web pages are showing up Our website is - www.mainlysilver.co.uk0 -
A web audit for web traffic? Need answers please..
Hi, We are a PR agency based in Dubai and we produce a lot of web content. The website is build on ruby on rails and we have implemented keywords and SEO strategies but sadly the traffic pattern has not changed since the past three years. What surprised us today that we created a page 2-3 days ago for a client who is participating in Arab Health (a very prestigious healthcare event) and suddenly our page comes on top 3 on google.ae as well as google.com We are kind of convinced that there is something wrong with our code.. Do you think this could be a possibility? and the lack of change in the traffic pattern might not be an SEO issue but a code issue? What could be the possible reasons for this pattern? In such a scenario what would experts like you recommend we do? Do a SEO Audit? Web audit? code audit? hire a seo/ web / code consultant? Thanks - helpful answers are really appreciated and just btw if anyone feels they could professionally help us out of this mess, we are willing to work with him/her. Thanks in advance
Algorithm Updates | | LaythDajani0 -
Removing an old Google places listing for a newer version?
Hey there, I was wondering whether you could help me out on the following; One of our clients has a Google places listing that we created for their business but it appears to be being blocked - or at least conflicting - with an old listing. As such, Google appears to be showing the old listing with an outdated URL and company name - rather than the new one. Does anyone know how I can go about removing this listing or showing that the newer one is now more relevant? Unfortunately, I don't have the logins for the old places listing. Old listing; https://plus.google.com/105224923085379238289 New listing; https://plus.google.com/b/114641937407677713536/114641937407677713536
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve0 -
Will increased pagerank increase traffic from google?
I got notified that my domain went from a google pagerank of 3 to 4. When this happens, does google raise me in the searches which can then hopefully get me more traffic, or is it a worthless number. Maybe only google knows 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BrickPicker0 -
Why does Google say they have more URLs indexed for my site than they really do?
When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site. I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down. At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping! Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | CassisGroup0