1st Campaign - Advice please.
-
We have just run our first campaign for our site and have found over 5,335 errors!
It would appear that the majority of which are where the crawl has duplicated the product page with the "write a review - Tell a friend page"...hence a large number of errors.
In addition we also have over 5,000 302 warnings for the following URL:
URL: http://www.collarandcuff.co.uk/index.php?_a=login&redir=/index.php?_a=viewCat&catId=105
Please bear in mind we are fairly new to this type of data....so go easy on us.
In short, will these errors have a significant bearing on our rankings etc and if so how do we rectify?
Many thanks.
Tony
-
Hi Tony,
If the "Sign In" form is an element included on the page that you set to rel=canonical, the other instances of the sign in form should be neutralized (in terms of triggering duplicate content errors).
Usually, something as small as a sign in form doesn't constitute enough content to trigger the "duplicate" warning. The SE's algo has to account for certain elements that are useful on each page (for example, navigation bars). They are more concerned with people scraping large amounts of written content from other sites or just recycling large portions of their own site for SEO purposes.
-
Josh,
It appears that the errors may relate to the "Sign In" section of the page which for the record is available on every page of the site hence the number of errors. Would that have a bearing on the results and more importantly would that reduce the link juice?
-
Josh.
Thanks so much.
We use Cubecart v4...basic and i simple i know but it works for us.
Trust that helps.
Tony
-
Hi Tony,
Welcome to the world of SEO
I just spoke to someone who had a similar issue (duplicates due to user reviews). There is a relatively clean solution for this and it comes with a fancy name, "Canonicalization". Here is a great step by step for setting a page to rel="canonical".
Basically, you want to tell Google that there is one "source" page for all the duplicates.
Example:
You have a page for blue widgets. Users can review the blue widget, but each new review becomes a new page (problem). If you label the original product page as canonical, your duplicates will be ignored, and the Google bot will be much happier with your site
It's hard for me to tell how much the duplicate content is impacting your ranking right now, but after you use rel=canonical, you should see some major improvements within a couple weeks.
As for the 302 redirects...you want to fix this immediately! Here is the step by step for 301's.
There are some shortcuts to changing 301 redirects depending on your platform...do you happen to know what your development team is using? Changing 5,000 of these would be a little cumbersome to do by hand
Keep up the good work!
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
-
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
Sudden Rankings Drop for Good Keywords.. Did I Do This? Please Help :(
Hello, I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either. Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada). My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41). I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer) The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AliMac260 -
HTTP HTTPS Migration Gone Wrong - Please Help!
We have a large (25,000 Products) ecommerce website, and we did an HTTP=>HTTPS migration on 3/14/17, and our rankings went in the tank, but they are slowly coming back. We initially lost 80% of our organic traffic. We are currently down about 50%. Here are some of the issues. In retrospect, we may have been too aggressive in the move. We didn't post our old sitemaps on the new site until about 5 days into the move. We created a new HTTPS property in search console. Our redirects were 302, not 301 We also had some other redirect issues We changed our URL taxonomy from http://www.oursite.com/category-name.html to https://www.oursite.com/category-name (removed the .html) We changed our filters plugin. Proper canonicals were used, but the filters can generate N! canonical pages. I added some parameters (and posted to Search Console) and noindex for pages with multiple filter choices to cut down on our crawl budget yesterday. Here are some observations: Google is crawling like crazy. Since the move, 120,000+ pages per day. These are clearly the filtered pages, but they do have canonicals. Our old sitemaps got error messages "Roboted Out". When we test URLs in Google's robots.txt tester, they test fine. Very Odd. At this point, in search console
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GWMSEO
a. HTTPS Property has 23,000 pages indexed
b. HTTP Property has 7800 pages indexed
c. The crawl of our old category sitemap (852 categories) is still pending, and it was posted and submitted on Friday 3/17 Our average daily organic traffic in search console before the move was +/-5,800 clicks. The most recent Search Console had HTTP: 645 Clicks HTTPS: 2000 clicks. Our rank tracker shows a massive drop over 2 days, bottoming out, and then some recovery over the next 3 days. HTTP site is showing 500,000 backlinks. HTTPS is showing 23,000 backilinks. I am planning on resubmitting the old sitemaps today in an attempt to remap our redirects to 301s. Is this typical? Any ideas?0 -
Please provide solution for my website? Duplicate content Problem
I have 2 Domains with the same name with same content. How to solve that problem? Do I need to change the content from my main website. My Hosting is having different plans, but with the same features. So many pages were having the same content, and it is not possible to change the content, what is the solution for that? Please let me know how to solve that issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexa.Hill0 -
Titles and Metas disappeared?? Help please!
Hi everyone, Had a bit of a concern today, my weekly report has come through and my crawl issues have skyrockets by over 400! It says my metas and titles are missing but when I check through the site manually they seem to all still be there, I'm getting the same problem when I use screaming frog to crawl the site. I would really appreciate an explanation from someone as to why this is happening as I am quite confused about the situation. Thank you people Charlie Our website is www.homelogic.co.uk 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MintySEO0 -
Why this site is not hit by google penguin only experts answer please
Hello I know a site which has the following things and it is not hit by google penguin at all and is ranked on first page first link in google.com.pk it has 1.3K total backlinks its has 34 referring domains according to ahrefs the exact match keyword which is ranked in google.com.pk as first position is used in 1.2 K backlinks its DA is 18 and PA is 31 its citation flow is 19 trust flow is 13 targeted exact match keyword is present in Title and description also. Now tell me what is happening here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tanveerayakhan0 -
We will be switching our shopping cart platform from volusion to magento and really cautious / nervous about our rankings / seo stuff. any advice for anyone that has migrated stores, etc. these urls are years old, etc.
shopping cart platform switch and SEO. What do you suggest? What's the best way to ensure we keep rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan0 -
Any advice for setting up a Job Board?
Hi- I've got a big client who is setting up an in-house job board, ie. as part of their own site. They are a diverse company that offers a wide variety of roles across the whole country. The software they have chosen to use is not in any way SEO-focused. Therefore I'll need to recommend some modifications to the sitemap created by the web design team, within the time and budget available to me. At this stage I am thinking along the lines of determining the major geographical areas and job sectors and creating summary (landing) pages such as /jobs/california/electrical-engineering which contain any currently available roles for that geo+sector. I've tried to find guidance on job board SEO optimization or even case studies but haven't found much at all. This seems useful though: http://www.jobboardmount.com/cm/features/seo_dashboard Does anyone have any tips or links to useful information on job board SEO? Thanks in advance! Jules
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Juller1