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
-
Validated pages on GSC displays 5x more pages than when performing site:domain.com?
Hi mozzers, When checking the coverage report on GSC I am seeing over 649,000 valid pages https://cl.ly/ae46ec25f494 but when performing site:domain.com I am only seeing 130,000 pages. Which one is more the source of truth especially I have checked some of these "valid" pages and noticed they're not even indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19860 -
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
301 Redirect / Canonical loop on home page?
Hi there, My client just launched a new site and the CMS requires that the home page goes to a subfolder - clientsite.com/store. Currently there is a redirect in place such that clientsite.com -> clientsite.com/store. However, I want clientsite.com to be the canonical version of the URL. What should I do in this case, given that there is now a loop between the redirected page and the canonical page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Cleaning up /index.html on home page
All, What is the best way to deal with a home page that has the /index.html at the end of it? 301 redirect to the .com home page? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0 -
Category Pages up - Product Pages down... what would help?
Hi I mentioned yesterday how one of our sites was losing rank on product pages. What steps do you take to improve the SERPS of product pages, in this case home/category/product is the tree. There isn't really any internal linking, except one link from the category page to each product, would setting up a host of internal links perhaps "similar products" linking them together be a place to start? How can I improve my ranking of these more deeply internal pages? Not just internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website. After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword. Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JingShack0 -
Noindex term for pages
I have a client who has a virtuemart site and all of the "ask a question on this product" had been indexed on google. I have managed to get a noindex meta tag into the ask a question page, will these be dropped from the index next time they are crawled and google sees the noindex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webseoservices0