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
-
Add trailing slash after removing .html extention
My website is non www ,it has wordpress in subdirectory and some static webpages in the root and other subdirectory 1. i want to remove .html extention from the webpages in the root and
Technical SEO | | Uber_
the others static webpages in subdirectory.
2. add slash at the end.
3. 301 redirect from non slash to url with slash. so it should be http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles/ and http://ghadaalsaman.com/en/poem-list.html to http://ghadaalsaman.com/en/poem-list/ the below code 1. working with non slash at the end **2. **redirect 301 url with slash to non here's my .htaccess <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /</ifmodule> #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://ghadaalsaman.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L] PS everything is ok with the wordpress , the problems with static pages only. Thanks in advanced0 -
Launch of improved site
Hi, Just want to ask you guys if i have missed something in my planning. We have done a migration from Ithemes Exchange to woocommerce. The complete migration are done on our dev server. It has an exakt setup as our live one. My plan is to change our live version with a backup from our migrated and finished site from our dev site. All of our product links will be intact with accept from some that we have combined in to new ones, the ones that are changed has been redirected with a 301. Will this way of launching our site effect our ranking/seo in some way? Thankful for any thoughts about this one! // Jonas
Technical SEO | | knubbz0 -
Removed .html - Now Get Duplicate Content
Hi there, I run a wordpress website and have removed the .html from my links. Moz has done a crawl and now a bunch of duplicated are coming up. Is there anything I need to do in perhaps my htaccess to help it along? Google appears to still be indexing the .html versions of my links
Technical SEO | | MrPenguin0 -
Ranking not improving
Our site is now 3 months old (although the domain is older) but rankings don't seem to be improving at all. We've got some good quality relevant links coming into the site, and the content is unique and often updated. Is there something holding the site back? Am I being impatient? the site is www.help-my-mobility.org Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
GWT crawl errors: How big a ranking issue?
For family reasons (child to look after) I can't keep a close eye on my SEO and SERPs. But from top 10 rankings in January for a dozen keywords I'm now not in top 80 results -- save one keyword for which I'm ~18-20.
Technical SEO | | Jeepster
Not a sitewide penalty: some of my internal pages are still ranking top 3 or so. In GWT, late March I received warning of a rise in server errors:
17 Server Errors/575 soft 404s/17 Not Founds/Access Denied 1/Others 4
I've also got 2 very old sitemaps (from two different ex-SEO firms) & I'm guessing about 75% of the links on there no longer exist. Q: Could all this be behind my calamitous SERPS drop? Or should I be devoting my -- limited -- time to improving my links?0 -
Different HTML based on resolution
Is it acceptable in terms of SEO to display different HTML based on a users resolution size? I feel I'm wasting space on my site catering for all the 1024 x 768ers
Technical SEO | | niallfred0 -
Using symbols in the html title of a webpage
If you a symbol in the title of a webpage will this dilute the keywords in the title
Technical SEO | | mickey11
thus making it rank worse in search engines here is an example <title><br /> Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> versus <title><br /> ▶ Black Shoe Polish<br /></title> will the extra symbols count as words and thus the dilute the effectiveness of the Black Shoe Polish keyword. sort of making like 4 words instead 3. By the way, The reason to use a symbol is to make it stand on in the search engine results0