What coding works for SEO and what coding doesn't?
-
Hi:
I recently learned about inline styles and that Google started penalizing sites for that in October. Then I was told that Wix and Flash don't work (or work well) either for SEO as the engines won't crawl them (I think). Does anyone know of a blog that goes over everything that doesn't work so that I could recognize it when I look at someone's code. Anyone know of such a resource?
Cheers,
Wes
-
Hi Mark:
Thanks very much for your note. I tried something similar the SEO Browser, and it shows you what the search engines see. Very useful.
Cheers, Wes.
-
The general rule of using HTML for everything is one that I would follow. If you're unsure if something is crawlable, try downloading the web developer plugin for chrome http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/. Then disable javascript and plugins and refresh the page. Any content that can't be seen then probably won't be seen by search engines either.
-
Hi Wesley,
I would recommend going over a couple of technical SEO audits you can find on the web. They give a clear insight in what SEOs are looking for when doing a technical audit for SEO. It mostly contains way more than only checking for Flash or Wix sites that hide or dont' display any content in their HTML.
-
Thanks very much, I'll definitely try the adwords and the cached versions.
Cheers,
wes
-
Basically a web page has to be crawlable. If an engine can't crawl it than you don't exist. SEO 101, use html for all text. Google has made strides to try to understand what sites are about but to keep it easy for crawlers use html.
As for a tool you can use googles adwords tool and add the url into "landing page" and see how some of the site gets crawled by a simple bot. You can also look at google cached versions of sites and look at the "text only" options, that should give you a good view of what the crawlers see.
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
-
New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO
New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?
Technical SEO | | DML-Tampa0 -
"Yet-to-be-translated" Duplicate Content: is rel='canonical' the answer?
Hi All, We have a partially internationalized site, some pages are translated while others have yet to be translated. Right now, when a page has not yet been translated we add an English-language page at the url https://our-website/:language/page-name and add a bar for users to the top of the page that simply says "Sorry, this page has not yet been translated". This is best for our users, but unfortunately it creates duplicate content, as we re-publish our English-language content a second time under a different url. When we have untranslated (i.e. duplicate) content I believe the best thing we can do is add which points to the English page. However here's my concern: someday we _will_translate/localize these pages, and therefore someday these links will _not _have duplicate content. I'm concerned that a long time of having rel='canonical' on these urls, if we suddenly change this, that these "recently translated, no longer pointing to cannonical='english' pages" will not be indexed properly. Is this a valid concern?
Technical SEO | | VectrLabs0 -
Trailing Slashes and SEO
Hi, We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine. We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done. I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Disallowing WP 'author' page archives
Hey Mozzers. I want to block my author archive pages, but not the primary page of each author. For example, I want to keep /author/jbentz/ but get rid of /author/jbentz/page/4/. Can I do that in robots by using a * where the author name would be populated. ' So, basically... my robots file would include something like this... Disallow: /author/*/page/ Will this work for my intended goal... or will this just disallow all of my author pages?
Technical SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Why isn't my site not searchable from google?
I am having a hard time figuring out why is it that when I search for my website name, it didn't show up in google's search result? Here's a link to my site. I've been twiddling for days looking for answers in my google webmaster tools. Here's a link of the crawl stats from google webmaster tool. As you can see it is actually crawling some pages. However my looking at my indexed status, I am getting 0 as you can see here (http://cl.ly/image/3G1R1p0b3k1P). I've double checked for my robots.txt and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary there. I am not blocking anything. Any ideas why?
Technical SEO | | herlamba0 -
SEO credit for subdomain blogs?
One of my clients is currently running a webstore through Volusions. They would like to add a blog to their website, but since Volusions doesn't currently support blogs on the same domain we would have to create a Wordpress blog and link it to a subdomain. (http://support.volusion.com/article/linking-your-blog-your-volusion-store) Using this method, will their primary website receive any SEO credit for the content being created on the blog or will it only count towards the subdomain? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CMSSolutions980 -
Can't find mistake in robots.txt
Hi all, we recently filled our robots.txt file to prevent some directories from crawling. Looks like: User-agent: * Disallow: /Views/ Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /routing/ Disallow: /Profiler/ Disallow: /LILLYPROFILER/ Disallow: /EventRweKompaktProfiler/ Disallow: /AccessIntProfiler/ Disallow: /KellyIntProfiler/ Disallow: /lilly/ now, as Google Webmaster Tools hasn't updated our robots.txt yet, I checked our robots.txt in some ckeckers. They tell me that the User agent: * contains an error. **Example:** **Line 1: Syntax error! Expected <field>:</field> <value></value> 1: User-agent: *** **`I checked other robots.txt written the same way --> they work,`** accordign to the checkers... **`Where the .... is the mistake???`** ```
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Site: search doesn't return homepage first
When searching for site:myclient.com their homepage doesn't appear first. I know some SEOs have reported this was a warning sign that there was a penalty. Here is what I've checked/found: Toolbar pagerank remains strong. Homepage is indexed. SEO traffic is falling, but its been gradually falling for a year now, mainly due to the client neglecting any type of marketing campaigns or link building, I believe. There was not a specific drop that could be tied to a penalty. Site remains well indexed. 62,742 of 63,021 URLs in the sitemap are indexed. Site is a large ecommerce site, so many pages are duplicate content (product descriptions). Homepage does rank #1 when searching for string of text present on the homepage. Nothing unusual in Google Webmaster Tools Search for myclient.com returns homepage with 6 expanded sitelinks under it. Google safe browsing check shows no malware. Anything else I should check?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0