Certain PHP Pages Not Showing In SERPs
-
Hi all,
You've all been so helpful so far, I'm hoping you can help me with our trickiest SEO question yet.
Last year we migrated 7 sites into one, going from flat html to Joomla. This went fine and although we saw a slight drop in traffic, it wasn't too bad.
Now however traffic has started to drop and we've been able to hone it down into a certain area of our website.
Each of the 7 sites had their own page with some php code that was fed products. These products were updated everyday and were are second most popular page on the sites aprt from the home page. These pages were found in Google no problem and were an essential resource for our site.
What we have found is these pages cannot be found at all, unless you type the full business name and product. If you just type the product and the location our customer is based in, we're no where, using the Moz tools it says we're not in the top 50 results. This is a bit of a shock since we used to be at least on the first page, usually quite high up.
I'm a little stumped as SEO wise these pages are technically better. They offer the same functionality but in a much more SEO friendly way.
I've asked our developer to check:
Nothing is being blocked in robots.txt
The pages are being indexed
There's no strange code errorsEssentially the pages can't be found even if we type the full title, for example 'customer's products in their town' to be found we have to type 'customer's products in their town and their full business name'.
The top third of the page is just html text, the bottom like I mentioned is PHP and is fed data from a database which is refreshed each morning.
I know our developer did some rel conical work but has assured me that's all working fine.
While I know it's a new website, we've owned the domain for a while so our domain authority isn't brand new and 0, we also have pages with worse page authority that show up on page 1 no problem, so I'm leaning towards something else might not be right.
Can anyone help me figure out why these pages are being indexed but not even found?
Thanks!
-
Like I said, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to diagnose this kind of problem without the URL.
Learn more about 301 redirects at http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection .
-
Thank you for your answer!
Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to give out the url at this stage.
Could you elaborate about the 301-redirects? Our developer set these up and asked us simply where the old urls would go on the new site.
Duplicate content - There are 2 or 3 ways to get to these pages which aren't showing in SERPs, our developer has set up a rel conical to avoid duplicate content but could there be an issue there?
I've asked our developer to look into old files from the static site, is there anything in particular I should be asking him to search for?
Thank you!
-
This sort of thing is very difficult to troubleshoot without the site URL and page in question. Feel free to message me privately, and I can take a look
There are so many variables that can be affected when you migrate sites, especially if you are combining multiple sites under a single domain name. You really need to perform a full technical audit after any kind of migration or redesign. Here are a few things that I would check right away.
- Were 301-redirects were set up properly? If they weren't, you may be losing the value of your backlinks.
- Are there any duplicate content problems created by Joomla?
- Was the information architecture or linking structure changed significantly in the process?
- Are there any files left on the server from the old static site that are still indexed by the search engines? (I found this recently during an audit.)
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
-
JSON-LD product page markup for multiple currencies?
I haven't found a working example of a single product page with one "Offer" in multiple "priceCurrency" and "price" We have product pages with a single product URL which will offer different prices in different currencies based on the user's IP. Some of the language of the page will be translated based on the IP (this will have href lang tag) but the URL will not change. (We're aware TLD is considered best practice, however, this is not an option at this time.) Is the best option to update the markup based on what the corresponding "country"? I'm uncertain how this may be handled by crawlers. Eg, For the product page https://www.example.com/product1 displaying USD "offers": {
Web Design | | sb1030
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "7.99"} For the product pagehttps://www.example.com/product1 displaying EUR "offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://www.example.com/product1",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
"availability": "InStock",
"priceCurrency": "EUR",
"price": "7.50"} Thanks for any input.0 -
Internally linked pages from different subdomain must be well optimised?
Hi all, We have guide/help pages from different subdomain (help.website.com). And we have linked these from 3rd hierarchy level pages of our website (website.com/folder1/topic2). But help.website sumdomain & pages are not well optimised. So, I am not sure linking these subdomain pages from our website pages hurts our rankings? Thanks,
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
What are the downsides and/or challenges to putting page paths (www.example.com/pagepath) on a different server?
Hi, Our company is organized into three different segments and our development team recently needed to switch a portion of the business to subdomain because they wanted to move to a different server platform. We are now seeing the impact of moving this segment of the business to a subdomain on the main domain. SEO is hurting and our MOZ score has dropped significantly. One fix they are debating is moving everything back to one domain, but place segments of the business on different page paths and hosting specific paths on different servers. I.e. the main domain could be www.example.com hosted in one location and then www.example.com/segment1 would be hosted on a different server. They are hoping to accomplish this using some sort of proxy/caching redirection solution. The goal of this change would be to recapture our domain strength. Is this something that is a good option or no? If not, what are the challenges and issues you see arising from doing something like that as I don't know of any other site set up like this. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | bradgreene0 -
Pushstate and Infinite Scrolling Article Pages: Is it detrimental to not change URLs as the page is being scrolled?
I've noticed a recent trend of news sites using infinite scrolling on article pages to garner more pageviews and I can assume serve up more ads. Here is an overview. Here is an article from NBC news that uses this technique: http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/music/grammys-2016-here-s-why-adele-s-performance-was-out-n519186 Studies have shown that this technique has decreased bounce rates by +15% for some sites. My question is: If a site is using the technique without changing URLs as the user scrolls down what overall negative effects does this have? Obviously you wouldn't be getting credit for the extra pageviews but I was wondering if there were any indexation implications with this. Here is an example of article infinite scrolling without changing the URL: http://www.wftv.com/news/national-content/deputies-wife-attacks-husband-because-he-didnt-get-her-a-valentines-day-gift/87691927
Web Design | | Cox-Media-Group1 -
Body of text on category pages
Hello everyone, wonder if I can pick your brains about our company's website. We are a tea company - Canton Tea Co. We have been advised that it is really important to get more text onto the category pages on our website, as otherwise the page just consists of a list of products, and therefore provides Google with a ton of headers, tiny descriptions, and not enough text to allow the page to being easily indexed, therefore hurting our Google ranking for key search terms like 'Green Tea' which should lead to the Green Tea category page. So we decided to add some text to the category page. The only place for this text to go was laid over the category header image. However, it looks pretty awful and unsophisticated having this text on top of the image - please see an example, our Green Tea category page, via this link: http://www.cantonteaco.com/loose-leaf-tea-1/type/green-tea.html So I have three questions: How significant is the text on a category page such as this to that page's Google ranking? If we moved the text to an area that was hidden until clicked on, for example the 'Filter by' section that opens up when you click on it (see via URL above), would that negate the SEO benefit? Do you have any other ideas or opinions on how to resolve this? Thank you! Louise, Canton Tea Co.
Web Design | | Cantonteaco0 -
Facebook is now only allowing owners of FB pages (not admins) to create keys for a WP blog post syndication. Is there a way around this?
I hired a contractor to configure a WP plugin to syndicate FB, G+, Twitter and standard WP posts. He is using NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster. He came back to me saying that FB is now only allowing direct owners (not admins) of FB pages to create keys. This means I have to give my client's personal FB access to a third party contractor. I'm not comfortable asking my client to do this. Does anybody know of a way around this? Is there a way to create a FB key with just admin access? Thanks
Web Design | | RosemaryB0 -
404 page in Windows IIS. HELP!
I run a real estate website.
Web Design | | Jeepster
My webmaster needs to create a 404 page for listings when they get deleted.
So far all he's come up with is 302-redirect to a standard "error template" page.
Can anyone suggest a 404 how-to guide I can show him?
Thanks0 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0