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
-
Content thin for new home page been told to change it? any suggestions?
Hi guys, I'm newbie.... I have been told that my home page is content thin, and if I want to rank really well in the search i need to have more relevant content on my homepage - the site is only new 2months and I can see we are now at 39th place in the search, if i make changes to the home page design and add more content will this effect this current ranking?
Web Design | | edward-may0 -
Hi, I have a doubt. If we want to hide unwanted text in a web page its possible with "" tag. And my question "does a search engine crawl those text? help me.
I want to hide a lot of text behind my site page. I know its possible with that tag. But in what way a search engine looks at those text? Hidden or they are crawled and indexed.
Web Design | | FhyzicsBCPL0 -
How to find internal pages linking to a URL?
Hey, I had an issue where a client found a bad link on their site then I went to fix it and couldn't figure out where on earth it was. I tried using different software which would find the link, but not tell me where it was linked from. I asked for some help from someone in my office and they found it in about 15 seconds. Their strategy was "think like a client - just click everywhere". Is there a way to quickly find what URLs are pointing to a specific URL? Cheers
Web Design | | renegadeempire0 -
Main page redirect affecting search results?
Question.... A recent change was made to our page www.BGU.edu by a marketing person. So now when you type in www.BGU.edu it actually redirects to a different page www.BGU.edu/inquiry This is a really bad idea isn't it? I do not know enough about SEO to know a lot, and just joined SEOmoz but do I need to tell the admin to change it back?
Web Design | | nongard10 -
Legitimate hidden text and H1s are "OK?" Show me the data!
I'm trying to promote the SEO perspective during a site redesign so I'm researching the impact of design requests: Embedding text in graphic headers and applying to the graphics to get the SEO value Reducing view-able text on a page for design reasons and by using JavaScript to hide text in accordions or tabs. SEOmoz uses these techniques on their ranking report and most of what I read in teh forums says it is OK to hide text if your motives are pure and the text displays in a text-only browser. But I do SEO, not SEOK. I want to optimize, not just avoid penalties. And I try to make decisions based on data, not just anecdotes. Are there any studies out there on the effects these hidden-text topics? How much difference DOES it make to have the text exposed? Since there is potential for spam with these techniques, why would Google give the same rank to pages with and without hidden text? When I'm balancing UX and SEO, I want to clearly define the trade-off. What have you done when faced with this dilemma?
Web Design | | integra-telecom0 -
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 -
Homepage and Category pages rank for article/post titles after HTML5 Redesign
My site's URL (web address) is: http://bit.ly/g2fhhC Timeline:
Web Design | | mcluna
At the end of March we released a site redesign in HTML5
As part of the redesign we used multiple H1s (for nested articles on the homepage) and for content sections other than articles on a page. In summary, our pages have many many, I mean lots of H1's compared to other sites notable sites that use HTML5 and only one H1 (some of these are the biggest sites on the web) - yet I don't want to say this is the culprit because the HTML5 document outline (page sections) create the equivalent of H1 - H6 tags. We have also have been having Google cache snapshot issues due to Modernzr which we are working to apply the patch. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/issues/1086 - Not sure if this would driving our indexing issues as below. Situation:
Since the redesign when we query our article title then Google will list the homepage, category page or tag page that the article resides on. Most of the time it ranks for the homepage for the article query.
If we link directly to the article pages from a relevant internal page it does not help Google index the correct page. If we link to an article from an external site it does not help Google index the correct page. Here are some images of some example query results for our article titles: Homepage ranks for article title aged 5 hours
http://imgur.com/yNVU2 Homepage ranks for article title aged 36 min.
http://imgur.com/5RZgB Homepage at uncategorized page listed instead of article for exact match article query
http://imgur.com/MddcE Article aged over 10 day indexing correctly. Yes it's possible for Google index our article pages but again.
http://imgur.com/mZhmd What we have done so far:
-Removed the H1 tag from the site wide domain link
-Made the article title a link. How it was on the old version so replicating
-Applying the Modernizr patch today to correct blank caching issue. We are hoping you can assess the number H1s we are using on our homepage (i think over 40) and on our article pages (i believe over 25 H1s) and let us know if this may be sending a confusing signal to Google. Or if you see something else we're missing. All HTML5 and Google documentation makes clear that Google can parse multiple H1s & understand header, sub & that multiple H1s are okay etc... but it seems possible that algorythmic weighting may not have caught up with HTML5. Look forward to your thoughts. Thanks0 -
Does on page links have an effect on SERP rankings with PANDA
I have been doing some competitive analysis basing my company on others and have noticed a pattern. Very high ranking sites seem to have limited the internal and external on page links on their subdomains to under 100. my site has a lot of links but all are relevant and lead to unique content. I am interested to know if anyone else has noticed this pattern in changes in the SERP results. bIs google now penalizing pages with to many on site nav links? And if a full site restructure is needed to allow google to index and rank these pages or if a it is a non issue and does not need to be addressed. Panda confuses me!!!!! HELP!
Web Design | | Brother220