Magento technical SEO issues
-
Hi This is lots of questions and don't expect full answers but if anyone can help or put me in touch with some who can that would be great
so here are 3 issues we have from some auditing our site
Firstly on pages like https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc so any pages where there is a sortby the cananoical link doesn't seem to be working correctly.
So for here it is https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us/sort-by/price/sort-direction/desc"/>
but should be https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-with-us"/>
secondly with have a lot of duplicate title tags mainly caused from the blog and the above problem see-> http://prntscr.com/b2t9xe
but regarding the blog we have an issue where 2 canonical appearing for example this page
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/there are 2 canonical links appearing
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/page/19/"/>
we want it to be this
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/blog/"/>Thirdly
Our mobile usability issues have gone up a lot see- > http://prntscr.com/b2tado
I can see what the issue is that this folder https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/skin/frontend/tidybooks/default/images/ was being crawled by google and contains lots of 'index of' pages. I've disallowed directory in robots.txt as shown here -> http://prntscr.com/b2tbc5is that correct?
any help would be great
Just to let you know
we use magento v1.7
we use SEO suite ultimate extension
and we use fishpigs wordpress extension
thanks
-
Hello,
The source code on those pages have a Robots Index,Follow tag. This should be noindex, follow. They also have two rel = canonical tags, which point to different URLs, thus conflicting with each other.
Really I would have to log into the back-end to see what's going on, but I'm guessing one of the rel canonical tags is being added by Mageworks or Yoast and the other is default from Wordpress. You may require some custom coding to the blog template, and I recommend working with a developer if you can't figure it out on your own. There are lots of Wordpress developers on sites like Upwork and Guru who could probably get this done for you for a minimal investment.
-
Thanks Everett for you response to be honest I think I'm going to separate these questions out on different post as suggested as they concern different elements.
For question 1 - we use a separate layered navigation module by Mandev so I guess by first port of call is to speak to them. Mageworks refuse to deal with that side. There are a ton of options available, plus all sort-by options are NOINDEX, FOLLOW Robots Meta Header.
For question 2 - We do use yoast plugin and I have noindexed all relevant bits causing issues but whether it's an integration issue between Magento and wordpress I'm not sure as I can see no referencing to yoast in our page source code. Below is example for some of the duplicate tags we are getting, I have noindex pages using yoast in wordpress however the code is showing index follow. Also you will see the 2 canonical links as well and no mention of yoast.
Duplicate title tags
|
The Tidy Books UK Blog
|
Displaying 30 of 37
|
-
Hello Geraldine,
I'm going to rephrase your questions here just to make sure I understand them correctly.
1. Your Sort-By URLs are using self-referencing rel= canonical tags.
When I looked into this issue I found that some of these pages no longer exist and produce a 404 error page. Example:
https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/childrens-bookcases-shelves/sort-by/position/sort-direction/desc/l/letters:5I did find some that I was able to access and verified the problem above. You should contact MageWorks to ask if there is a way you can fix this with the SEO plugin you're using. If not, I suggest adding a disallow statement in the robots.txt file for the /sort-by/ folders to keep them from being accessed and indexed. Then I would go into Google Search Console (GSC) and remove that entire directory from the index, as described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en .
2. You have duplicate title tags, mostly caused by the blog and the sort-by URLs discussed above.
If you're not using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress you should be. Without seeing the report and knowing exactly what those URLs are with duplicate title tags, I can't help answer this question very well. Common examples are Tag pages and paginated Category pages. I usually advise blog owners to disallow the Tag pages in the Robots.txt file and removing the directory from Google SERPs using GSC URL Removal Tool, as described above.
3. Image directory pages are causing mobile usability errors in GSC and you have blocked them from being indexed.
Because those index pages do not need to be accessed in order to render the page, I don't see any problem with blocking those in the robots.txt file. However, you do NOT want to block anything that needs to be accessed in order to render the page so I would advise you to use the Robots.txt tester tool in GSC to make sure your Robots.txt code is not inadvertently blocking those image files as well, such as https://www.tidy-books.co.uk/skin/frontend/tidybooks/us/images/eco.png . As long as you aren't blocking access to the actual image files, only to the directory pages, your solution is OK.
It would be better to serve an error code on those pages though. Best practice is to not allow folder index pages to be loaded like that. Otherwise, it creates a bit of a security risk. Often webmasters will show a "403: Forbidden" code on those URLs.
I hope this helps. Please feel free to respond with any updates or clarifications. Hopefully others will chime in now that your issues are broken up into component parts. In the future, you'll get better responses by asking three different questions instead of lumping them all into one. This is because someone my know how to help with one of your questions, but not the others, and are less inclined to answer the one they can help with because they can't answer the others.
Good luck!
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
-
Issues with sitelnks anchor text
Hi Everyone, I'm currently running a job classified ad site, and having some problems with my brand site links. So in short, when I type my brand some sitelinks appear which is OK, but there is one that has the anchor text as "1", yep just a number one, as far as I know, Google takes the anchor text from internal linking, and since this the landing page for my search site.com/search-jobs I don't want to demote it. Now I started checking why the number "1" is actually showing and I figured it out it might be due to pagination, since the search results (?=page2, ?=page3, etc) were all linking from the bottom numbers to site.com/search-jobs with the almighty number 1, I took a decision on changing that link to site.com/search-jobs?page=1 and adding a canonical tag to the landing page to avoid duplicated content. The solution worked for a few days for private sessions only (anchor text was Search for jobs in Peru), but after that number 1 came back and I can't figure it out how to change it, tried to update the cache on search console on most pages that still had the previous version but to no avail. My boss and I are trying to fix this issue but no luck yet, should I update all of my pages' cache?, any help would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
Impact of Non SEO Subdomains
My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program. One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots. Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain? What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
301 and 200 Status Issues
Hi, Moz has highlighted that we have duplicate page content on our site, displaying the following: http://bmiresearch.com/press 200 status code and http://www.bmiresearch.com/press 200 status code We have setup a 301 redirect rule on http://bmiresearch.com/press to permanently redirect to http://www.bmiresearch.com/press and on Google inspect element network it shows this http://bmiresearch.com/press 301 status code which mean redirect to this URL permanently http://www.bmiresearch.com/press 200 status code Does anyone know why this might be occuring? Is it possible that because Google has index both URL http://www.bmiresearch.com/press and http://bmiresearch.com/press with 200 status code? If so how would we correct this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | carlsutherland0 -
Personalization software and SEO
Hi guys, I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP. I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide? I'll appreciate your opinions.
Technical SEO | | anagentile1 -
Magento Rewrite Issue
Moz's Crawler has thrown up a bunch of crawl issue for my site.The site is a magento based site and I recently updated the themes so some routes may have have become redundant. Moz has identified 289 pages with Temporary Redirect. I thought magento managed the redirects if I set the "Auto-redirect to Base URL" to Yes(301 Moved permanently). But this is enabled on my store and I still get the errors. The only thing I could think of was to add a Robots.txt and handle the redirection of these links from here. But handling redirection for 289 links is no mean task. I was looking for any ideas that could fix this without me manually doing this .
Technical SEO | | abhishek19860 -
Issues with trailing slash url
Recently, we have changed our website to www.example.com/super-rentals/ (example) and we have done a 301 redirection to the new urls from the old one. We have noticed in Google webmaster tool that urls without trailing slash as 404 error. www.example.com/super-rentals. Please let us know how to fix this issue as soon as possible. Note: Our previous urls are not the urls without trailing slash. It is a different url (www.example.com/super-rentals.htm) we have rewritten in to www.example.com/super-rentals/ only. I would like to know why GWT pulls out the urls without trailing slash and shows in 404 error. Thanks for your time
Technical SEO | | massimobrogi0 -
Wordpress plugins for SEO
Hello I am new to wordpress I just have started using it. Can anyone suggest me some useful tools / plugins / setting for SEO? I am further intrested in sepeeding up Wp. Any good advive on wp an seo would be appriciated.
Technical SEO | | sesertin0 -
SEO LINKS
New to S.E.O. so excuse my naivety. I have made lots of new links some of them paid for e.g. Best of the Web but I don’t see any change in the latest competitive link analysis. Some of the links we have been accepted for just do not show. Also the keywords we are trying to promote the most have disappeared off the radar for over 2 weeks now. I think we have followed the optimization suggestions correctly. Please could you enlighten me. Regards Paul www.curtainpolesemporium.co.uk
Technical SEO | | CPE0