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Hi,

I'm fairly sure you can put the tags in a sitemap rather than the header.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Placing the tags into the header is a much bigger technical issue for us at present.

Cheers

Moz is flagging a lot of pages on our site which have duplicate page titles. 99% of these are international pages which hreflang tags in the sitemap.

Do I need to worry about this? I assumed that it wasn't an issue given the use of hreflang. And if that's the case, why is Moz flagging them as an issue?

Thanks.

Hi Mike,

I did see that there was an update last week, but as far as I can see we weren't impacted until Sunday/yesterday.

In terms of pages indexed there has been a slight drop, but only 700 out of 19,900. So in line with the variance we get on a week to week basis.

The drop in ranking seems to have only effected non branded keywords. Would a penalty effect both?

Thanks for the input. I got another site crawl from Moz today (i have campaigns running on the regional subfolders and one on the domain) at domain level. We have 1,292 404 errors at a domain level. All of our links are broken, so every URL in the sitemap is pushing Google to a 404. If you actually browse the site it works but every URL has index.php injected into the middle of it.

I have manually checked every non-branded keyword we were ranked no.1 for in Australia. We were ranked #1 for 23 keywords I was tracking. We are now out of the top ten for 20, ranked #9 for 1 and #1 for two others.

I came in this morning to a swath of email updates from Moz. Our site had jumped in ranking in the four geographic regions we target and we were seeing (more or less) the best results we've ever had. Most of the jumps were only 1 - 4 places but they were for our most competitive keywords.

Late this afternoon I did some spot checks on keywords to confirm that we were still holding roughly in the same positions and before I reported this to the wider business. We're not. What's more we have dropped off the first page for some terms and don't seem to be ranked at all for for others. The only keywords we're getting good rankings for are branded search terms.

I can only assume this is due to a technical issues over the weekend our developers caused. I'm not completely across this but I at some point our sitemaps stopped working and a huge number of links on the site were broken. Could a massive surge in 404s cause this? I'm checking google analytics and I can't see a drop in organic traffic yet although I don't have the full figures for today.

Thanks

No. There is a No Follow tag on the link so while Google will see the link no 'juice' passes on.

Yep. Checked in the tester at the time and did some more spot checks this morning.

I used Disallow: /*?key which I thought was generally recognised by bots?

I've blocked a large number of pages which Moz were showing as duplicate or giving 404's in our robots.txt using /?key and /?p etc.

However Moz crawler is still showing as being an issue. I assumed Roger picked up the robots.txt file, or is that not the case?

Looks like Page Rank for all our key product listing pages has taken a hammering. They're all getting a PR of 1, even though our domain authority remains ok (it has dropped too, but not as dramatic).

What we're seeing is a lot of yo-yo'ing. This week we had 30 SERP drops and 17 rises, which has been typical for last month. Prior to that we'd see about half of this.

e.g. 'home security cameras' SERPs since mid-Oct has been: 4, 4, 8, 4, 7, 6. This is pretty typical of what I'm seeing. We've not made any real content or site changes in this time.

Traffic wise there has been a 3.5% dip in search over the last few weeks. So not huge.

No. There is a No Follow tag on the link so while Google will see the link no 'juice' passes on.

I actually had a look at the robots.txt last night to block the effected areas and discovered the dev's who built the site hadn't set it up. We've added a default one which we're going to test over the next week to see how it fares. If that doesn't work then we'll start looking at the parameters.

Thanks.