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Google Search Console is telling us that there are 5,193 sitemap "issues" - URLs that are present on the XML sitemap that are blocked by robots.txt
However, there are only 1,222 total URLs submitted on the XML sitemap. I only found 83 instances of URLs that fit their example description.
Why is the number of "issues" so high?
Does it compound over time as Google re-crawls the sitemap?
I am working with a client who migrated their site prior to starting their SEO work with us. In a crawl of broken backlinks, I found some old image files with links. Ideally, I would like to redirect to an appropriate image, but I have no way of knowing what the image was because the page it was on is now dead. Does anyone have a way to identify and handle broken image files from a site that has already been migrated?
Hi there,
We understand that hreflang tagging can be incorporated into an existing XML sitemap. That said, is there any inherent issue with having two sitemaps - your regular XML sitemap plus an international XML sitemap which lists off many of the same URLs as your original XML sitemap?
For example, one of our clients has an XML sitemap file they don't want to have to edit, but we want to implement international hreflang xml sitemaps for them. Can we add an "English" XML sitemap with the proper hreflang tagging even though this new sitemap contains many duplicates as the existing XML sitemap file?
Thank you!
If a site has about 100 pages offering specific discounts for employees at various companies, for example...
and all these pages are nearly 100% duplicates, how would you handle them?
My recommendation to my client was to use noindex, follow. These pages tend to receive backlinks from the actual companies receiving the discounts, so obviously they are valuable from a linking standpoint. But say the content is nearly identical between each page; should they be indexed? Is there any value for someone at Kohl's, for example, to be able to find this landing page in the search results?
Here is a live example of what I am talking about:
I have a site with a few hundred thousand backlinks and many of these are are legitimate, but the source site of the backlink often has a low authority and is broken, causing a spiral of bad backlinks from pagination, comment replies, etc. For example one site may have 4 legitimate backlinks with a spiral of 400+ bad backlinks, this is happening across dozens of domains.
My site is more authoritative than these broken backlinks and regularly receives highly authoritative backlinks, because of this would it be best to disavow these spiraling low authority domains, attempt to contact the webmaster and add a nofollow, or any other solution?
Hi there,
My client has a site website.com and a booking engine, booking.website.com
They are currently tracking the main site and the booking subdomain as two separate properties in the same GA account. The issue is we can't see where users are originating on the subdomain property; it's all being counted as referral.
My understanding is we need to set up subdomain tracking using Google Tag Manager in order for GA to pass the user data between the two subdomains.
This is fine, except for this one line I am reading on Google's guide to cross-domain tracking:
If you have updated your tracking code to analytics.js, then no additional configuration is required to track subdomains.
You can use cross domain tracking to collect data from a primary domain, like www.example.com, and a subdomain, like www.subdomain.example.com, in a single Analytics account property.
That last line makes it sound like we should be using cross-domain tracking for this purpose.
Are we correct in setting up subdomain tracking and NOT cross-domain tracking to be able to track users across subdomains on the same domain?
My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects.
Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site.
However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site.
We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place.
We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site?
FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.
I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this:
/cart.php
/quote
/checkout.php
/finishorder.php
/login.php
In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google.
These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page?
How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?
I am working with a major beauty client who owns an exact-match domain name related to their product that brings in a ton of traffic. They offer great content on this website that is inherently valuable. The catch is that the call-to-action brings users back to the main company site (a different URL). So if they want to "buy the product" or "learn more," they are taken to a different domain (the main company domain). There are 47 links to the main site on the EMD site.
There are some slight mentions of the main brand on the EMD site, but it's hardly noticeable. It mostly appears to be a standalone site not affiliated with a major brand.
My gut tells me this is black-hat but I can't find a fitting description of this strategy online, and why they shouldn't be doing this. Is this considered a doorway page / doorway site? Is this considered a link scheme? What would you call this strategy? Or is this actually not even black hat?
I have an e-commerce client who sells shoes. There is a main page for "Kids" shoes, and then right under it on the top-navigation bar there is a link to "Boys Shoes" and "Girls Shoes." All 3 of these links are on the same level - 1 click off the home page. (And linked to from every page on the website via the top nav bar). All 3 are perfectly optimized for their targeted term.
However, when you search for "boys shoes" or "girls shoes" + the brand, the "Kids" page is the one that shows up in the #1 position. There are sitelinks beneath the listing pointing to "Girls" and "Boys." All the other results in Google are resellers of the "brand + girls" or "brand + boys" shoes. So our listing is the only one that's "brand + kids shoes."
Our "boys" shoes page and "girls" shoes page don't even rank on the 1st page for "brand + boys shoes" or "brand + girls shoes."
The only real difference is that "kids shoes" contains both girls and boys shoes on the page, and then "boys" obviously contains boys' shoes only, "girls" contains girls' shoes only. So in that sense there is more content on the "kids" page.
So my question is - WHY is the kids page outranking the boys/girls page? How can we make the boys/girls pages be the ones that show up when people specifically search for boys/girls shoes?
Hi everyone,
EDIT: I'm going to link to the actual page, please remove if there are any issues with confidentiality.
Here is the page: https://www.legalzoom.com/knowledge/llc/topic/advantages-and-disadvantages-overview
It's ranking #2 on Google for "LLC"
This page is a couple months old and is substantially heavy in content, but not much more so than all the dozens of other pages online that are competing with it. This is a highly competitive industry and this particular domain is an extremely huge player in this industry. This new page is suddenly ranking #2 for an extremely competitive head term, arguably the most important/high volume keyword being targeted by the entire site.
The page is outranking the home page, as well as the service page that exactly targets the query - the one that you would think would be the ranking page for this head term. However, this new page is somewhat of a spin-off with some additional related content about the subject, some videos, resources, a lot of internal links, etc.
The first word of the title tag exactly matches the head term. I did observe that almost no other pages on the site have the exact keyword as the first word of the title tag, but that couldn't be sufficient to bring it up so high in the ranks, could it?
Another bizarre thing that is happening is that Google is ignoring the Title Tag in the actual HTML (which is a specific question that is accurate to the content on the page), and re-assigning a title tag that basically looks like this: "Head Term | Brand." Why would it do this on this page? Doesn't it usually prefer more descriptive title tags?
There are no external links coming up on Moz or Majestic pointing to this page. It has just a couple social shares. It's not being linked to from the home page or top nav bar on the main site.
Can anyone explain how this particular page would outrank the main service page targeting this keyword, as well as other highly authoritative, older pages online targeting the same keyword?
Thanks for your help!
My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects.
Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site.
However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site.
We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place.
We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site?
FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.
These two filtering options ("organic traffic" in the left sidebar and "non-paid search traffic" in the advanced segments) give me slightly different numbers. Any idea why this would be the case?
Ok I added it in, I hope I don't get in trouble!
Of course - but why would Google pick this page above the page that is specifically targeting "LLC"? This page answers a specific question about LLCs and it's brand new. I'm sure 99% of the linkbuilding strategies Legalzoom has used to build links to LLC pages have gone to their primarly LLC service page. This one is only a couple months old and is outranking the main LLC service page.
Agreed, so why is Google restructuring its title tag and prioritizing it above other LLC pages?
I know about their ability to do so, but don't you agree that in this case they "dumbed down" the title tag to something much less relevant to the actual content on the page? It seems like they made it MORE keyword stuffed / spammy in this example.