Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Michael.

Re: hits from the 301s, am I right in thinking that on the flipside, our root directory and directories one removed will (assuming content becomes more relevant!) will eventually see a benefit from having these lower-importance pages further away?

Hi Mozzers,

I'm working on Content Strategy at my job, and I'm close to making some recommendations on short/long-term direction. While I'm there, I want to tackle the URL/menu structure (correct term?), which is a bit of a mess as pages have been created without any consideration for it over time.

For ease, let's just say we have 3 main subdirectories of the site (Section A-C), and let's also say that section A also has 3 important subdirectories. From a UX perspective at least, we want a page to look like:

example.com/sectionA/subsectionAA/page1

but currently it's

example.com/page1

We have dozens and dozens of these examples. To complicate matters a little further, Sections B and C have been earmarked to be consolidated into a new section (D), as they're currently confusing and overlapping, and create roadblocks in user journeys. So a page that is, say:

example.com/sectionB/page2

may well want to be:

example.com/sectionD/subsectionDA/page2

I'm comfortable enough with technically doing this, as I'm experienced enough in Drupal and have an agency on hand too, BUT - I don't know if there are any SEO pitfalls I need to be wary of when I'm doing this, beyond resubmitting sitemaps, and the trickle-down effects of redirects.

Any advice, wise forum? thanks!

Thank you both.

As it happens, just now I discovered the site is already covered with a basic SSL certificate through my host. However, the secure version of the site doesn't load properly - the CSS is being loaded over http, so I need to fix that in wp-admin. Just leaving this here in case it ever helps anybody else!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27727003/website-homepage-loses-styling-when-ssl-forced

I am creating a small business website for a friend in Recruitment. It’s very small and mainly just a shop window for the business. There’s no login area for the website, but there are two areas were users can enter information:

• General contact us form (giving email and phone number)
• Applying for a job (attaching a resume)

The forms are using Ninja Forms – which I believe are secure in passing information. But am I missing anything? Do I need to make these pages https at all? I’m quite new to building sites from scratch.

Thanks for your help

Thanks so much, this is so helpful!

About the search console question, I may have confused you. This is what I mean: I have a www and non-www property of the website in Search Console (from before my time), which looks like this:

|

property

|

Sitemap

http://www.mysite.com/

|

http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

http://mysite.com

|

NO SITEMAP LINKED

|

(apologies that has not formatted well, I hope you can decipher!)

With a sitemap linked to the www version and nothing to the non-www version. The sitemap is located on the non-www version of the site, so I was just wondering if the above scenario has essentially meant we've had no sitemap submissions to date (that said, the sitemap appears to be pulling through despite being the "wrong" address, so I can only think there are either 2 separate sitemap files, OR the redirect we have set from www to non-www is having an effect?)

Hi Logan,

Thanks for your quick response, that’s very helpful and the article you provided is great.

I hadn’t thought of the purpose of self-referring canonicals, thanks for clarifying.

Re: Search Console: I’ve just noticed we only have a sitemap linked for the http://www property. Currently, all www. traffic is redirected to the non-www version of any given page (forgetting https for a second). Is this an issue in terms of pagerank?

And my last question, I promise! If our UA tag is firing on both http and https versions of the site, should we be seeing traffic from both in GA, if the property/view default url is set to http:// ? By my understanding, that setting is just a vanity thing for reporting purposes, but I’m not sure where, if anywhere, I need to specify in a particular view that http:// and https:// traffic should be treated as the same thing?

I’m fairly new in an in-house role and am currently rooting around our Drupal website to improve it as a whole. Right now on my radar is our use of http / https, canonicals, and our use of Google Search Console. Initial issues noticed:

• We serve http and https versions of all our pages
• Our canonical tags just refer back to the URL it sits on (apparently a default Drupal thing, which is not much use)
• We don’t actually have https properties added in Search Console/GA

I’ve spoken with our IT agency who migrated our old site to the current site, who have recommended forcing all pages to https and setting canonicals to all https pages, which is fine in theory, but I don’t think it’s as simple as this, right? An old Moz post I found talked about running into issues with images/CSS/javascript referencing http – is there anything else to consider, especially from an SEO perspective?

I’m assuming that the appropriate certificates are in place, as the secure version of the site works perfectly well.

And on the last point – am I safe to assume we have just never tracked any traffic for the secure version of the site?

Thanks

John

Hi Logan,

Thanks for your quick response, that’s very helpful and the article you provided is great.

I hadn’t thought of the purpose of self-referring canonicals, thanks for clarifying.

Re: Search Console: I’ve just noticed we only have a sitemap linked for the http://www property. Currently, all www. traffic is redirected to the non-www version of any given page (forgetting https for a second). Is this an issue in terms of pagerank?

And my last question, I promise! If our UA tag is firing on both http and https versions of the site, should we be seeing traffic from both in GA, if the property/view default url is set to http:// ? By my understanding, that setting is just a vanity thing for reporting purposes, but I’m not sure where, if anywhere, I need to specify in a particular view that http:// and https:// traffic should be treated as the same thing?