For important pages on your site, it's always important to look after the HTTP status codes especially when they're not in the 2XX range. What I would look at in a case like this is if indeed you're able to find some clues in other tools like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. In addition, try mimicking the user agent of Google and figure out in your own browser what the type of response could be.
![Martijn_Scheijbeler Martijn_Scheijbeler](/community/q/assets/uploads/profile/22318-profileavatar-1619582473207.png)
Best posts made by Martijn_Scheijbeler
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RE: 400-499 http status code
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RE: UTM parameter problem
NO, this is not hurting your ranking score. UTM parameters are being used for tracking purposes but won't have any influence on the pages. If you want to be absolutely sure about this you can do two easy things:
- Tell the crawler in Google Search Console that these parameters don't influence anything, you can read more about it here.
- Use canonical tags, which you already seem to have, so you should be good.
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RE: Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my shop subdomain?
It depends what currently is in your robots.txt. Usually it would be useful to have another one for your subdomain.
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RE: Referring domain issues
Do the other 31 domains need to be online? Otherwise I would say make sure that you redirect and de-index these domains as soon as possible yourself as they'll definitely can have an impact on the authority of the one that you would like to rank.
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RE: JSON-LD parsing error
Yes this makes total sense as the JSON-LD is not in the right place and the content it has is far from JSON-LD. What you're doing is opening the script tag for this and in that you would have the code for it but in your case there is plain HTML in there which definitely would throw an error.
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RE: Web Core Vitals - scores wildly fluctuate?
It's not that crazy, basically every time you refresh a page certain things could happen. For example, when you load an ad server on your page it could be that it needs more redirects that time in order to get the right ad. That would potentially lower the score in Lighthouse.
I'd take an average usually and mainly look at making improvements and with that providing insight on how you're trending in Lighthouse. It also often makes sense to spot-check things after bigger changes and deploys.
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RE: "Display" referrals on google analytics
Try to figure out if they're using different devices, coming in from different browsers. If that's the case then it's likely not spam traffic but just somebody who opened up a Google Adwords display campaign to your site. It's really hard in that case to figure out where that's coming from.
The bounce rate in this case looks very high but still people seem to visit multiple pages which wouldn't be the case if it was really a bot. As they're most of the times not trained to perform any clicks and also most likely wouldn't come from multiple countries.
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RE: Trying to mark as fixed multiple errors on webmaster tools
No there is no such way to add a list of items to Google Search Console with URLs that you want have marked as fixed. Instead what you can do is filter on these URLs in the interface and then all at the same time you can mark them as fixed. Google Search Console doesn't allow you to update URLs based from the API.
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RE: Referring domain issues
Are you able to check the traffic through organic search on the other 2-3 sites that you're talking about? If traffic there is very high (which I doubt) than you would have to think carefully about this. Otherwise if traffic is very low than I would check if you could redirect that to the most important domain in the inventory.
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RE: Spam backlinks
Hi,
You're already quite lucky that most of the links are with the nofollow attribute. But as you've already uploaded the 'bad' links via the disavow tool I wouldn't worry to much about these links. I'm also of the opinion that Google is probably able to see that at least some percentage of these pages are a callback to the original sources and will not be measured that high.
Cheers,
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RE: JSON-LD parsing error
You can definitely leave it as it is, it probably won't influence much. It's more additional information that could help you in the long run but it won't harm you.
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RE: Non-Interaction Virtual page views
Hi Luca,
No, this is not an option. Only event hits can contain a nonInteraction value. So you'll have to deal with this in a different way, which will likely mean converting these to actual events instead of virtual pageviews.
Martijn.
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RE: How to do A/B testing without creating two separate url like google analytic experiment?
Try this, with this you can do the same with Google Content Experiments without creating multiple pages. You do everything through JavaScript: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/experiments
It's unfortunately a lesser known feature of Content Experiments, although I would suggest to start using Google Optimize in the future.
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RE: Issue with Site Map - how critical would you rank this in terms of needing a fix?
- It's not a perfect solution and if you can make the costs than I would always do it, but honestly I can't say this is very critical right now to fix. Google and other search engines want you to have a very high quality sitemap so that all pages in there will exist and work for them as well as for users but if a certain percentage of them won't work then it won't get you massively in trouble I'd say.
- I'm not really sure about this option as it doesn't sound like an actual fix at all so for now I would say don't do it.
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RE: Which is better paginated URL? domain.com/directory/1 or domain.com/directory/#page-2
Definitely: domain.com/directory/1. As using an anchor won't help for SEO as crawlers won't follow the link.
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RE: What are top 3 directives to prepare for a Google algorithm update?
Have you evaluated your link opportunities but also your current backlink profile? This could help you in finding out if there are any opportunities that you might be able to take advantage of or the links that might be hurting you currently.
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RE: Tracked Event for Button Now I would I like to know that Customer reached to thank you page?
Hi,
Like suggested above, I would advise to go with the Goal set up so you can more easily what followed before the goal transactions happend. What you could do alternatively is create a segment and only include users that have clicked your button so you can see how many ended up on your thank you page.
Martijn
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RE: Schema query
Schema.org shouldn't be able to get you into duplication issues. It's meant to be duplicated in there.
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RE: Does Google index language flags/links in header, even if only 1 is visible at a time?
HI Iurie,
Are the links to the sites in the other languages available in the HTML or are you loading them more dynamically. If the first is the case then it shouldn't be any problem and Google will at least find the links to these pages and probably provide you with some juice there.
Besides that I would recommend looking into href lang tags to point Google via the source code as well to the other languages.
Hope this helps!
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RE: Its posible to use Google Authorship in an online shop?
Of course it would be possible, but how do you see it as an advantage to the shop? The products don't have an author, right? So that would result in not using authorship for attributing post content to an author.
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RE: What are top 3 directives to prepare for a Google algorithm update?
What I would also look at is the data that you can find in Google Search Console about the backlinks that you have so you're able to check their quality.
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RE: Query on Google Experiment?
Hi,
Yes! What I would do in your case is make Variation A the 'original' and compare your variation B against it. What you'd like to do in most cases is still check what the influence is on your secondary metrics by adding a signup box. What could happen potentially is that some metrics will start shifting.
Martijn.
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RE: vs.
Hi Mike,
I definitely wouldn't trust only on using the HTML Lang Tag, as that's something that isn't used a lot by sites in the end. Plus it's a vague indicator to Google that that is the actual language that is being used there. I would go with stating the different pages with the HREF Lang tag and worst case go with a canonical tag implementation.
Martijn.
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RE: We have a website that has awesome metrics but will not rank - any thoughts?
Hi Ryan,
By just looking at one keyword I think there is already a lot to gain in the content on your site. The relevancy of this page to your keyword: detroit wedding dj is quite low as the keyword is exactly matched only twice on the page and just somewhere in the body text: http://mikestaff.com/detroit-michigan-weddings/services/dj/. I hate saying that you need to use it more in the headings and the rest of the content but it probably will help. If the relevancy on the page itself isn't good enough then you might not win it although your metrics against most competitors will be much higher.
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RE: Competitor Inbound Links Increase from 175K to 1 million in 1 month, how?
Hi,
Well, what happened with: innocent until proven guilty ;). Because what could have happened here:
- Open Site Explorer found more links in their niche/industry so they just found more links in there area.
- They have started a partnership with a site that is linking to them from hundreds of thousands of pages. Have been there done that and then usually this happens. It's Links, not referring root domains what we're looking at in the end.
Some ideas to identify if this is really the more black hat kind of stuff, identify patterns:
- Look at their changes in follow/nofollow links so you get some sense if there links are bought or not.
- Look at what kind of anchor texts they're using. If the majority of links is still with their brand name anchor text then they might have done link buying or whatever crappy tactic but at least not focused on a certain keyword. If they're dumb they did it for specific keywords they want to rank for.
- Look at other competitors in their industry, do they see a similar trend.
- Have they done any other outreach/PR stunts in the past that suddenly got them tons of new links?
All of this might give you a better sense into if this is shitty black hat or that it's a valid tactic.
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RE: Google search analytics position - how is it worked out
Have you noticed that some of the lines could mean different things as CTR and the ranking for that position? In other cases, sometimes Google has delays or hiccups in there data, sometimes that could be the cause for empty datapoints for a certain date.
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RE: Excluding Cookieless Static Content Sub-domain from GA/GTM
Hi Julian,
Could you potentially make sure that Google Analytics and GTM aren't loaded on static.ecommerce.com, which you could do by making an exclusion for them in the Triggers?
Martijn
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RE: Google ignoring the Title Tag?
Hi Nancy,
Yes it is, what Google does is they provide the user with a more relevant title in the search results on what they think is better for them. But they will still take the content of the page to do that. So usually they don't make up their own title but use headlines that can already be found on the page.
In this case it would be good to think about how you can provide more content around these topics/ change the title of the page to fix that for users.
Martijn.
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RE: When to Disavow
- Yes, because still Google might think that the page is low quality.
- Yes, as the page is very low quality it might drive a signal.
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RE: Site traffic halved not sure why
Hi,
So did you check in Google Search Console if there are any more errors that you noticed or any volume in terms of keywords that has gone up or down? Usually with your amount of weekly traffic it could be a penalty but it's also still very likely that just your traffic on a couple of higher volume keywords went down and that's what you're seeing in your analytics data.
Another thing could be to check what kind of landing pages from organic search were affected so you can get a better sense of what's happening across your site. Because with this decline it seems unlikely to me that potentially all your pages were affected.
Martijn.
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RE: Is it a good idea to 301 redirect one same niche site towards another site for seo benefit
I agree with Gaston, but usually the SEO benefits that you will see are rather small. This was a tactic that was used a couple of years ago to just buy a bunch of domains that already have a ton of links to them and then just point them to your main root domain.
Usually the easiest signal to look at is already to see if you suddenly start redirecting certain URLs to another page.
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RE: We setup a new Google Analytics account for the new domain but the old one is still there
Hi,
I'm sorry to say, but there is no connection whatsoever between data (or settings) in Google Analytics and how you're ranking. So changing the settings on your Google Analytics account or changing the domain name in the settings wouldn't impact your rankings (at all!). I'd likely try to find the cure for what you're trying to accomplish somewhere else. Are there any other changes that you've made and is there anything that you've done around the migration of the domains that could have gone wrong?
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RE: The use of Markup language
Hi,
Like Kirsten already mentioned, I would definitely go with structured markup. The best thing around these these is JSON-LD to do this so you can separate your structured markup from the rest of the content. In this case I would also re-use the Organization information on your Product pages but also go indeed with the Product Schema. But what you can do as well is make sure that if you have review they're marked up with the Review Schema as well.
Best of luck!
Martijn.
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RE: Anyone know of a free keyword monitoring tool?
Try Rank Tracker from Link Assistant.
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RE: Embedded site on directory from other country
Probably in any case you want to submit these kind of pages to your disavow files as thousand of links from these kind of directory's won't do you any good.
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RE: My automated build system is creating a duplicate website
To answer your questions:
- Technically it could compete with your current site as it's on its own domain, in reality, it's unlikely as you're canonicalizing the pages back to its original and making sure that the content itself through that way is attributed to your original site.
- What I would recommend is excluding the CI/CD site from the engines, through a robots.txt or a similar technique. That way you're making sure that the staging site itself isn't being crawled at all. In the end, I'd say there's very little upside of having that be the case currently.
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RE: We have 2 versions of URLs. we have the mobile and the desktop. is that a duplicate content?
Hi Armen,
Taken into account that these mobile pages are not the AMP variant of them I would say this might become an issue. In the end you're improving the user experience but as you're doing it by creating two pages which are the same based on the content you're not doing the best from the SEO perspective. What I would do is look into using the canonical tags back to one of the two: either mobile or desktop. By doing that you'll make sure that there is only 1 variant of every page out there for SEO.
Martijn.
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RE: Added sub-folder to GWT no data?
Uhmm I thought this was about Google Search Console, not Google Analytics?
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RE: 3 word brand name + SEO. Will I be losing out on organic searches with spaces?
No, you won't. In most cases, you'll be totally fine. I would only worry when either your area is incredibly competitive or when there are competitors with very similar brand names.
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RE: Knowledge Graph Not Showing Up after Schema Implementation
It could be a lot of things, do you know if Google has already crawled + indexed the new markup that you've added for example? It can be that they haven't seen the new markup yet.
Besides that we also still don't have seen any knowledge graph markup, not even for our own brand name. In some cases Google completely ignores what they're going to do with your keyword and it's relevance.
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RE: Will adjusted bounce rate affect avg time on page?
1. Yes, it will, as for users that never visit the second pageview in their session, it will now count the time between pageview and event.
2. No, you're not as you're basically adjusting the bounce rate itself right away with this. In addition what you could do, if you want to go advanced is to write all this data to a custom metric as well so you're capturing the same idea. But that's more like a hack and nice hobby than I would say it's an actual solution that I would want to leverage in an enterprise setting.
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RE: Please take a look at my keyword usage
Mwah, this is just a personal opinion. But I would say for now you should be able to get away with this. Sometimes the information provided for a dance class provider isn't that much but overall it doesn't harm the page.
What I would look into for the long run though is the fact that you have these footer links that look a bit spammy: http://take.ms/jN6tJ
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RE: Invest in a Image Sitemap - Yes or No?
- Yes, the bigger the company the more I'd say it would be worth it to look into as you probably will start having issues with crawl budget and driving authority to certain places on your site.
- In most sites images might already be embedded in a normal sitemap, you can check out ours at: http://thenextweb.com/sitemap_index.xml.
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RE: Is it bad from an SEO perspective that cached AMP pages are hosted on domains other than the original publisher's?
Hi Brian,
Well, the AMP page will have a canonical URL leading back to the original page. This will take care of the credits to the original page.
Martijn.
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RE: Whatstuffwherebot user agent messing up Google Analytics
Hi Akira,
Have you enabled bot filtering as a setting in Google Analytics on a view level? If not, you could always add a filter on the property or account level to filter out the traffic if it has very common patterns as you're describing. Usually, I would just stay away, from filtering out this type of traffic though if you have large amounts of traffic as otherwise you might be doing more harm to your data long-term than helping it.
Martijn.
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RE: Microsoft IIS SEO tool claims I have no H1... It's not true.
It clearly has an H1 on the page. Maybe the tool can't handle the fact that the H1 has some extra attributes. I would use any other SEO scraper like ScreamingFrog to see if they're able to find the H1 on the page. Which is probably going to be the case, if so then I wouldn't worry at all about your IIS tool not seeing the H1.
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RE: Working around Dev Site
Hi George,
Maybe in addition to that make sure you have to enter HTTP Authentication to make sure that none of the pages on the domain are being crawled. Besides that I would indeed go with the recommendation from Lynn.
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RE: Too many wordpress redirects impact Rankings?
No, it shouldn't if you made sure that all the pages that you had before and that you have know will be redirected to the new pages that currently exist. In this case Google will make sure that the URLs are on the new location and if that's because of the redirects it shouldn't really hurt you. But there are a lot of things that can go wrong when setting up redirects, definitely if there are multiple.
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RE: Rel alternate implementing with x default
Hi Hitesh,
The examples as you presented them are both correct.