Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version.  I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards

Hi Google Analytics settings can geotarget to just one main location from what I can see. But is there a way to target the website to more than 1 location. The domain is currently a .co.uk so it is UK specific, and from my knowledge I understand that popular and well ranked pages in any country can rank outside of the geotargeted area. Aside from canonicalising new url's with relevant keywords, meta tagging new pages, and creating unique rich content tailored to countries is there anything else I can do, in your opinion? Thanks.

Hi According to a Moz Crawl, it looks like the Wordpress attachment pages from all image uploads are being indexed and seen as duplicate content..or..is it the Yoast sitemap causing it? I see 2 options in SEO Yoast: Redirect attachment URLs to parent post URL. Media...Meta Robots: noindex, follow I set it to (1) initially which didn't resolve the problem.  Then I set it to option (2) so that all images won't be indexed but search engines would still associate those images with their relevant posts and pages. However, I understand what both of these options (1) and (2) mean, but because I chose option 2, will that mean all of the images on the website won't stand a chance of being indexed in search engines and Google Images etc? As far as duplicate content goes, search engines can get confused and there are 2 ways for search engines
to reach the correct page content destination. But when eg Google makes the wrong choice a portion of traffic drops off (is lost hence errors) which then leaves the searcher frustrated, and this affects the seo and ranking of the site which worsens with time. My goal here is - I would like all of the web images to be indexed by Google, and for all of the image attachment pages to not be indexed at all (Moz shows the image attachment pages as duplicates and the referring site causing this is the sitemap url which Yoast creates) ; that sitemap url has been submitted to the search engines already and I will resubmit once I can resolve the attachment pages issues.. Please can you advise. Thanks.

Hi this is my first question in here I truly hope someone will be able to help. It's quite a detailed problem and I'd love to be able to fix it through your kind help. It regards htaccess files and robot.txt files and 902 errors. In October I created a WordPress website from what was previously a non-WordPress site it was quite dated. I had built the new site on a sub-domain I created on the existing site so that the live site could remain live whilst I created on the subdomain.  The site I built on the subdomain is now live but I am concerned about the existence of the old htaccess files and robots txt files and wonder if I should just delete the old ones to leave the just the new on the new site. I created new htaccess and robots.txt files on the new site and have left the old htaccess files there. Just to mention that all the old content files are still sat on the server under a folder called 'old files' so I am assuming that these aren't affecting matters. I access the htaccess and robots.txt files by clicking on 'public html' via ftp I did a Moz crawl and was astonished to 902 network error saying that it wasn't possible to crawl the site, but then I was alerted by Moz later on to say that the report was ready..I see 641 crawl errors ( 449 medium priority | 192 high priority | Zero low priority ).  Please see attached image. Each of the errors seems to have status code 200; this seems to be applying to mainly the images on each of the pages: eg domain.com/imagename . The new website is built around the 907 Theme which has some page sections on the home page, and parallax sections on the home page and throughout the site. To my knowledge the content and the images on the pages are not duplicated because I have made each page as unique and original as possible.  The report says 190 pages have been duplicated so I have no clue how this can be or how to approach fixing this. Since October when the new site was launched, approx 50% of incoming traffic has dropped off at the home page and that is still the case, but the site still continues to get new traffic according to Google Analytics statistics. However Bing Yahoo and Google show a low level of Indexing and exposure which may be indicative of the search engines having difficulty crawling the site.  In Google Analytics in Webmaster Tools, the screen text reports no crawl errors. W3TC is a WordPress caching plugin which I installed just a few days ago to speed up page speed, so I am not querying anything here about W3TC unless someone spots that this might be a problem, but like I said there have been problems re traffic dropping off when visitors arrive on the home page. The Yoast SEO plugin is being used. I have included information about the htaccess and robots.txt files below. The pages on the subdomain are pointing to the live domain as has been explained to me by the person who did the site migration. I'd like the site to be free from pages and files that shouldn't be there and I feel that the site needs a clean up as well as knowing if the robots.txt and htaccess files that are included in the old site should actually be there or if they should be deleted... ok here goes with the information in the files. Site 1) refers to the current website. Site 2) refers to the subdomain. Site 3 refers to the folder that contains all the old files from the old non-WordPress file structure. **************** 1) htaccess on the current site: ********************* BEGIN W3TC Browser Cache <ifmodule mod_deflate.c=""><ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary</ifmodule>
<ifmodule mod_filter.c="">AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/x-component application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript text/x-js text/html text/richtext image/svg+xml text/plain text/xsd text/xsl text/xml image/x-icon application/json
<ifmodule mod_mime.c=""># DEFLATE by extension
AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css htm html xml</ifmodule></ifmodule></ifmodule> END W3TC Browser Cache BEGIN W3TC CDN <filesmatch ".(ttf|ttc|otf|eot|woff|font.css)$"=""><ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"</ifmodule></filesmatch> END W3TC CDN BEGIN W3TC Page Cache core <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteRule .* - [E=W3TC_ENC:_gzip]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} w3tc_preview [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [E=W3TC_PREVIEW:_preview]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =""
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !(comment_author|wp-postpass|w3tc_logged_out|wordpress_logged_in|wptouch_switch_toggle) [NC]
RewriteCond "%{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html%{ENV:W3TC_ENC}" -f
RewriteRule .* "/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html%{ENV:W3TC_ENC}" [L]</ifmodule> END W3TC Page Cache core BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress ....(((I have 7 301 redirects in place for old page url's to link to new page url's))).... #Force non-www:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] **************** 1) robots.txt on the current site: ********************* User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://domain.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml **************** 2) htaccess in the subdomain folder: ********************* Switch rewrite engine off in case this was installed under HostPay. RewriteEngine Off SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 53 DirectoryIndex index.cgi index.php BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /WPnewsiteDee/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /subdomain/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress **************** 2) robots.txt in the subdomain folder: ********************* this robots.txt file is empty **************** 3) htaccess in the Old Site folder: ********************* Deny from all *************** 3) robots.txt in the Old Site folder: ********************* User-agent: *
Disallow: / I have tried to be thorough so please excuse the length of my message here. I really hope one of you great people in the Moz community can help me with a solution. I have SEO knowledge I love SEO but I have not come across this before and I really don't know where to start with this one. Best Regards to you all and thank you for reading this. moz-site-crawl-report-image_zpsirfaelgm.jpg