Hey Devanur
please see our responses below:
Hi Alex,
Thanks for the info. Here are few issues that I observed with the website and I am very confident that if you can address and fix these, you should come out of the issue with flying colors:
1. URL canonicalization issue: Both the www and non-www versions of your website URLs return an HTTP header status code 200. You should ideally make all the non-www URLs to be redirected to their respective www versions via a 301 permanent redirection immediately.
**Response: We are asking the developer to correct this. **
2. Inconsistent URL structure: Your website is still using 'underscrores (_) in the URLs as word separators. There are underscores along with the recommended hyphens (-). This inconsistent usage can sometimes lead to issues. So please replace all the underscores with hyphens.
Response: This problem only occurs in a few pages where special characters have been replaced with underscores – probably in 4% of product pages. I can’t see that this has an impact on the SEO?
3. Google PageSpeed check: When I ran Google PageSpeed test on some of the URLs from your website along with the ones that you gave, I found the score varying between, 28 and 60. Please look at the recommendations that the PageSpeed tool gives and try to address the issues (especially the ones like, "Reduce blocking resources". For more: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rtt#PreferAsyncResources)
I suggest you to please run Google PageSpeed check for some of the URLs.
Note: The URLs from your website that are present in the Google's index may also give similar issues when run through PageSpeed test. This should not make you not addressing these issues.
Response: We will ask the developers to improve performance specifically with the highest value things that are showing up in Google PageSpeed check.
4. Heavy pages leading to higher page loading times and response times:
Many of the pages that I checked are more than 1.3 MB in size which is very huge.This can be a really big problem most of the times that will not only impacts your website from search engines' perspective but also leads to bad user experience which ultimately affects the SEO of your website. You can use tools like gtmetrix.com and fix the issues shown by them.
Response: We will ask the developers to improve performance specifically with the highest value things that are showing up in gtmetrix.com suggestions.
5. Repetition of keywords or phrases in page titles and URLs:
This issue might look like an over optimization effort and should be fixed as early as possible.
For example: www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/acqua-di-parma/acqua-di-parma-acqua-di-parma-collezione-barbiere-shaving-cream-75ml_25oz
If you look at the above page, the phrase, 'acqua-di-parma' is present twice in both the URL and page title. This is something that you need to review seriously as it looks like keyword repetition that is not good from an SEO stand point.
Response: This occurs with approx 300 product pages out of 40,000 so a very small percentage. We will clean this up when we update our data. I can’t see that this has any impact on SEO considering the small no? Note however that every product page is constructed as follows:
www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/<brand< a=""> name>/<brand name="" +="" product="">, e.g.</brand></brand<>
http://www.wheretobuybeauty.com.au/floris/floris-royal-arms-diamond-edition-eau-de-parfum-spray-100ml_34oz
Is there some risk that this will look like over optimisation?
By the way, your robots.txt file is clean and it should not be causing these issues.
Please have the issues mentioned above as soon as possible and you should be out of the woods soon after that.
I wish you good luck Alex.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi.
