We have a site hosted on SquareSpace:  Roomhance.com

Going through the on-page optimizaton tool, we noticed that the H1 tags weren't fully optimized.

If you click on view source on the page, it shows 2 H1 tags on the home page:

id="logoImage"><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="html-attribute-name">="</a>/">src="//static1.squarespace.com/static/5bcca055ab1a62465f5b9ee7/t/5c18feb270a6adf771765799/1588613682225/?format=1500w" alt="Virtual Staging For Real Estate | Roomhance" />

style="text-align:center;white-space:pre-wrap;">Virtual Staging

The 2nd one shown above it the H1 tag we want.  I'm wondering if the H1 tag in the logo image is hurting us for SEO?  Can't figure out how to modify it in SquareSpace.

Martijn -

Thanks for your reply.  I tried the code you provided, however it still provided a 404 error.   I was able to get the following to work properly - any drawbacks to doing it this way?

RewriteRule ^mono(.*)$ - [NC,R=410,L]

The browser now shows the following anytime there is the word "mono" immediately after "sitename.com/"

The requested resource
/mono.php
is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource.

Additionally, a 410 Gone error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Thanks for the detailed response.  Yes, there are some negative-SEO backlinks to some of the URLs created during the spam injection.  I've seen a few backlinks from other forum sites to our site to one of the spam created URLs which has hurt our rankings such as the following URL created on our site:

sitename.com/mono.php?best-resume-writing-service-for-it-professionals

I was confused by the following in your response:  "If you can serve the 410s on a custom 410 page which also gives the Meta no-index directive, that will be a very strong signal to Google indeed that those aren't proper pages or fit for indexation"

• Is that all done view the htaccess file?  Code? Or is the meta no-index directive done in the robots.txt?- custom 410 page?  I've seen some 404 pages, but not custom 410 pages.  Would that be similar to a new 404 page?

Thanks for your response.

We had a spam injection a few months ago.  We successfully cleaned up the site and resubmitted to google.  I recently received a notification showing a spike in 404 errors.

All of the URLS have a common word at the beginning injected via the spam:

sitename.com/mono
sitename.com/mono.php?buy-good-essays
sitename.com/mono.php?professional-paper-writer

There's about 100 total URLS with the same syntax with the word "mono" in them.  Based on my research, it seems that it would be best to serve a 410.  I wanted to know what the line of HTACCESS code would be to do that in bulk for any URL that has the word "mono" after the sitename.com/

i'm first going to see what happens if I just upload a sitemap with http URLs since there wasn't a sitemap in webmaster tools from before.  Will give you the update then.

Paul that does make sense - i'll add the SSL certificate back, and then redirect from https to http via the htaccess file.

GR - thanks for the response.

Given our site is just 65 pages, would it make sense to just put all of the site's "https" URLs in the robots.txt file as "noindex" now rather than waiting for all the pages to get indexed as "https" and then remove them?

And then upload a sitemap to webmaster tools with the URLS as "http://"?

VW

We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized.  As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site.  However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet.  So, those iframes weren't displaying the content.

As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for.

However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors.  The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https.  I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https.

My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?

We'll be uploading a sitemap to google search console for a new site.  We have ~70-80 static pages that don't really chance much (some may change as we modify a couple pages over the course of the year).  But we have a separate blog on the site which we will be adding content to frequently.

How can I set up the sitemap to make sure that "future" blog posts will get picked up and indexed.

I used a sitemap generator and it picked up the first blog post that's on the site, but am wondering what happens with future ones?  I don't want to resubmit a new sitemap each time that has a link to a new blog post we posted.

Thank you, that seems to have addressed that issue!

Sure, here you go:  www.RiverNorthCondos.com

We recently launched a new site that doesn't have any ads, but in Webmaster Tools under "Fetch as Google" under the rendering of the page I see:

Googlebot couldn't get all resources for this page. Here's a list:

URL	Type	Reason	Severity
https://static.doubleclick.net/instream/ad_status.js	Script	Blocked	Low	robots.txt
https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/id	AJAX	Blocked	Low	robots.txt

Not sure where that would be coming from as we don't have any ads running on our site?

Also, it's stating the the fetch is a "partial" fetch.

Any insight is appreciated.

I recently set up a new site and set the "preferred" domain in Google Webmasters to show URLs WITHOUT the WWW for google search purposes.

In the confirmation email from google, this confused me:

"This setting defines which host - www or not - should be considered the canonical host when indexing your site."

In the website, we have cononical URLS at the top of every page in the header, but still have the WWW in those.  Any issues with that?

We've been working on a site for the past couple months and going to be launching in a couple weeks.

How long does it take for Google to establish a "stabilized" ranking for the site and various pages?  The main homepage will have its targeted keywords and each product page will have its own targeted keywords.  We have about 100 total pages for the site.

I know rankings may fluctuate initially but trying to get an idea of when the rankings are stabilized before we start working on the ongoing SEO like earning backlinks, changing on-page optimization, etc to be able to track changes in rankings over time.