How to Find and Fix Common Technical SEO Issues

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D I G I T A L@badams

Find and FixCommon Technical

SEO Issues

Webpromo Expert Webinar

19 January 2016

Barry Adams

POLEMIC


Barry Adams

POLEMIC


Agenda:

1. Server-side Technical SEO

2. On-site Technical SEO

3. Technical SEO for International Websites

4. Q & A

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Server-side Technical SEO

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Crawl Optimisation

• Minimising wasted crawl budget

Crawl Budget = the maximum amount of time a search engine spider will spend crawling your website before it gives up.

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Crawl Sources

• Site Crawl

• XML Sitemaps

• Inbound Links

• DNS Records

• Domain Registrations

• Browsing Data

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Crawl Waste

DeepCrawl report

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Crawl Issue: URL Duplication

• http://website.com

• http://www.website.com

• http://www.website.com/index.php

• http://website.com/index.php

• http://www.website.com/category

• http://www.website.com/category/

• http://website.com/category

• http://website.com/category/

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Solving URL duplication: WWW

• Apache .htaccess rules:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website\.com

RewriteRule (.*) http://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This redirects all requests to http://website.com to http://www.website.com

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Trailing Slash Redirect


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

This redirects all requests to /category to the version with the trailing slash: /category/

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HTTPS Redirect


RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^443$

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.website.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This redirects all standard HTTP requests to the HTTPS version of the website

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SSL Certificate Quality

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

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Learn more about Apache .htaccess:

• http://www.htaccess-guide.com/

• http://www.htaccesstools.com/

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HTTP Status Codes

The most important ones:

200 OKeverything is fine, here is your content

404 Not Foundthe page you are trying to view doesn’t exist

301 Permanent Redirectthe page you are trying to view has moved permanently,here’s the new URL

302 Temporary Redirectthe page you are trying to view has moved temporarily,here is the new URL

500 Server Errorthere’s been a massive fuck up, I can’t serve you this page

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On-Site Technical SEO

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XML Sitemaps

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Optimise your XML sitemap

• Ensure your sitemap contains final URLs only

• Minimise non-200 status codes

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Use Multiple Sitemaps

• Google says max 50.000 URLs

Nick Eubanks case study shows 35.000 is optimal

Source: http://seoauv.com/increase-traffic/

http://seoauv.com/increase-traffic/

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Mismatched Canonicals

• All URLs in XML sitemap should be final canonical URLs only

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Always use Canonicals

• Duplicate URLs can originate from various sources…

http://www.website.com/page1.html

http://www.website.com/page1.html?utm_source=buffer&

utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=seo

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Use Full URLs in Canonicals

<link rel=“canonical” href=“/page1.html”>

<link rel=“canonical”

href=“www.website.com/page1.html”>

<link rel=“canonical”

href=“https://www.website.com/page1.html”>

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Use Canonicals wisely…

• “rel=canonical” is primarily for index issues

It is not a fix for crawl waste

Search engines need to see the canonical tag before they can act on it

Ergo, pages need to be crawled before rel=canonical has any effect

Ditto with meta noindex tags

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Internal Redirects

• Find redirects with Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl

• Internal links should all be 200 OK

• Flat site structure

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Pagination

• Potential for massive crawl waste

Especially when combined with sorting

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Optimise Paginated Lists

• Show more products per page

• Use pagination meta tags;<link rel="prev" href="http://www.domain.com/category/?page=2" />

<link rel="next" href="http://www.domain.com/category/?page=4" />

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com/category/?page=all" />

Googlebot will deprioritise deeper paginated pages

• Block sorting parameters in robots.txt;User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /*?order=*

Noindex: /*?order=*

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GSC Robots.txt Tester

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Alternative: X-Robots-Tag

• Special HTTP status code intended for crawlers

• Implemented in Apache .htaccess file:

<FilesMatch ".pdf$">

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"

</FilesMatch>

More info: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag

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Faceted Navigation

• Risk of crawl waste & index inflation

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Dealing with Faceted Navigation

1. Block facet URL parameters in robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /*attribute=*

Noindex: /*attribute=*

2. Tag facet links with “rel=nofollow”

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JavaScript & Faceted Navigation

• ‘Hiding’ facets in JavaScript does not work

Google will execute JS and can follow embedded links

Don’t block JavaScript & CSS in robots.txt!

• JavaScript can add load time

Fast load speed is crucial

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Optimise Load Speed

• Crawl budget = time

• Fast website = more pages crawled in same amount of time

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WebPageTest.org

• Time to First Byte

• Lightweight pages

• Caching

• Compression

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Code Bloat

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Structured Data

• Schema.org markup

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JSON-LD Markup

• In the <head> section

Separate from body code

Easier to implement

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Google Tag Manager JSON-LD

• Use GTM data layer macros to inject JSON-LD schema.org code in your product pages

Source: http://www.swellpath.com/2015/03/7-steps-to-pushing-json-structured-data-using-google-tag-manager/

http://www.swellpath.com/2015/03/7-steps-to-pushing-json-structured-data-using-google-tag-manager/

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Structured Data Testing Tool

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

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Expired Pages

• Google’s advice: serve 404 Not Found

Downside: potential loss of link value

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tz7Eexwp_A

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My Advice

• Keep the page up

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High-churn Ecommerce

• Products with a limited lifespan, potentially thousands of new pages every week

Online auctions / ‘… for sale’ classified sites / etc

301-redirect old URL to most relevant new URL

Minimum 180 days

Serve 410 (or 404) on old URL after 180 days

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Technical SEO forInternational Websites

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International Domains

• Pick the right domain; Generic TLDs: .com, .org, .net, .info, …

ccTLDs: .co.uk, .ie, .de, .fr, .it, .nl, …

• Generic domains can be geo-targeted with Google Search Console

• Country-code domains will be assumed to target that countryIt’s almost impossible to get a .it website to rank in

google.co.uk

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Google Search Console

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Website Structure

• Subdirectories:

website.com/gb

website.com/it

• Subdomains:

gb.website.com

it.website.com

Verify separately in Google Search Console and set the geo-target

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Country & Language

www.website.com/be-fr/

www.website.com/be-nl/

www.website.com/be-de/

Use official ISO country & language codes where possible

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HTML Language Tag

• Use the ‘lang’ attribute:

• Don’t forget to change when you launch your international version!

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HREFLANG Meta Tags

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ie"

hreflang="en-ie" />

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ca"

hreflang="en-ca" />

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au"

hreflang="en-au" />

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en"

hreflang="en" />

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-

default" />

More info: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

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Google Search Console

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Questions?

[email protected]

www.polemicdigital.com

@polemicdigital

@badams

How to Find and Fix Common Technical SEO Issues

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