GWT and html improvements
-
Hi all
I am dealing with duplicate content issues on webmaster tool but I still don't understand what's happening as the number of issues keeps changing. Last week the duplicate meta description were 232, then went down to 170 now they are back to 218.
Same story for duplicate meta title, 110, then 70 now 114. These ups and downs have been going on for a while and in the past two weeks I stopped changing things to see what would have happened.
Also the issues reported on GWT are different from the ones shown in the Crawl Diagnostic on Moz.
Furthermore, most URL's have been changed (more than a year ago) and 301 redirects have been implemented but Google doesn't seem to recognize them.
Could anyone help me with this?
Also can you suggest a tool to check redirects?
Cheers
Oscar
-
Thank you guys for your answers, I will look into it, and try to solve the problems.
I think many pages are self canonicalized, but I see that many URL's haven't been redirect to the new ones so I will start fixing the redirects.
In the top pages report though shows just the new URL's.
Anyway, I will keep you update on this as I am not too sure how to tackle this.
Thanks a lot.
Cheers
-
Had a few minutes and wanted to help out...
Google doesn't always index/crawl the same # of pages week over week, so this could be the cause of your indexing/report problem with regards to the differences you are seeing. As well, if you are working on the site and making changes, you should be seeing these numbers improve (depending on site size of course
Enterprise sites might take more time to go through and fix up, so these numbers might look like they are staying at the same rate - if your site is huge
To help with your 301 issue - I would definitely look up and download SEO Screaming Frog. It's a great tool to use to identify potential problems on the site. Very easy to download and use. Might take some getting used too, but the learning curve isn't very hard. Once you use it a few times to help diagnose problems, or see things you are working on improve through multiple crawling. It will allow you to see some other things that might not be working and get to planning fixes there too
As well, make sure to review your .htaccess file and how you have written up your 301's. If you are using Apache, this is a great resource to help you along. Read that 301 related article here
Make sure to manually check all 301 redirects using the data/URL's from the SEO Screaming Frog tool. Type them in and visually see if you get redirected to the new page/URL. If you do, it's working correctly, and I'm sure it will only be a matter of time before Google fixes their index and displays the right URL or 301. You can also check this tool for verifying your 301 redirects using the old URL and see how it performs (here)
Hope some of this helps to get you off to working/testing and fixing! Keep me posted if you are having trouble or need someone to run a few tests from another location.
Cheers!
-
We had the same issue on one of our sites. Here is how I understand it after looking into it and talking to some other SEOs.
The duplicate content Title and Meta description seem to lag any 301 redirects or canonicals that you might implement. We went through a massive site update and had 301s in place for over a year with still "duplicates" showing up in GWT for old and new URLs. Just to be clear, we had the old URLs 301ing to the new ones for over a year.
What we found too, was that if you look into GWT under the top landing pages, we would have old URLs listed there too.
The solution was to put self canonicalizing links on all pages that were not canonicaled to another one. This cleaned thing up over the next month or so. I had checked my 301 redirects. I removed all links to old content on my site, etc.
What is still find are a few more "duplicates" in GWT. This happens on two types of URLs
-
We have to change a URL for some reason - we put in the 301. It takes a while for Google to pick that up and apply it to the duplicate content report. This is even when we see it update in the index pretty quick. As, I said, the duplicate report seems to lag other reports.
-
We still have some very old URLs that it has taken Google a while to "circle back" and check them, see the 301 and the self canonical and fix.
I am honestly flabbergasted at how Google is so slow about this and surprised. I have talked with a bunch of people just to make sure we are not doing anything wrong with our 301s etc. So, while I understand what is happening, and see it improving, I still dont have a good "why" this happens when technically, I have everything straight (as far as I know). The self canonical was the solution, but it seems that a 301 should be enough. I know there are still old links to old content out there, that is the one thing I cannot update, but not sure why.
It is almost like Google has an old sitemap it keeps crawling, but again, I have that cleared out in Google as well
If you double check all your stuff and if you find anything new, I would love to know!
Cheers!
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it detrimental to make a site wide change from .html to .shtml (all pages)?
We have an established website with decent domain authority. My developer inherited the site from another developer and is recommending that we convert all pages from the .html to the .shmtl From an SEO perspective, would this hurt us? Also, if this is not an issue, would updating the canonical help us, or does the canonical setting only deal with the "www." vs. "non-www"? Any insights will be appreciated greatly. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | BVREID0 -
Ignore these external links reported in GWT?
Taking a long, Ace-Ventura-like breath here. This question is loaded. Here we go: No manual actions reported against my client's site in GWT HOWEVER, a link: operator search for external links to my client's website shows NO links in results. That seems like a very bad omen to me. OSE shows 13 linking domains, but not the one that's listed in the next bullet point. Issue: In Google Webmaster Tools, I noticed 1,000+ external links to my client's website all coming from riddim-donmagazine.com (there are a small handful of other domains listed, but this one stuck out for the large quantity of links coming from this domain) Those external links all point to two URLs on my client's website. I have no knowledge of any campaigns run by client that would use this other domain (or any schemes for that matter) It appears that this website riddim-donmagazine.com has been suspended by hostgator All of the links were first discovered last year (dates vary but basically August through December 2013) There have not been any newly discovered links from this website reported by GWT since those 2013 dates All of the external links are /? based. Example: http://riddim-donmagazine.com/?author=1&paged=31 If I run that link in preceding bullet point through http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php, or any others from riddim-donmagazine.com those external links return 302 status. My best guess is at one time the client was running an advertising program and this website may have been on that network. One of the external links points to an ad page on the client's website.
Technical SEO | | EEE3
(web.archive.org confirms this is a WordPress site and that it's coverage of Bronx news could trigger an ad for my client or make it related to my client's website when it comes to demographics.) Believe me, this externally linked domain is only a small problem in comparison with the rest of my client's issues (mainly they've changed domains, then they changed website vendors, etc., etc.), but I did want to ask about that one externally linked domain. Whew.Thanks in advance for insights/thoughts/advice!0 -
GWT False Reporting or GoogleBot has weird crawling ability?
Hi I hope someone can help me. I have launched a new website and trying hard to make everything perfect. I have been using Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to ensure everything is as it should be but the crawl errors being reported do not match my site. I mark them as fixed and then check again the next day and it reports the same or similar errors again the next day. Example: http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/ (this would be a correct structure for the site). GWT reports: http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/category/article/ 404 (It does not exist, never has and never will) I have been to the pages listed to be linking to this page and it does not have the links in this manner. I have checked the page source code and all links from the given pages are correct structure and it is impossible to replicate this type of crawl. This happens accross most of the site, I have a few hundred pages all ending in a trailing slash and most pages of the site are reported in this manner making it look like I have close to 1000, 404 errors when I am not able to replicate this crawl using many different methods. The site is using a htacess file with redirects and a rewrite condition. Rewrite Condition: Need to redirect when no trailing slash RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
Technical SEO | | baldnut
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.(html|shtml)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /$1/ [L,R=301] The above condition forces the trailing slash on folders. Then we are using redirects in this manner: Redirect 301 /article.html http://www.domain.com/article/ In addition to the above we had a development site whilst I was building the new site which was http://dev.slimandsave.co.uk now this had been spidered without my knowledge until it was too late. So when I put the site live I left the development domain in place (http://dev.domain.com) and redirected it like so: <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl:s] RewriteRule ^ http%{ENV:protossl}://www.domain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]</ifmodule> Is there anything that I have done that would cause this type of redirect 'loop' ? Any help greatly appreciated.\0 -
Html Improvements Missing title tags
Hi, Webmaster suddently today i could see 100's of posts showing title tags are missing Html Improvements Missing title tags https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/html-suggestions?hl=en&siteUrl= Please see image Can anyone help on why this happened suddenly and what is this and whats the solution http://imgur.com/zHsXVJN Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Correct Redirect method for switching pages from .html to /pretty urls/
I have a customer that has all his site files as .html extensions and i'm going to rebuild this site into a wordpress site for easier management, regarding the new permalink structure, should i just do a 301 redirect on this?
Technical SEO | | tgr0ss0 -
No improvement from Google penalty despite a lot of work
Hi Everyone, i hope someone can help. Our site www.danbro.co.uk suddenly dropped across all keyphrases and even our brand name on 12th April. We receieved a notification of unnatural link building and so the problem was obvious. Since then we have removed a number of old blog links, forum links that we have built up over a number of years. Once removed we sent a reconsideration. There are still a number of links we are trying (but sometimes to no avail) to remove. It is quite frustrating as we do have a number of high quality links on really relevant sites and we do update our content on a regular basis. Does anyone have any other solutions of what we can be doing? changing the domain name is not an option as it is the brand name. any help is much appreciated
Technical SEO | | Townpages0 -
Root vs. Index.html
Should I redirect index.html to "/" or vice versa? Which is better for duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | DavetheExterminator0 -
Converse.com - flash and html version of site... bad idea?
I have a questions regarding Converse.com. I realize this ecommerce site is needs a lot of seo help. There’s plenty of obvious low hanging seo fruit. On a high level, I see a very large SEO issue with the site architecture. The site is a full page flash experience that uses a # in the URL. The search engines pretty much see every flash page as the home page. To help with issue a HTML version of the site was created. Google crawls the Home Page - Converse.com http://www.converse.com Marimekko category page (flash version) http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko Marimekko category page (html version, need to have flash disabled) http://www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko Here is the example of the issue. This site has a great post featuring Helen Marimekko shoes http://www.coolmompicks.com/2011/03/finnish_foot_prints.php The post links to the flash Marimekko catagory page (http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko) as I would expect (ninety something percent of visitors to converse.com have the required flash plug in). So the flash page is getting the link back juice. But the flash page is invisible to google. When I search for “converse marimekko” in google, the marimekko landing page is not in the top 500 results. So I then searched for “converse.com marimekko” and see the HTML version of the landing page listed as the 4<sup>th</sup> organic result. The result has the html version of the page. When I click the link I get redirected to the flash Marimekko category page but if I do not have flash I go to the html category page. ----- Marimekko - Converse All Star Marimekko Price: $85, Jack Purcell Helen Marimekko Price: $75 ... www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko - Cached So my issues are… Is converse skating on thin SEO ice by having a HTML and flash version of their site/product pages? Do you think it’s a huge drag on seo rankings to have a large % of back links linking to flash pages when google is crawling the html pages? Any recommendations on to what to do about this? Thanks, SEOsurfer
Technical SEO | | seosurfer-2883190