What coding works for SEO and what coding doesn't?
-
Hi:
I recently learned about inline styles and that Google started penalizing sites for that in October. Then I was told that Wix and Flash don't work (or work well) either for SEO as the engines won't crawl them (I think). Does anyone know of a blog that goes over everything that doesn't work so that I could recognize it when I look at someone's code. Anyone know of such a resource?
Cheers,
Wes
-
Hi Mark:
Thanks very much for your note. I tried something similar the SEO Browser, and it shows you what the search engines see. Very useful.
Cheers, Wes.
-
The general rule of using HTML for everything is one that I would follow. If you're unsure if something is crawlable, try downloading the web developer plugin for chrome http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/. Then disable javascript and plugins and refresh the page. Any content that can't be seen then probably won't be seen by search engines either.
-
Hi Wesley,
I would recommend going over a couple of technical SEO audits you can find on the web. They give a clear insight in what SEOs are looking for when doing a technical audit for SEO. It mostly contains way more than only checking for Flash or Wix sites that hide or dont' display any content in their HTML.
-
Thanks very much, I'll definitely try the adwords and the cached versions.
Cheers,
wes
-
Basically a web page has to be crawlable. If an engine can't crawl it than you don't exist. SEO 101, use html for all text. Google has made strides to try to understand what sites are about but to keep it easy for crawlers use html.
As for a tool you can use googles adwords tool and add the url into "landing page" and see how some of the site gets crawled by a simple bot. You can also look at google cached versions of sites and look at the "text only" options, that should give you a good view of what the crawlers see.
Hope that helps.
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
-
I need help with redirecting chain to another page and 301, I don't understand on how to fix
Redirect Chain <label>What it is:</label> Your page is redirecting to a page that is redirecting to a page that is redirecting to a page... and so on. Learn more about redirection best practices. <label>Why it's an issue:</label> Every redirect hop loses link equity and offers a poor user experience, which will negatively impact your rankings. <label>How to fix it:</label> Chiaryn says: “Redirect chains are often caused when multiple redirect rules pile up, such as redirecting a 'www' to non-www URL or a non-secure page to a secure/https: page. Look for any recurring chains that could be rewritten as a single rule. Be particularly careful with 301/302 chains in any combination, as the 302 in the mix could disrupt the ability of the 301 to pass link equity.” This is not helping me I don't understand about the 301 do I use the www.jasperartisanjewelry.com or the /jasperartisanjewelry.com I'm confused
Technical SEO | | geanmitch0 -
Specific pages won't index
I have a few pages on my site that Google won't index, and I can't understand why. I've looked into possible issues with Robots, noindex, redirects, canonicals, and Search Console rules. I've got nothing. Example: I want this page to index https://tour.franchisebusinessreview.com/services/franchisee-satisfaction-surveys/ When I Google the full URL, I get results including the non-subdomain homepage, and various pages on the subdomain, including a child page of the page I want, but not the page itself. Any ideas? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | ericstites0 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
What should I do with a large number of 'pages not found'?
One of my client sites lists millions of products and 100s or 1000s are de-listed from their inventory each month and removed from the site (no longer for sale). What is the best way to handle these pages/URLs from an SEO perspective? There is no place to use a 301. 1. Should we implement 404s for each one and put up with the growing number of 'pages not found' shown in Webmaster Tools? 2. Should we add them to the Robots.txt file? 3. Should we add 'nofollow' into all these pages? Or is there a better solution? Would love some help with this!
Technical SEO | | CuriousCatDigital0 -
SEO Issues
Hi, We have created a moving cost calculator tools and other moving company can added this tools their website. This is the code: [ <iframe src="http: www.enakliyat.com.tr="" fiyat-hesapla.aspx"="" height="554" width="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:none;"> ] when the other moving company added this code their websites, tool also works on the site and the tool make the referrals traffic our site.** Is it right using this method?**</iframe src="http:> http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-fiyatlari-hesaplama/ here is the tool
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Google doesn't rank the best page of our content for keywords. How to fix that?
Hello, We have a strange issue, which I think is due to legacy. Generally, we are a job board for students in France: http://jobetudiant.net (jobetudiant == studentjob in french) We rank quite well (2nd or 3rd) on "Job etudiant <city>", with the right page (the one that lists all job offers in that city). So this is great.</city> Now, for some reason, Google systematically puts another of our pages in front of that: the page that lists the jobs offers in the 'region' of that city. For example, check this page. the first link is a competitor, the 3rd is the "right" link (the job offers in annecy), but the 2nd link is the list of jobs in Haute Savoie (which is the 'departement'- equiv. to county) in which Annecy is... that's annoying. Is there a way to indicate Google that the 3rd page makes more sense for this search? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jgenesto0 -
When I look in OpenSiteExplorer, it says that it hasn't followed any of my internal links... WTF?
When I look at my site in open site explorer, it says it has followed 1 internal link.. I know that opensiteexplorer has updated, because my domain rank has changed since the last time i looked. I figured it just hadn't fully crawled and indexed my links, but considering I have had an account here for over a month, and the site is over 7 months old, I doubt that is the case. My site is www.ontracparts.com can anybody help me here?? Thanks, Tyler
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Does adding Tool Tips to a site hurt it's SEO?
I'm wanting to add tool tips to my site as it's intended for non-technical people that are wanting high tech equipment and services. I thought that by adding tool tips, I could clear any confusion they may have about a particular word right there rather then them having to search for what it means. I did some research online and saw that it may hurt SEO ratings but wanted to verify here first before deciding.
Technical SEO | | sDevik0