Ahhh the lightbulb just went off! Thanks a bunch

Hello!

Although 404's will eventually stop being crawled by Google, having too many at once can negatively affect your rankings. The  most important thing is that you do not want to be linking to these 404s anywhere from within your site. If so, you want to definitely remove those links.

If I have one or two 404s in my crawl errors, I typically will just leave them be and wait for them to be dropped out of being indexed. Some other solutions I've utilized are:

1. Make an engaging 404 page so that when users find the page they will be encouraged to stay on the website. Having a search box or some of the most popular links on the page is a good place to start

2. 301 redirect the pages to relevant pages that do exist. This will help your link juice flow and will make for a good user experience since they are reaching a relevant page.

Hope that helps!

Hey David

Once you publish a page/post in WordPress and submit a sitemap, you are stuck with those pages. I've experienced this problem a lot as I use WordPress often. Once you trash a page there and delete it permanently, it's not stored anywhere in the WordPress CMS. They are just reading as 404s since they existed and now no longer exist.

As stated above, just make sure you are not linking to your trashed page anywhere in your site.

I've done a couple things with 404 Pages on my WordPress sites:

1. Make an awesome 404 page so that people will stay on the site if they found your 404 page on accident. Google will eventually stop crawling 404s so this is a good temporary way to engage users.

2. 301 Redirect the 404s to relevant pages. This helps keep your link juice and also helps with the user experience (since they are reaching a relevant page)

Hope that helps!

Hello

While there are good reasons to validate your code, it does not directly affect your rankings. Matt Cutts talks about this in a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg

Validation does give insight into your development needs and will help you to improve user experience. However broken code won't take away from good content and that is primarily what search engines are looking for.

Indeed! I'd be more concerned as a developer that there are glitches even if it won't affect SEO. Bad business

This is an interesting question… I did some exploring on my Google business page and researched what was showing up in the SERPs…turns out what's there isn't what I want either! So this is how I'm trying to fix it but I think it will take time to register changes…

On the left side drop down of my page I selected "My Business." On the dashboard there's two photos and next to it is a "+5" box that I assumed would bring me to all my photos when I clicked it. It brought me to a page with a pop up that said "Map & Search Photos… When a user searches for your business on Google Maps or Google Search, these photos will appear alongside the rest of your business information." It's here that you can add, edit, and delete what shows up!

Thanks for asking the question…never would have learned this without it!

Exactly…. Google is the first one that comes to mind!

Hmm…

I would just remove the one photo that you don't want to see there and leave a bunch in that you would be ok with. That's what I'm doing. I've been scouring the internet to see what would make Google choose one over another but I can't seem to find anything. Weird…

The only other idea I had was maybe it is dependent upon what the image file is named?? Like if the image name is more relevant to the brand and search it would be chosen before something that was named something arbitrary, such as "logo-1.jpg"

I'm still not entirely sure about how your site is structured but I'll give it a shot…

Firstly, the noindex tag is only for pages. It tells the crawl to not index an entire page and stops it from ranking. That tag is meant for the section of the page. Nofollow tags are found within the link and are meant to stop the transfer of page authority…so you are essentially telling the crawler bots that the links are external and/or not totally relevant/trustworthy. Nofollow shouldn't be used really on internal links within your site pages because you want to spread the page rank and authority and receive the SEO benefits of that.

It's probably telling you there is a problem because you are essentially stopping the flow of link juice within your site and from sharing page rank and authority with other trustworthy/relevant sites.

So why have you made them nofollow in the first place? Maybe you can assess why and where to use the nofollow so that it is beneficial. I guess it's not necessarily a "problem" …but you are not receiving any possible benefits from limiting your nofollow links.

Hope that helps!

Hello!

I would definitely suggest disallowing these pages from being indexed in your robots file. These 120 pages will be considered duplicate content, and will most likely will also be duplicate titles and meta descriptions. Duplicates of any kind is a huge SEO problem.

Once you edit your robots file, you will not need to do anything in your webmaster tools. The site will be crawled according to your robots file.

Another idea… depending on your URL structure, you may be able to use canonical tags to stop multiple pages that are seen as duplicates from being crawled. That way you won't have to completely stop the indexing of these pages by disallowing them through the robots file.

Hope that helps!

Ahh ok I see now.

Even though you have a nofollow on your link in the navigation from your url to your wiki, the pages will still be indexed! Even if the links are not being followed by search engines they are still being indexed by them-just want to make that clear. Also, it's important to note that even if Google reads a nofollow tag they still have an option to follow it anyway. Because of the open source platform you are using, I'm not sure if there's a way to stop the crawl from indexing the link between your url and your wiki. That might take some fancy foot work. That would be the only way to get the nofollow percentage removed…but you really don't want your wiki pages to not be indexed anyway.

Moz is reflecting what the crawl bots see…such as Google. You can't tell it to not show you certain things unless you alter your code, .htaccss, or robots files to change the way the site is being crawled.

As I stated earlier…having a lot of nofollows doesn't necessarily hurt your SEO, but it will not bring you the benefits of followed links that pass link juice and page rank.

I understand it's hard to see the real issues to address when you are flooded with this other stuff, but I'm not sure you have many other options unless you want to remove the nofollows.

Just curious…why do you use so many nofollows anyway? Or is it automatically generated by wiki?

Hi Doug! Thanks for your info. Is this also considered a "backlink"? Or is there a difference between the two?

Hi Pete

H tags are used to show hierarchy so I would suggest changing your first H2 tag at the top of the page to an H1. After that, you can break up your content  with H2s, 3s, etc. Google will look for a H1 tag to see what the page content is about so it is important to have the keyword you are targeting within that.

Clearly organizing your design with heading tags hierarchy will make it more user friendly and will also help search engines better understand your content. Think about it like you are looking at a newspaper… the H1 gives you the title, H2 will be the supportive subtitles, and so forth

Hope that helps!

I see your issue with that…

I'd suggest moving the H1 title and the section it titles up, at the very least. Maybe under that slider? It's not good practice to bury your H1 at the bottom of your page.

There's tons of documentation stating that 404's negatively affect SEO. It's definitely debatable and there are obviously other factors involved. My main point is that it's important to deal with any and all crawl errors.