So - we pushed back a bit because we seriously couldn't fathom why we'd need to remove all of the 304 functionality from the website due to a directive from the Google Ads team.

Turns out, our gut instinct was right. The client's PPC agency ended up giving the Google Ads team a call, and then they learned that there was actually a 404 error happening (face palm) for one page. Not a 304.

Leaving this post here for good measure in case this ever happens to anyone else. Watch out for typos!

We have a client who is launch some Google Ads campaigns, and they recently asked us to fix 304 "Errors" on their website as per this feedback:

"When we inspected the website we came across a number of 304 status errors. In order to get the ads running, we will need all of the website domain status codes converted to 200. “

Of course, all of their website pages return a 200 Status, it's just the HTTP headers that additionally clarify with a 304 Response (not an error).

Has anyone else ever run into this issue with Google Ads? IMHO it makes no sense to remove this functionality. Google has even recommended in the past to use this it:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/11/date-with-googlebot-part-ii-http-status.html

Thanks for any tips or feedback!

Thanks! I also got a tip from the Screaming Frog team that if you use the Javascript spidering option, that can also grab all of the images: https://twitter.com/mirabilemac/status/1114249330116968448

The one additional thing I realised is that if you host images externally (cloud etc.), screaming frog will not provide the image size of those.  So if you're doing an audit and need to know image size too, that won't be included if hosted externally. Still, it's wayyy better than not having a list of images at all.

Hello!

We are doing an image optimization audit, and are therefore trying to find a way to get a list of all images on a site.  Screaming Frog seems like a great place to start (as per this helpful article:  https://moz.com/ugc/how-to-perform-an-image-optimization-audit), but unfortunately, it doesn't include images in CSS.  

Does the community have any ideas for how we try to otherwise get list of images?

Thanks in advance for any tips/advice.

I was prompted to write a response to this article today after helping a friend look into her Squarespace site.  It's not like I expected it to have the equivalent of Wordpress' amazing Yoast SEO plugin, but I was at least expecting some nice control over metadata.

However, I discovered users have almost no control over the Title or Meta Description tags on the individual page level.

I even tweeted at SquareSpace support, and they admitted it was not an option yet (at least of 9/2/2016): https://twitter.com/SquarespaceHelp/status/771819238101176320

Right now, you can only add custom titles and descriptions on what Squarespace calls "pages" - but beware, not all pages are created equal.  Blog posts are not pages. Neither are e-commerce products.  My friend wanted to optimize her product page title tags, but she can't.  So disappointing.

Fingers crossed that SquareSpace updates their CMS to maybe allow for this someday....

Hi Megan,

We would not have noticed any discrepancy either at first glance.  Each month, we record numbers from the last day of each month on the graph. The graph only shows the past 3 mos.

Imagine that on April 31, you recorded the following monthly #s from the graph.

February = 3,500
March = 4,000
April = 5,500

And then, next month, when you looked at the same interface in Twitter, the numbers were all different.

February = n/a (won't go back that far)
March = 3,200
April = 4,000
May = 4, 500

At first you'd think - wait.  I recorded 5,500 followers in April, and now in May I have 4,500.  Did I lose 1,000 followers?

Nope, because according to Twitter, because the graph still shows growth, and we can see the # of users added in May.

**It's just that for whatever reason, the aggregate #s were all lowered.  **All data, across the board, is lower, even though it shows relative growth.

I see a few possibilities here:

1. Our records were wrong. 
This is a possibility, but kind of unlikely since we pull the data each month, and we create a separate report for each month (so we have multiple historic record of the numbers being different and higher over time)...  But who knows, human error happens.

2. Twitter Purged Spam
Maybe they purged a bunch of spam accounts? If so, I would have expected to see a dramatic decrease in followers over one month - but maybe instead, they deleted all record of them, included when they were added, so while overall this lowered numbers, it didn't mess with the monthly growth pattern of legitimate followers.

3. Twitter Analytics Bug???  

Thanks.  It's possible there may not be an answer to this, but it would be nice to know if anyone else has experienced something like this.

Hi Megan,

Thanks for the response!  Your Interface for Moz is a little bit different from what I see.  If I go into Twitter Analytics, there's a link on the menu bar for "Audience".

I added two screenshots under my (brand-new lol) Imgur account (see link below)

Basically, wherever you can find a chart of the past 3 months of Twitter follower numbers - there, it displays your TOTAL number of followers.

What happened to us is that our total number of followers dropped across all 3 months, over all time.

We keep track of the numbers on this page, and when we logged in recently, we were bewildered because none of the numbers for the past 3 months matched up to any of our records.  They had all changed, as if adjusted en masse.

So while we have accrued new users month over month, the total numbers are all different, so it's like we lost followers... even though we didn't...

Our number of followers on Twitter has suddenly dropped (yet not dropped) in a really weird way.

Twitter Analytics shows follower counts in two places: Monthly increases in followers, and then also in the Audience Insights tab, where you can see three months of follower counts mapped in a chart.

Month-to-month, the total number of followers continues to rise.

What’s inconsistent, however, is the total number of aggregate followers shown in the cart. Twitter just dropped our to total count of followers by about 600.

But it’s not like we just suddenly lost 600 followers last month (in fact we gained far more than that), but rather that Twitter seems to have adjusted the aggregate numbers across the board retroactively for all months. So while month-to-month continues to show gains, overall, we still went down.

The only way we would have even noticed this, by the way, is because we have a record of the OLD total follower count that Twitter had previously displayed as recently as last month.

So confusing.

We’re trying to figure out what happened, and the only thing that seems to make sense is that Twitter may have done a huge spam account purge, and instead of making it look like we suddenly lost a lot of followers, they just updated the aggregate total # of followers across all time……?

[For the record, we do not buy followers, but we don’t always do the best job at blocking spam followers when the do follow us either.]

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks.

Thanks guys - yes, we're using canonical tags already to help resolve this, but I'd like even better if we didn't have to resort to this. It also makes me nervous that these characters are technically classified as "unsafe", but I haven't been able to find any official word from Google on whether or not they will index URLs with brackets or not.  It's definitely not the web standard....

Hello,

This is the first time I've asked a question here, but I would really appreciate the advice of the community - thank you, thank you!  Scenario:  Internal linking is pointing to two different versions of a URL, one with brackets [] and the other version with the brackets encoded as %5B%5D

Version 1: http://www.site.com/test?hello**[]=all&howdy[]=all&ciao[]=all
Version 2: http://www.site.com/test?hello%5B%5D**=all&howdy**%5B%5D**=all&ciao**%5B%5D**=all

Question: Will search engines view these as duplicate content?  Technically there is a difference in characters, but it's only because one version encodes the brackets, and the other does not (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp)

We are asking the developer to encode ALL URLs because this seems cleaner but they are telling us that Google will see zero difference.   We aren't sure if this is true, since engines can get so _hung up on even one single difference in character.  _

We don't want to unnecessarily fracture the internal link structure of the site, so again - any feedback is welcome, thank you.