Masty

CONTENT

CHAPTER 1 SEO-Friendly Hosting: 5 Things to Look for in a Hosting

Company

By Amelia Willson

CHAPTER 2 The Ultimate Guide for an SEO-Friendly URL Structure

By Clark Boyd

CHAPTER 3 How to Use XML Sitemaps to Boost SEO

By Jes Scholz

CHAPTER 4 Best Practices for Setting Up Meta Robots Tags &

Robots.txt

By Sergey Grybniak

CHAPTER 5 Your Indexed Pages Are Going

Down – 5 Possible Reasons Why

By Benj Arriola

CHAPTER 6 An SEO Guide to HTTP Status

Codes

By Brian Harnish

CHAPTER 7 404 vs. Soft 404 Errors: What’s

the Difference & How to Fix

Both

By Benj Arriola

CHAPTER 8 8 Tips to Optimize

Crawl Budget for

SEO

By Aleh Barysevich

INTRODUCTION Technical SEO Is a Necessity, Not an Option

By Andy Betts

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CONTENT

CHAPTER 10 HTTP or HTTPS? Why You Need a Secure Site

By Jenny Halasz

CHAPTER 11 How to Improve Page Speed for More Traffic &

Conversions

By Jeremy Knauff

CHAPTER 12 7 Ways a Mobile-First Index Impacts SEO

By Roger Montti

CHAPTER 13

The Complete Guide to

Mastering Duplicate

Content Issues

By Stoney G deGeyter

CHAPTER 14 A Technical SEO Guide to

Redirects

By Vahan Petrosyan

CHAPTER 15 SEO-Friendly Pagination:

A Complete Best Practices

Guide

By Jes Scholz

CHAPTER 16

What Is Schema

Markup & Why It’s

Important for SEO

By Chuck Price

CHAPTER 9 How to Improve Your Website Navigation: 7 Essential

Best Practices

By Benj Arriola

CONTENT

CHAPTER 18 Understanding JavaScript Fundamentals: Your Cheat

Sheet

By Rachel Costello

CHAPTER 19 An SEO Guide to URL Parameter Handling

By Jes Scholz

CHAPTER 20 How to Perform an In-Depth Technical SEO Audit

By Anna Crowe

CHAPTER 17 Faceted Navigation: Best Practices for SEO

By Natalie Hoben

Technical SEO Is a

Necessity, Not an

Option

Introduction

Written By

Executive & CMO Advisor

Andy Betts

The practice of SEO has

changed more than any other

marketing channel over the

last decade. NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A

NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

Through a succession of algorithmic evolutions, SEO has also

remained the foundation of a successful digital strategy – 51 percent of

online traffic arrives at websites via organic search, after all.

SEO has gone mainstream.

Still, we must take stock of the fact that SEO in 2018 requires new

skills and approaches to succeed in an increasingly competitive

world.

With more than 5,000 devices integrated with Google Assistant and

voice search on the rise, the focal points of search have become

decentralized.

The SERP as we knew it is long gone; search is dynamic, visual, and

everywhere now.

This has a very significant impact on organizations, as SEO is

a collaborative discipline that requires a synthesis of multiple

specialisms to achieve optimal results. At the heart of this lies the

domain of technical SEO, which has remained the foundation upon

which any successful strategy is built.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

A Brief History of Technical SEO

All roads lead back to technical – it’s how you now use your skills that

has changed.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

SEO has always entailed driving high-quality traffic through organic

search.

The means of achieving this goal have altered significantly since the

early days of SEO, when technical skills were dominant.

Crawlability was then – as it is now – a foremost consideration

when setting up an SEO strategy.

Content was secondary – a vehicle to include keywords and improve

rankings. This evolved over time to encompass link building, based

on Google’s key early innovation of using links to evaluate and rank

content.

The goal of marketers remained constant: to attract organic search

traffic that converted on their website.

As a result, we endured a cat and mouse game with some marketers

doing whatever it took to gain high search rankings.

As soon as Google caught up with keyword cloaking, black hat SEO

practitioners moved on to link buying in an attempt to manipulate

their rankings.

The Panda

and Penguin

algorithm

updates put

paid to a lot

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

In the process, SEO has moved from an entirely rational discipline

to something more rounded, including the typically “right-brained”

domain of creative content. This has changed the shape of SEO

departments and demanded collaboration with other digital

marketing departments.

Technical SEO, for its part, now encompasses all search engine

best practices and allows no room for manipulation. This specialism

never went away, but it has seen a recent renaissance as senior

marketers realize that it drives performance as well as crawler

compliance.

of those murky tactics and even (briefly) raised the discussion of

whether SEO was dead.

This question missed one key point.

As long as people are using search as a means to discover

information, SEO will continue in rude health. Those discussions

are a distant memory as we embrace modern SEO, especially its

convergence with content marketing.

The industry has gone from strength to strength and the best

strategies are now justly rewarded with increased search presence.

There are four key areas to this:

Site Content: Ensuring that content can be crawled and indexed

by all major search engines, in particular making use of log file

analysis to interpret their access patterns and structured data to

enable efficient access to content elements.

Structure: Creating a site hierarchy and URL structure that allow

both search engines and users to navigate to the most relevant

content. This should also facilitate the flow of internal link equity

through the site.

Conversion: Identifying and resolving any blockages that prevent

users from navigating through the site.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

Performance: A key development has been the evolution of

technical SEO into a performance-related specialism. This has

always been the case, but marketers of all stripes have realized

that technical SEO is about a lot more than just “housekeeping.”

Getting the three areas above in order will lead to better site

performance through search and other channels, too.

Within this context, it is worth questioning whether “SEO” is even an

adequate categorization for what we do anymore.

A New Approach: Site, Search &

Content Optimization

The term “search engine optimization” is arguably no longer fit

for purpose, as we extend our remit to include content marketing,

conversion rate optimization, and user experience.

According to research from BrightEdge, only 3 percent of

250 marketers surveyed believe SEO and content are separate

disciplines.

Our work includes:

Optimizing the site for users.

Ensuring accessibility of content for all major search engines and

social networks.

Creating content that engages the right audience across multiple

marketing channels.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

We should therefore be looking at this set of skills as site, search,

and content optimization – especially as the role of a search engine

continues to evolve beyond the 10 blue links of old.

Our responsibility is to get in front of consumers wherever they are

searching, which is an ever-changing set of contexts. This would

be a more fitting depiction of a marketing channel that plays an

increasingly pivotal role in digital and business strategy.

After all, when major technological trends develop, technical SEO

pros are often at the forefront of innovation. This looks set to be

further entrenched by recent industry developments.

Now that Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive

Web Apps (PWAs) are center stage, brands must ensure that their

web presence meets the highest standards to keep pace with the

modern consumer.

Being “mobile-first” has big implications for how we engage our

audiences, but it is also a technological consideration. PWAs will

soon be coming to Google Chrome on desktop, which is a further

manifestation of the “mobile-first” approach to site experiences that

we all need to adopt.

It would be hard to argue that these fit uniquely under the remit of

‘Search Engine Optimization’, and yet it is likely SEO pros that will

lead to change within their respective organizations.

Brands need to think beyond search engines and imagine the

new ways their content could – and should – be discovered by

customers.

A different approach to SEO is required if we are to tap into the

full potential of emerging consumer trends. That approach should

expand to include site experience optimization, as well as traditional

SEO techniques.

There are plentiful new opportunities for those who adapt; a

process that can be accelerated by creating a collaborative working

environment.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

6 Thinking Hats & SEO

However we choose to label it, it should be clear that SEO has never

existed in a vacuum. From its early symbiosis with web development

to its latter-day convergence with content, SEO has always been

about collaboration.

It is therefore helpful to consider frameworks that can bring this idea

to life and bring together the specialist skills required for a modern

organic search campaign.

We typically talk only about black hat and white hat in SEO (with the

occasional mention of gray), but Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking

Hats approach can add structure to collaboration.

Each hat reflects a way of thinking and separates out the different

functions required to achieve successful outcomes. These could

be entirely different departments, different

individuals, or even different mindsets for

one person.

The objective is to improve the

collaborative process, but also to

erode the fallibility of subjectivity

by approaching every

challenge from all angles

before progressing.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

1. White Hat

A well-known term for most SEO pros, White Hat thinking in this

context depends purely on facts, statistics, and data points. This is

the most objective way of approaching a situation.

Who Should Wear This

Hat?

Data analysts and analytics

specialists are typically

naturals at adopting this

approach.

Why Is It Needed for

SEO?

Looking purely at the data

is a perfect starting point

for discussion. It keeps

everyone focused on the

objective truths of crosschannel

performance.

Data without context is

meaningless, of course, so

this approach in isolation

lacks the color needed to

understand consumers.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

2. Yellow Hat

The Yellow Hat approach brings optimism to the table, focusing

on the potential benefits a strategy may bring for brands and the

consumer.

Who Should Wear This

Hat?

Anyone can be an optimist,

so this could be a mindset

that all parties take on for a

period of time. Equally, this

could be handed to one

person as a responsibility;

the key thing is to maintain

some structure.

Why Is It Needed for

SEO?

We tend to have a lot

of ideas, so it is easy to

jettison some of them

before their full potential

has been explored. Taking

an alternative view allows

for full exploration of an

idea, even if only to retain

some of its components.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

3. Black Hat

The Black Hat is anathema to advanced SEO pros, but the

concept does have value in this particular context. We can use

this interchangeably with the “devil’s advocate” approach, where

someone purposefully points out obstacles and dangers for the

project.

Who Should Wear This Hat?

No one really, but be aware of the dangers of people offering SEO

solutions and little transparency into the how. Keep an eye out for

negative SEO attacks.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

4. Red Hat

The Red Hat approach relates to feelings and emotions, often based

on the gut reaction to an idea. This can be very beneficial for a digital

project, as we can sometimes be overly rational in our data-driven

approach.

Who Should Wear This

Hat?

It can be helpful to assign

this role to someone who

works closely with the target

audience, or who analyzes

and interprets a lot of

audience data.

Why Is It Needed for

SEO?

When fighting for vital –

and dwindling – consumer

attention, first impressions

matter. Content marketing

campaigns can depend

on getting this right, so

it’s worth listening to gut

instinct sometimes.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

5. Green Hat

The Green Hat brings creativity and spontaneity to the process,

tackling challenges from a new perspective when possible. Where

others see obstacles, this approach will see new opportunities.

Who Should Wear This

Hat?

Anyone can be creative.

However, it may be best to

assign this role to someone

who feels comfortable

sharing their ideas with

a group and is not easily

disheartened if they don’t

take off!

Why Is It Needed for

SEO?

There are best practices,

but those only take us so

far. They are a leveling

force; new ideas are what

really make the difference.

In an industry, as nascent

as ours, there are plenty

of trails yet to be explored.

The Green Hat brings that

element of innovation to a

discussion.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

6. Blue Hat

The Blue Hat organized the thinking process and takes ultimate

responsibility for bringing together the different strands into a

cohesive whole.

Who Should Wear This

Hat?

The project lead or the

person closest to the

brand’s objectives can help

keep things focused. Project

managers also have a

natural affinity for this role.

Why Is It Needed for

SEO?

SEO is an increasingly

diverse set of disciplines,

which makes this role

indispensable. To maximize

the organic search

opportunity, various

departments need to

be working in tandem

on an ongoing basis.

The Blue Hat keeps this

collaboration going.

Actual hats are optional, but may help the adoption of this approach.

Regardless, these ways of thinking have a range of

benefits across any organization:

Opportunities to integrate more digital functions into the SEO

process.

Ways to learn new skills, both by doing and by observing.

Integration of SEO best practices across more digital channels.

A central role for SEO, without reducing the importance of other

specialists.

Technical SEO Is Important Now

More Than Ever

SEO has evolved to be part of something bigger and technical skills

must be applied in a different manner.

If anything, it has expanded into a much more sophisticated and

nuanced digital channel that has outgrown the “Search Engine

Optimization” category.

The core tenets of organic search remain firmly in place, with

technical SEO given overdue prominence as a driver of web, mobile

and device performance.

SEO professionals are often at the forefront of technological

innovations and this looks unlikely to change in a world of voice

search, digital assistants, and Progressive Web Apps.

New approaches

are required if we

are to maximize

this opportunity,

however. That

begins with the

definition of what

exactly SEO entails

and extends to

the ways we lead

collaboration within our organizations.

The level of technical acumen needed for success has changed

back to the levels it once was.

NEW WAYS TO APPROACH TECHNICAL SEO: A NECESSITY, NOT AN OPTION

However, where and how you apply that knowledge

is key to technical success. Focus your skills on

optimizing:

Your site.

Mobile and desktop devices.

Mobile apps.

Voice search.

VR.

Agents.

Vertical search engines (it’s not just Google anymore – think

Amazon for example).

The AI revolution is begging for more help from technical SEO

professionals and data scientists to help drive it forward.

Mastering SEO fundamentals is only the bare minimum. If you really

want to win against the competition, you must go beyond the basics.

If you act now and take a slightly different viewpoint on your role,

organic search can assume a central role in both business strategy

and cross-channel digital marketing.

SEO-Friendly Hosting:

5 Things to Look for in

a Hosting Company

Chapter 1

Written By

Owner at AWCopywriting

Amelia Willson

As SEO professionals, we

have no shortage of things to

worry about.

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

There are the old standbys: backlinks, content creation, sitemaps

and robots.txt files.

And there’s new(er) stuff to get excited about as well: voice search,

featured snippets, the mobile-first index.

Amidst the noise, one factor often goes overlooked, even though it can

impact your site’s uptime and your page speed – both of which are

essential elements for maintaining positive organic performance.

I’m talking about web hosting, folks.

The web host you choose determines the overall consistency of

the site experience you offer organic visitors (and all visitors, for

that matter).

If you want to prevent server errors and page timeouts – and stop

users from bouncing back to Google – you need a solid web host

you can rely on.

Ultimately, you want a web host that supports your organic efforts,

rather than impeding them. Let’s look at five key features that define

an SEO-friendly web hosting company.

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

Your host’s uptime guarantee is arguably the most important factor in

whether they’re SEO-friendly.

Uptime refers to the percentage of the time your site is online and

accessible. The higher your uptime, the less likely visitors will visit

your site only to discover it’s down, sending them back to the search

engines and potentially risking your rankings in the process.

Better, more reliable hosts offer higher uptime guarantees.

For best results, choose a host with at least 99.9 percent uptime

guarantee (or higher, if you can get it). That translates to roughly 1.44

minutes of downtime a day and 8.8 hours per year. Not bad.

However, be wary of any host that claims 100 percent uptime. There’s

always going to be some

downtime. The key is

to keep it as short as

possible. That way, it

won’t affect your SEO

performance.

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

1. High Uptime Guarantee

While uptime refers to your site content being accessible to users,

your server location may dictate how quickly it’s accessible to them.

If you’re on a shared, VPS, or dedicated server hosting plan, your site

lives on a physical server in a data center somewhere (as opposed to

cloud hosting, where your data is housed in the cloud).

Ideally, you want that data center located as close as possible to the

majority of your site visitors. The farther away your server is, the longer

it can take for your site to load.

Server location can also look fishy to search engines, which may

affect your SEO. If you operate in one country but use a host located

halfway around the world, there may be something nefarious going

on.

It goes without saying that servers themselves should also be fast,

and that the host should further boost performance through a

Content Delivery Network (CDN).

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

2. Server Location

We all like options. You should enjoy them with your web hosting, too.

Beyond hosting itself, many hosting companies offer optional valueadds

that can upgrade your site.

Here are some of the SEO-friendly ones you’ll want to

see:

Automatic backups: If something ever goes wrong, you want a

site backup you can quickly restore from. See if your host offers

automatic backups for free or for an added cost.

SSL: HTTPS has been a ranking factor for years now. If you

haven’t already transitioned to a secure site, you need to get your

act together. Make sure your host supports SSL. Some even

include them for free with your hosting package.

Multiple hosting plans: As your site grows, your hosting needs

are likely to change (this is a good thing!). Eventually, your traffic

numbers may be big enough to warrant switching to your own

dedicated server. This transition will be easier (and cheaper) if

you don’t have to switch hosting providers at the same time.

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

3. Multiple Options

Alright, let’s say you’re actually using this list to compare hosts. By this

point, you’ve read through their hosting features, and it appears they’re

checking off all the right things.

Now it’s time to validate that the marketing claims are true. Before you

A caveat: The hosting space tends to attract more unhappy reviews

than most.

If a barista messes up your coffee, you’re unlikely to be bothered

enough to write a scathing review for the cafe on Yelp.

But if your site goes down, even for a moment, or even if you were at

fault (as can happen if you choose an inappropriate hosting plan for

your traffic needs), you are going to be extremely angry with your host

and tweet, post, and blog about it loudly and vociferously.

Unfortunately, that’s just the nature of the business.

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

4. Good Reviews

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

Having said that, you can still gather a lot of valuable information

from reviews. Look for hosts that appear again and again on Top

Web Hosts lists, and read the reviews to verify that the hosting plan

you’re considering is likely to give you what you need.

You won’t have trouble finding these lists. A quick Google search for

[best web hosting] delivered a slew of results from PCMag, CNET,

and more:

While you’re reading through the reviews, pay special attention to how

people talk about their support.

In the unlikely event that your site does go down, you want to be able

to fix it immediately. Most often, that will involve speaking to a support

person.

A good host will offer 24/7 support for free. Verify the operating hours

of your potential host’s support team, and see how exactly you’ll be

able to get in touch with them. Is there a phone number, live chat, or

email?

Check out their social profiles, too. Web hosts who care about helping

their customers tend to make customer support widely available on

social media, perhaps even via dedicated support Twitter accounts.

Here’s an example from Squarespace:

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

5. Responsive Support Team

Bonus: Easy-to-Use CMS

What Defines an SEO-Friendly Web

Host?

This one’s not exactly related to hosting, but it’s important

nonetheless. Being able to easily create outstanding content is key for

your SEO success. You know that.

So, you want a host that integrates with a CMS you’re either already

familiar with or you can easily learn. Otherwise, you’re just making

things hard on yourself!

Fortunately, most hosts today offer their own drag-and-drop content

creation tools. Many also integrate with WordPress and other popular

content management systems.

Good, reliable web hosting is one of those things that runs in the

background without you ever having to think about it. That, in

essence, is an SEO-friendly web host.

SEO-FRIENDLY HOSTING: 5 THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN A HOSTING COMPANY

The Ultimate Guide for

an SEO-Friendly URL

Structure

Chapter 2

Written By

Founder , Candid Digital

Clark Boyd

First impressions count.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

And when it comes to your website, your URLs are often the first thing

Google and customers will see.

URLs are also the building blocks of an effective site hierarchy, passing

equity through your domain and directing users to their desired

destinations.

They can be tricky to correct if you don’t plan ahead, as you can end

up with endless redirect loops. Neither Google nor your site visitors will

appreciate those.

So they are worth getting right. But getting URL structure right involves

a complex blend of usability and accessibility factors, along with some

good old-fashioned SEO.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach, there are some rules we

can all follow to get the most out of our URLs and set our sites up for

future SEO success.

Every time you launch a page on your domain, it should have a

purpose. Whether transactional, informational, or administrative, its

reason for existence should be clear at the outset.

You’ll want this page to be discovered by the right people (and

crawlers), so you will incorporate some keyword research and include

the relevant terms. The most descriptive of these — the term that gets

to the nub of what this page is about — should be included in the

URL, close to the root domain.

We’ll deal with multiple pages that broadly tackle the same topic later,

but for now, let’s assume the simple example of a page that clearly

handles one topic. Let’s go for whiskey.

Generic example:

https://example.com/topic

Whiskey-based example:

https://example.com/whiskey

Even this isn’t quite as simple as it seems, though.

Should we use

“whiskey” or

“whisky” as our

standard spelling?

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

1. Use Your Keywords

The search volume is with “whiskey” and our site is based in the U.S.,

so let’s run with that.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

Both are valid, with the former being an Irish spelling and the latter

Scottish. The Irish spelling has been adopted in the U.S., but we’ll

need more proof before proceeding with that as our chosen variation.

The Moz Keyword Explorer is great for this sort of predicament,

as it groups keywords together to give an estimate of the search

volume for particular topics. In this era of vague keyword-level search

volumes, it provides a nice solution.

Perhaps the biggest challenge we all face when defining a sitewide

URL hierarchy is ensuring that it will still fit our purpose for years to

come.

It is for this reason that some websites end up as a patchwork quilt

of sub-domains and conflicting paths to arrive at similar products.

This is poor from a user’s perspective, but it also sends confusing

signals to Google about how you categorize your product offering.

An example of this would be:

https://example.com/whiskey/irish-whiskey/jameson

https://example.com/bushmills

The first URL flows

logically from domain

to category to subcategory

to product.

The second

URL goes from

domain to product.

Hierarchically, both

products should sit at

the same level in the site

and the Jameson example is

better for SEO and users.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

2. Build a Sound Structure for the

Future

We encounter this a lot, though. Why?

It can be a simple lack of communication, with a product team

launching a new item straight onto the site without consulting other

parties. It can also be down to a failure of future planning.

Either way, it’s essential to lay out your structure in advance. Work

together with different teams to understand the future direction

of the business, then add your SEO knowledge to shape the site

architecture. It will rarely be perfect, but the more you plan, the fewer

errors you will have to undo down the line.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

As a rule of thumb, make sure a user can understand what your

page is about by looking at the URL. That means you don’t need to

include every single preposition or conjunction.

Words like “and” or “the” are just distractions and can be stripped

out of the URL altogether. Just as users can understand what a

topic is about without these short words, Google will derive all the

meaning it requires too.

You should also avoid keyword repetition within URLs. Adding the

same keyword multiple times in the hope of increasing your ranking

chances will only lead to a spammy URL structure.

An example of this unnecessary repetition would be:

https://domain.com/whiskey/irish-whiskey/jameson-irish-whiskey/

jameson-irish-whiskey-history

The first two uses of the main keyword make sense, but the third

and fourth are overkill.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

3. Avoid Superfluous Words &

Characters

A few additional points to bear in mind on this topic:

Case Sensitivity: It is surprisingly common to find multiple

versions of the same URL, with one all in lower case and the

others using occasional capital letters. Use canonical tags to

mark the lower-case URL as the preferred version or, if possible,

use permanent redirects.

Hashes: These can be useful to send users to a specific section

of a page, but restrict their use in other circumstances if possible.

If the content users are sent to after the # symbol is unique, make

it available via a simple URL instead.

Word Delimiters: Stick with hyphens to separate words within

your URL strings. Underscores will serve to join two words

together, so be wary of using these.

URL Length: After 512 pixels, Google will truncate your URL in

search results pages. A good rule of thumb is to keep y0ur URLs

as short as you can, without losing their general meaning.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

This one can be harder than it sounds, depending on the content

management system you use.

Some e-commerce platforms will automatically spit out character

strings that leave you with URLs like: https://domain.com/

cat/?cid=7078.

These are a bit unsightly and they also go against the rules we’ve

been outlining above. We want static URLs that include a logical

folder structure and descriptive keywords.

Although search engines have no problem crawling or indexing

either variant, for SEO-based reasons it’s better to use static URLs

rather than dynamic ones. The thing is, static URLs contain your

keywords and are more user-friendly since one can figure out what

the page is about just by looking at the static URL’s name.

So how do we get around this? You can use rewrite rules if your web

server runs Apache, and some tools like this one from Generate It

are helpful. There are different fixes for different platforms (some more

complex than others).

Some web developers

make use of relative URLs,

too. The problem with

relative URLs for SEO is

that they are dependent on

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

4. Minimize Dynamic URL Strings

the context in which they occur. Once the context changes, the URL

may not work. For SEO, it’s better to use absolute URLs instead of

relative ones, since the former are what search engines prefer.

Now, sometimes different parameters can be added to the URL

for analytics tracking or other reasons (such as sid, utm, etc.) To

make sure that these parameters don’t make the number of URLs

with duplicate content grow over the top, you can do either of the

following:

Ask Google to disregard certain URL parameters in Google Search

Console in Configuration > URL Parameters.

See if your content management system allows you to solidify URLs

with additional parameters with their shorter counterparts.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

As a rule, there are two major versions of your domain indexed in

search engines: the www and the non-www version of it. We can

add to this the complexity of having a secure (https) and non-secure

(HTTP) version too, with Google giving preference to the former.

Most SEOs use the 301 redirect to point one version of their site to

the other (or vice versa).

This tells search engines that a particular URL has moved

permanently to another destination.

Alternatively (for instance, when you can’t do a redirect), you

can specify your preferred version in Google Search Console in

Configuration > Settings > Preferred Domain. However, this has

certain drawbacks:

This takes care of Google only.

This option is restricted to root domains only.

If you have an example.wordpress.com site,

this method is not for you.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

5. Consolidate the Different

Versions of Your Site

But why worry about the www vs non-www issue in the first place?

The thing is, some of your backlinks may be pointing to your www

version, while some could be going to the non-www version.

To ensure all versions’ SEO value is consolidated, it’s better to

explicitly establish this link between them. You can do this via the

301 redirect, in Google Search Console, or by using a canonical tag,

the latter of which we will look at in more detail below. THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

So, canonical tags. These are a very helpful piece of code when you

have multiple versions of what is essentially the same page. By adding

a canonical tag, you can tell Google which one is your preferred

version.

Note: The canonical tag should be applied only with the purpose of

helping search engines decide on your canonical URL. For redirection

of site pages, use redirects. And, for paginated content, it makes

sense to employ rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags in most cases.

Canonical tags are useful for just about any website, but they are

particularly powerful for online retailers.

For example, on Macy’s website, I can go to the Quilts & Bedspreads

page directly by using the URL (https://www.macys.com/shop/

bed-bath/quilts-bedspreads), or I can take different routes from the

homepage:

I can go to Homepage >> Bed& Bath >> Quilts & Bedspreads. The

following URL with my path recorded is generated:

https://www.macys.com/shop/bed-bath/quiltsbedspreads?

id=22748&edge=hybrid

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

6. Make Correct Use of Canonical

Tags

As you see, for each of these URLs, a canonical URL is specified,

which is the cleanest version of all the URLs in the group:https://

www.macys.com/shop/bed-bath/quilts-bedspreads?id=22748

What this does is, it funnels down the SEO value each of these three

URLs might have to one single URL that should be displayed in the

search results (the canonical URL). Normally search engines do a

pretty good job identifying canonical URLs themselves, but, as Susan

Moskwa once wrote at Google Webmaster Central:

“If we aren’t able to detect all the duplicates of a particular page, we

won’t be able to consolidate all of their properties. This may dilute

the strength of that content’s ranking signals by splitting them across

multiple URLs.”

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

Or I can go to Homepage >> For the Home >> Bed & Bath >>

Bedding >> Quilts & Bedspreads. The following URL is generated:

https://www.macys.com/shop/bed-bath/quiltsbedspreads?

id=22748&cm_sp=us_hdr-_-bed-%26-bath-_-22748_

quilts-%26-bedspreads_COL1

Now, all three URLs lead to the same content. And if you look into

the code of each page, you’ll see the following tag in the head

element:

In Google’s own Search Quality Evaluators Guidelines (a mustread

document for all SEOs!), there are clear references to both main

content and supplementary content.

Main content will be your lead page in each section that really sets

out what your category is all about. It will set out your stall as a

relevant source for a topic. Supplementary content provides, as the

name suggests, additional information that helps users navigate the

topic and reach informed decisions.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

7. Incorporate Topical Authority

URL structure is an essential component of getting this right.

So, let’s go back to our whiskey example to see how we might

tackle this. Our site is e-commerce focused and we want to sell the

product, of course. However, going for the jugular and only pushing

out product pages is tantamount to SEO tunnel vision.

Our initial research from Moz Keyword Explorer is a great resource

as we make these plans. Below, I have exported the keyword list

and reduced it to the highest-volume topics. From here, we can

start to decide what might qualify as a topic for a main content or

supplementary content page.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

This is a simplified example and just a first step, of course.

However, it is worth noting that this approach goes further than just

category > sub-category > product. By thinking in terms of main

content and supplementary content, a product is just as likely to

qualify as main content as a category is. The question is more about

which topics consumers want us to elaborate on to help them make

choices.

From here, we can dig into some of these topics and start to flesh

out what each hub might look like.

Some clear opportunities already stand out to create content and

rank via rich snippets. People want to know how whiskey is made,

what different varieties exist, and of course, whether it’s spelled

‘whiskey’ or ‘whisky’. This could be the beginning of a business

case to create a whiskey tasting guide or a ‘history of whiskey’

content hub on the site.

Combined with ranking difficulty metrics, business priorities, and

content production capabilities, this approach will soon take shape

as a site hierarchy and opportunity analysis.

For our whiskey example, it might start to comprise the following

structure:

https://domain.com/whiskey/whiskey-tasting-guide

https://domain.com/whiskey/whiskey-tasting-guide/how-to-tastewhiskey

https://domain.com/whiskey/whiskey-tasting-guide/how-iswhiskey-

made

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

https://domain.com/whiskey/whiskey-tasting-guide/barley-whiskey

Again, there are decisions to make.

In the last URL, one could argue that the tasting guide page for

barley whiskey should sit under the barley whiskey sub-category

page in the site hierarchy. Barley whiskey has been earmarked as

‘main content’ in my spreadsheet, after all. The choice here comes

down to where we want to consolidate value; dispersing that value

would reduce our chances of ranking for any ‘tasting guide’ terms.

These are exactly the kinds of decisions that can lead to a confused

structure if a consistent logic is not followed.

All of this will contribute to your topical authority and increase site

visibility.

This type of content often already exists on site, too. I am not

claiming anything revolutionary by saying a website should have

lots of useful information, after all. However, the structure of this

content and how entities are semantically linked to each other

makes the difference between success and failure.

This can be used as a ‘quick win’ tactic and it tends to be received

well by all parties. Updating and moving existing content will always

be an easier sell than asking for an all-new content hub.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

Once you’ve ticked off all of the above, you’ll want to make sure

search engines know what’s going on with your website. That’s where

sitemaps come in handy — particularly XML sitemaps.

An XML Sitemap is not to be confused with the HTML sitemap. The

former is for the search engines, while the latter is mostly designed

for human users (although it has other uses t00).

So what is an XML Sitemap? In plain words, it’s a list of your site’s

URLs that you submit to the search engines.

This serves two purposes:

1. This helps search engines find your site’s pages more easily.

2. Search engines can use the sitemap as a reference when

choosing canonical URLs on your site.

Picking a preferred

(canonical) URL becomes

necessary when search

engines see duplicate

pages on your site, as we

saw above.

So, as they don’t want any

duplicates in the search

results, search engines use

a special algorithm to identify

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

8. Create an XML Sitemap

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

duplicate pages and pick just one URL to represent the group in the

search results. Other web pages just get filtered out.

Now, back to sitemaps. One of the criteria search engines may use

to pick a canonical URL for the group of web pages is whether this

URL is mentioned in the website’s sitemap.

So, what web pages should be included in your sitemap? For

purely SEO reasons, it’s recommended to include only the web

pages you’d like to show up in search. You should include a more

comprehensive account of your site’s URLs within the HTML

sitemap.

Summary

An SEO-friendly URL structure is the following things:

Easy to read: Users and search engines should be able to

understand what is on each page just by looking at the URL.

Keyword-rich: Keywords still matter and your target queries

should be within URLs. Just be wary of overkill; extending URLs just

to include more keywords is a bad idea.

Consistent: There are multiple ways to create an SEO-friendly

URL structure on any site. It’s essential that, whatever logic you

choose to follow, it is applied consistently across the site.

Static: Dynamic parameters are rarely an SEO’s best friend, but

they are quite common. Where possible, find a solution that allows

your site to render static URLs instead.

Future-proof: Think ahead when planning your site structure. You

should minimize the number of redirects on your domain, and it’s

easier to do this if you don’t require wholesale changes to URLs.

Comprehensive: Use the concepts of main content and

supplementary content to ensure you have adequate coverage for

all relevant topics. This will maximize your site’s visibility.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

Supported by data: It normally requires buy-in from a lot of

stakeholders to launch or update a particular site structure.

Numbers talk, so make use of search and analytics data to support

your case.

Submitted to search engines: Finally, create an XML sitemap

containing all of the URLs that you want to rank via SEO and

submit it to search engines. That will ensure all your hard work

gets the reward it deserves.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AN SEO-FRIENDLY URL STRUCTURE

How to Use XML

Sitemaps to Boost SEO

Chapter 3

Written By

International Digital Director, Ringier

Jes Scholz

As the web evolves, so too

does Google and SEO.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

This means what is considered best practice is often in flux. What may

have been good counsel yesterday, is not so today.

This is especially true for sitemaps, which are almost as old as SEO itself.

The problem is, when every man and their dog has posted answers

in forums, published recommendations on blogs and amplified

opinions with social media, it takes time to sort valuable advice from

misinformation.

So while most of us share a general understanding that

submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console is important,

you may not know the intricacies of how to implement them in a way

that drives SEO key performance indicators (KPIs).

Let’s clear up the confusion around best practices for sitemaps today.

In this article we cover:

What is an XML sitemap

XML sitemap format

Types of sitemaps

XML sitemap indexation optimization

XML sitemap best practice checklist

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

What Is an XML Sitemap

In simple terms, an XML sitemap is a list of your website’s URLs.

It acts as a roadmap to tell search engines what content is available

and how to reach it.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

In the example above, a search engine will find all nine pages in a

sitemap with one visit to the XML sitemap file.

On the website, it will have to jump through five internal links to find

page 9.

This ability of an XML sitemap to assist crawlers in faster

indexation is especially important for websites that:

Have thousands of pages and/or a deep website architecture.

Frequently add new pages.

Frequently change content of existing pages.

Suffer from weak internal linking and orphan pages.

Lack a strong external link profile.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Side note: Submitting a sitemap with noindex URLs can also

speed up deindexation. This can be more efficient than removing

URLs in Google Search Console if you have many to be deindexed.

But use this with care and be sure you only add such URLs

temporarily to your sitemaps.

Key Takeaway

Even though search engines can technically find your URLs

without it, by including pages in an XML sitemap you’re indicating

that you consider them to be quality landing pages.

While there is no guarantee that an XML sitemap will get your

pages crawled, let alone indexed or ranked, submitting one

certainly increases your chances.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

XML Sitemap Format

A one-page site using all available tags would have this XML sitemap:

But how should an SEO use each of these tags? Is all the metadata

valuable?

Loc (a.k.a. Location) Tag

This compulsory tag contain the absolute, canonical version of the

URL location.

It should accurately reflect your site protocol (http or https) and if you

have chosen to include or exclude www.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

For international websites, this is also where you can implement

your hreflang handling.

By using the xhtml:link attribute to indicate the language and region

variants for each URL, you reduce page load time, which the other

implementations of link elements in the <head> or HTTP headers

can’t offer

Yoast has an epic post on hreflang for those wanting to learn more.

Lastmod (a.k.a. Last Modified) Tag

An optional but highly recommended tag used to communicate the

file’s last modified date and time.

John Mueller acknowledged Google does use the lastmod metadata

to understand when the page last changed and if it should be

crawled. Contradicting advice from Illyes in 2015.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

The last modified time is especially critical for content sites as it

assists Google to understand that you are the original publisher.

It’s also powerful to communicate freshness, be sure to update

modification date only when you have made meaningful changes.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Trying to trick search engines that your content is fresh, when

it’s not, may result in a Google penalty.

Changefreq (a.k.a. Change Frequency) Tag

Once upon a time, this optional tag hinted how frequently content on

the URL was expected to change to search engines.

But Mueller has stated that “change frequency doesn’t really play

that much of a role with sitemaps” and that “it is much better to just

specify the time stamp directly”.

Priority Tag

This optional tag that ostensibly tells search engines how important

a page is relative to your other URLs on a scale between 0.0 to 1.0.

At best, it was only ever a hint to search engines and both Mueller

and Illyes have clearly stated they ignore it.

Key Takeaway

Your website needs an XML sitemap, but not necessarily the

priority and change frequency metadata.

Use the lastmod tags accurately and focus your attention on

ensuring you have the right URLs submitted.

Types of Sitemaps

There are many different types of sitemaps. Let’s look at the ones you

actually need.

XML Sitemap Index

XML sitemaps have a couple of limitations:

A maximum of 50,000 URLs.

An uncompressed file size limit of 50MB.

Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip (the file name would

become something similar to sitemap.xml.gz) to save bandwidth for

your server. But once unzipped, the sitemap still can’t exceed either

limit.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Whenever you exceed either limit, you will need to split your URLs

across multiple XML sitemaps.

Those sitemaps can then be combined into a single XML sitemap

index file, often named sitemap-index.xml. Essentially, a sitemap

for sitemaps.

For exceptionally large websites who want to take a more granular

approach, you can also create multiple sitemap index files.

For example:

sitemap-index-articles.xml

sitemap-index-products.xml

sitemap-index-categories.xml

But be aware that you cannot nest sitemap index files.

For search engines to easily find every one of your

sitemap files at once, you will want to:

Submit your sitemap index(s) to Google Search Console and Bing

Webmaster Tools.

Specify your sitemap index URL(s) in your robots.txt file. Pointing

search engines directly to your sitemap as you welcome them to

crawl.

You can also submit sitemaps by pinging them to Google.

But beware:

Google no longer pays attention to hreflang entries in “unverified

sitemaps”, which Tom Anthony believes to mean those submitted via

the ping URL.

XML Image Sitemap

Image sitemaps were designed to improve the indexation of image

content.

In modern-day SEO, however, images are embedded within page

content, so will be crawled along with the page URL.

Moreover, it’s best practice to utilize JSON-LD schema.org/

ImageObject markup to call out image properties to search engines

as it provides more attributes than an image XML sitemap.

Because of this, an XML image sitemap is unnecessary for most

websites. Including an image sitemap would only waste crawl budget.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

The exception to this is if images help drive your business, such

as a stock photo website or ecommerce site gaining product page

sessions from Google Image search.

Know that images don’t have to to be on the same domain as your

website to be submitted in a sitemap. You can use a CDN as long as

it’s verified in Search Console.

XML Video Sitemap

Similar to images, if videos are critical to your business, submit an

XML video sitemap.If not, a video sitemap is unnecessary.

Save your crawl budget for the page the video is embedded into,

ensuring you markup all videos with JSON-LD as a schema.org/

VideoObject.

Google News Sitemap

Only sites registered with Google News should use this sitemap.

If you are, include articles published in the last two days, up to a limit

of 1,000 URLs per sitemap, and update with fresh articles as soon as

they’re published.

Contrary to some online advice, Google News sitemaps don’t

support image URL.

Google recommends using schema.org image or og:image to

specify your article thumbnail for Google News.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Mobile Sitemap

This is not needed for most websites.

Why? Because Mueller confirmed mobile sitemaps are for feature

phone pages only. Not for smartphone-compatibility.

So unless you have unique URLs specifically designed for featured

phones, a mobile sitemap will be of no benefit.

HTML Sitemap

XML sitemaps take care of search engine needs. HTML sitemaps

were designed to assist human users to find content.

The question becomes, if you have a good user experience and well

crafted internal links, do you need a HTML sitemap?

Check the page views of your HTML sitemap in Google Analytics.

Chances are, it’s very low. If not, it’s a good indication that you need

to improve your website navigation.

HTML sitemaps are generally linked in website footers. Taking link

equity from every single page of your website.

Ask yourself. Is that the best use of that link equity? Or are you

including HTML sitemap as a nod to legacy website best practices?

If few humans use it. And search engines don’t need it as you have

strong internal linking and an XML sitemap. Does that HTML sitemap

have a reason to exist? I would argue no.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Dynamic XML Sitemap

Static sitemaps are simple to create using a tool such as Screaming

Frog.

The problem is, as soon as you create or remove a page, your

sitemap is outdated. If you modify the content of a page, the sitemap

won’t automatically update the lastmod tag.

So unless you love manually creating and uploading sitemaps for

every single change, it’s best to avoid static sitemaps.

Dynamic XML sitemaps, on the other hand, are automatically update

by your server to reflect relevant website changes as they occur.

To create a dynamic XML sitemap:

Ask you developer to code a custom script, being sure to provide

clear specifications

Use a dynamic sitemap generator tool

Install a plugin for your CMS, for example the Yoast SEO plugin for

Wordpress

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Key Takeaway

Dynamic XML sitemaps and a sitemap index are modern best

practice. Mobile and HTML sitemaps are not.

Use image, video and Google News sitemaps only if improved

indexation of these content types drive your KPIs.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

XML Sitemap Indexation

Optimization

Now for the fun part. How do you use XML sitemaps to drive SEO

KPIs.

Only Include SEO Relevant Pages in XML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap is a list of pages you recommend to be crawled,

which isn’t necessarily every page of your website.

A search spider arrives at your website with an “allowance” for how

many pages it will crawl.

The XML sitemap indicates you consider the included URLs to

be more important than those that aren’t blocked but aren’t in the

sitemap.

You are using it to tell search engines “I’d really appreciate it if you’d

focus on these URLs in particular”.

Essentially, it helps you use crawl budget effectively.

By including only SEO relevant pages, you help search engines crawl

your site more intelligently in order to reap the benefits of better

indexation.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

You should exclude:

Non-canonical pages.

Duplicate pages.

Paginated pages.

Parameter or session ID based URLs.

Site search result pages.

Reply to comment URLs.

Share via email URLs.

URLs created by filtering that are unnecessary for SEO.

Archive pages.

Any redirections (3xx), missing pages (4xx) or server error pages

(5xx).

Pages blocked by robots.txt.

Pages with noindex.

Resource pages accessible by a lead gen form (e.g. white paper

PDFs).

Utility pages that are useful to users, but not intended to be

landing pages (login page, contact us, privacy policy, account

pages, etc.).

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

I want to share an example from Michael Cottam about prioritising

pages:

Say your website has 1,000 pages. 475 of those 1,000 pages are SEO

relevant content. You highlight those 475 pages in an XML sitemap,

essentially asking Google to deprioritize indexing the remainder.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Now, let’s say Google crawls those 475 pages, and algorithmically

decides that 175 are “A” grade, 200 are “B+”, and 100 “B” or “B-”.

That’s a strong average grade, and probably indicates a quality

website to which to send users.

Contrast that against submitting all 1,000 pages via the XML

sitemap. Now, Google looks at the 1,000 pages you say are SEO

relevant content, and sees over 50 percent are “D” or “F” pages.

Your average grade isn’t looking so good anymore and that may

harm your organic sessions.

But remember, Google is going to use your XML sitemap only as a

clue to what’s important on your site.

Just because it’s not in your XML sitemap doesn’t necessarily

mean that Google won’t index those pages.

When it comes to SEO, overall site quality is a key factor.

To assess the quality of your site, turn to the sitemap related

reporting in Google Search Console (GSC).

Key Takeaway

Manage crawl budget by limiting XML sitemap URLs only to SEO

relevant pages and invest time to reduce the number of low quality

pages on your website.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Fully Leverage Sitemap Reporting

The sitemaps section in the new Google Search Console is not as

data rich as what was previously offered.

It’s primary use now is to confirm your sitemap index has been

successfully submitted.

If you have chosen to use descriptive naming conventions, rather

than numeric, you can also get a feel for the number of different types

of SEO pages that have been “discovered” - aka all URLs found by

Google via sitemaps as well as other methods such as following links.

In the new GSC, the more valuable area for SEOs in regard to

sitemaps is the Index Coverage report.

The report will default to “All known pages”. Here you

can:

Address any “Error” or “Valid with warnings” issues. These often

stem from conflicting robots directives. One solved, be sure to

validate your fix via the Coverage report.

Look at indexation trends. Most sites are continually adding

valuable content, so “Valid” pages (aka those indexed by Google)

should steadily increase. Understand the cause of any dramatic

changes.

Select “Valid” and look in details for the type “Indexed, not

submitted in sitemap”. These are pages where you and Google

disagree on their value. For example, you may not have submitted

your privacy policy URL, but Google has indexed the page. In

such cases, there’s no actions to be taken. What you need to

be looking out for are indexed URLs which stem from poor

pagination handling, poor parameter handling, duplicate

content or pages being accidently left out of sitemaps.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Afterwards, limit the report to the SEO relevant URLs you have

included in your sitemap by changing the drop down to “All

submitted pages”. Then check the details of all “Excluded” pages.

Reasons for exclusion of sitemap URLs can be put into

four action groups:

1. Quick wins: For duplicate content, canoncials, robots

directives, 40X HTTP status codes, redirects or legalities

exclusions put in place the appropriate fix.

2. Investigate page: For both “Submitted URL dropped” and

“Crawl anomaly” exclusions investigate further by using the Fetch

as Google tool.

3.Improve page: For “Crawled - currently not indexed” pages,

review the page (or page type as generally it will be many URLs

of a similar breed) content and internal links. Chances are, it’s

suffering from thin content, unoriginal content or is orphaned.

4. Improve domain: For “Discovered - currently not indexed”

pages, Google notes the typical reason for exclusion as they “tried

to crawl the URL but the site was overloaded”. Don’t be fooled. It’s

more likely that Google decided “it’s not worth the effort” to crawl

due to poor internal linking or low content quality seen from the

domain. If you see a larger number of these exclusions, review

the SEO value of the page (or page types) you have submitted via

sitemaps, focus on optimising crawl budget as well as review your

information architecture, including parameters, from both an link

and content perspective.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Whatever your plan of action, be sure to note down benchmark KPIs.

The most useful metric to assess the impact of sitemap optimisation

efforts is the “All submitted pages” indexation rate - calculated by

taking the percentage of valid pages out of total discovered URLs.

Work to get this above 80 percent.

Why not to 100 percent? Because if you have focussed all your

energy on ensuring every SEO relevant URL you currently have is

indexed, you likely missed opportunities to expand your content

coverage.

Key Takeaway

In addition to identifying warnings and errors, you can use the

Index Coverage report as an XML sitemap sleuthing tool to isolate

indexation problems.

Note: If you are a larger website who has chosen to break their

site down into multiple sitemap indexes, you will be able to filter by

those indexes.

This will not only allow you to:

1. See the overview chart on a more granular level.

2. See a larger number of relevant examples when investigating a

type of exclusion.

3. Tackle indexation rate optimisation section by section.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

XML Sitemap Best Practice

Checklist

Do invest time to:

Compress sitemap files using gzip

Use a sitemap index file

Use image, video and Google news sitemaps only if indexation

drives your KPIs

Dynamically generate XML sitemaps

Ensure URLs are included only in a single sitemap

Reference sitemap index URL(s) in robots.txt

Submit sitemap index to both Google Search Console and Bing

Webmaster Tools

Include only SEO relevant pages in XML sitemaps

Fix all errors and warnings

Analyse trends and types of valid pages

Calculate submitted pages indexation rate

Address causes of exclusion for submitted pages

Now, go check your own sitemap and make sure you’re doing it

right.

HOW TO USE XML SITEMAPS TO BOOST SEO

Best Practices for

Setting Up Meta

Robots Tags & Robots.

txt

Chapter 4

Written By

Founder, Opporty

Sergey Grybniak

First-rate website optimization is

fundamental to success in search, but

forgetting about the technical part of

SEO can be a serious mistake. BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS &

ROBOTS.TXT

Experienced digital marketers and SEO professionals understand the

importance of proper search engine indexing. For that reason, they do

their best to help Google crawl and index their sites properly, investing

time and resources in on-page and off-page optimization.

Content, links, tags, meta descriptions, image optimization, and website

structure are essential for SEO, but if you have never heard about robots.

txt, meta robots tags, XML sitemaps, microformats, and X-Robot tags, you

could be in trouble.

But do not panic.

In this chapter, I will explain how to use and set up robots.txt and meta

robots tags. I will provide several practical examples as well.

Let’s start!

What Is Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file used to instruct search engine bots (also

known as crawlers, robots, or spiders) how to crawl and index

website pages.

Ideally, a robots.txt file is placed in the top-level directory of your

website so that robots can access its instructions right away.

Why Is Robots.txt Important?

Correct robots.txt operation ensures that search engine bots are

routed to required pages, disallowing content duplicates that lead to

a fall in position. For that reason, you should make sure your site has

a thoughtfully created robot.txt file.

If a robots.txt file is set up incorrectly, it can cause multiple indexing

mistakes. So, every time you start a new SEO campaign, check your

robots.txt file with Google’s robots texting tool.

Do not forget: If everything is correctly set up, a robots.txt file will

speed up the indexing process.

Robots.txt on the Web

Yet, do not forget that any robots.txt file is publicly available on

the web. To access a robots.txt file, simply type: www.websiteexample.

com/robots.txt.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

This availability means that:

You cannot secure or hide any data within it.

Bad robots and malicious crawlers can take advantage of a robots.

txt file, using it as a detailed map to navigate your most valuable web

pages.

Also, keep in mind that robots.txt commands are actually directives.

This means that search bots can crawl and index your site, even if

you instruct them not to.

The good news is that most search engines (like Google, Bing,

Yahoo, and Yandex) honor robots.txt directives.

Robots.txt files definitely have drawbacks. Nonetheless, I strongly

recommend you make them an integral part of every SEO campaign.

Google recognizes and honors robots.txt directives and, in most

cases, having Google under your belt is more than enough.

Robots.txt Basics

The robots.txt file should:

Contain the usual text in the UTF-8 encoding, which consists of

records (lines), divided by symbols.

Be situated at the root of the website host to which it applies.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Be unique.

Contain not more than 1,024 rules.

Be under 500KB.

Google bots find all the content available for indexing if:

There is no robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file isn’t shown in the text format.

They do not receive the 200 OK response.

Note:

You can, but are not allowed to, mention the byte order mark (BOM)

at the beginning of the robots.txt file, as it will be ignored by bots.

The standard recommends the use of a newline before each Useragent

directive.

If your encoding contains symbols beyond the UTF-8, bots may

analyze the file incorrectly. They will execute the valid entry only,

ignoring the rest of your content without notifying you about the

mistake.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Robots.txt Structure

Robots.txt File consists of:

One or several User-agent directives, meant for robots of various

search engines.

Disallow and Allow directives that allow or restrict indexing.

Sitemap directives.

Disallow directives forbid indexing, Allow directives allow

indexing.

Each record consists of the directory field (allow, disallow, host or

user-agent), two-spot and a value. Empty spaces are not required,

but recommended for better readability. You can place comments

anywhere in the file and mark them with the # symbol.

“#” is the symbol meant for comment descriptions.

Google bots do not count everything mentioned between

the # symbol and the next newline.

The general format is: <field>:<value><#comment (optional)>.

Empty spaces at the beginning and the end will be ignored.

Letter case for <field> element does not matter.

Letter case might be important for the <value> element, depending

on the <field> element.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

What to Hide with Robots.txt

Obviously, you do not want to show search engines your private

technical page, customers’ personal data, and duplicate content.

Robots.txt files can be used to exclude certain directories,

categories, and pages from search. To that end, use the “disallow”

directive.

Here are some pages you should hide using a robots.txt

file:

Pages with duplicate content

Pagination pages

On-site search pages

Dynamic product and service pages

Account pages

Admin pages

Shopping cart

Chats

Thank-you pages

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

How to Use Robots.txt

Robots.txt files are pretty flexible and can be used in many ways.

Their main benefit, however, is that they enable SEO experts to

“allow” or “disallow” multiple pages at once without having to

access the code of page by page.

Here is an example of how I instruct Googlebot to avoid crawling

and indexing all pages related to user accounts, cart, and multiple

dynamic pages that are generated when users look for products in

the search bar or sort them by price, and so on.

For example, you can block all search crawlers from content, like

this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Or hide your site’s directory structure and specific categories, like

this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /no-index/

It’s also useful for excluding multiple pages from search.

Just parse URLs you want to hide from search crawlers. Then, add

the “disallow” command in your robots.txt, list the URLs and, voila! –

the pages are no longer visible to Google.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

More important, though, is that a robots.txt file allows you to

prioritize certain pages, categories, and even bits of CSS and JS

code. Have a look at the example below:

Here, we have disallowed WordPress pages and specific

categories, but wp-content files, JS plugins, CSS styles, and blog

are allowed. This approach guarantees that spiders crawl and index

useful code and categories, firsthand.

One more important thing: A robots.txt file is one of the possible

locations for your sitemap.xml file. It should be placed after Useragent,

Disallow, Allow, and Host commands. Like this:

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Note: You can also add your robots.txt file manually to Google

Search Console and, in case you target Bing, Bing Webmaster

Tools.

Even though robots.txt structure and settings are pretty

straightforward, a properly set up file can either make or break

your SEO campaign.

Be careful with settings: You can easily “disallow” your entire site

by mistake and then wait for traffic and customers to no avail.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Typical Robots.txt Mistakes

1. The File Name Contains Upper Case

The only possible file name is robots.txt, nor Robots.txt or ROBOTS.

TXT.

2. Using Robot.Txt Instead of Robots.txt

Once again, the file must be called robots.txt.

3. Incorrectly Formatted Instructions

For example: Disallow: Googlebot

The only correct option is:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

4. Mentioning Several Catalogs in Single ‘Disallow’

Instructions

Do not place all the catalogs you want to hide in one ‘disallow’ line,

like this:

Disallow: /css/ /cgi-bin/ /images/

The only correct option is:

Disallow: /css/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /images/

5. Empty Line in ‘User-Agent’

Wrong option:

User-agent:

Disallow:

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

The only correct option is:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

6. Using Upper Case in the File

This is wrong and is treated as a bad style:

USER-AGENT: GOOGLEBOT

DISALLOW:

7. Mirror Websites & URL in the Host Directive

To state which website is the main one and which is the mirror

(replica), specialists use 301 redirect for Google and ‘host’ directive

for Yandex.

Although the links to http://www.site.com, http://site.com, https://

www.site.com, and https://site.com seem identical for humans,

search engines treat them as four different websites.

Be careful when mentioning ‘host’ directives, so that search engines

understand you correctly:

Wrong

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /cgi-bin

Host: http://www.site.com/

Correct

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /cgi-bin

Host: www.site.com

If your site has https, the correct option is

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /cgi-bin

Host: https:// www.site.com

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

8. Listing All the Files Within the Directory

9. Absence of Disallow Instructions

The disallow instructions are required so that search engines bots

understand your intents.

10. Redirect 404

Even if you are not going to create and fill out robots.txt. file for your

website, search engines may still try to reach the file. Consider

creating at least an empty robots.txt. to avoid disappointing search

engines with 404 Not Found pages.

Wrong

User-agent: *

Disallow: /AL/Alabama.html

Disallow: /AL/AR.html

Disallow: /Az/AZ.html

Disallow: /Az/bali.html

Disallow: /Az/bed-breakfast.html

Wrong

User-agent: *

Disallow: /AL/Alabama.html

Disallow: /AL/AR.html

Disallow: /Az/AZ.html

Disallow: /Az/bali.html

Disallow: /Az/bed-breakfast.html

Correct

Just hide the entire directory:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /AL/

Disallow: /Az/

Correct

Just hide the entire directory:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /AL/

Disallow: /Az/

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

11. Using Additional Directives in the * Section

If you have additional directives, such as ‘host’ for example, you

should create separate sections.

12. Incorrect HTTP Header

Some bots can refuse to index the file if there is a mistake in the

HTTP header.

Wrong

User-agent: *

Disallow: /css/

Host: www.example.com

Wrong

Content-Type: text/html

Correct

User-agent: *

Disallow: /css/

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /css/

Host: www.example.com

Correct

Content Type: text/plain

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

The main panel shows us all the pages that are blocked.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Checking Pages Blocked with Robots.txt

Let’s use Screaming Frog to check the web pages that are blocked

with our robots.txt file.

1. Go to the right panel and choose ‘Overview’ (1), ‘Response Codes’

(2), ‘Blocked by Robots.txt’ (3).

2. Check to ensure that no pages with essential content are

occasionally hidden from search engines.

3. Choose ‘User Agent’ to test robots.txt for various search engines.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

4. Specify which search engine bots the tool should imitate.

5. You may test various robots.txt sections by repeating the entire

process and pressing ‘Start.’

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

What Are Meta Robots Tags?

Meta robots tags (REP tags) are elements of an indexer directive that

tell search engine spiders how to crawl and index specific pages on

your website.

They enable SEO professionals to target individual pages and

instruct crawlers on what to follow and what not to follow.

Meta Robots Tags Basics

You may hide pages from indexing in several ways, including

meta robots tags implementation. Here you can use the following

directives:

all – No limitations for indexing and content demonstration. This

directive is being used by default and has no impact on the search

engines’ work, unless otherwise specified.

noindex – Do not show this page and the ‘Saved Copy’ link in the

SERPs.

nofollow – Do not allow following the on-page links.

none – The same as noindex, and nofollow meta tags.

noarchive – Do not show the ‘Saved Copy’ link in the SERPs.

nosnippet – Do not show the extended description version of this

page in the SERPs.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

notranslate – Do not offer this page’s translation in the SERPs.

noimageindex – Do not index the on-page images.

unavailable_after: [RFC-850 date/time] – Do not show this

page in the SERPs after specified date/time. Use RFC 850 format.

How to Use Meta Robots Tags

Meta robots tags are pretty simple to use.

It does not take much time to set up meta robots tags. In four simple

steps, you can take your website indexation process up a level:

1. Access the code of a page by pressing CTRL + U.

2. Copy and paste the <head> part of a page’s code into a separate

document.

3. Provide step-by-step guidelines to developers using this

document. Focus on how, where, and which meta robots tags to

inject into the code.

4. Check to make sure the developer has implemented the tags

correctly. To do so, I recommend using The Screaming Frog SEO

Spider.

The screenshot below demonstrates how meta robots tags may

look (check out the first line of code):

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Meta robots tags are recognized by major search engines: Google,

Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. You do not have to tweak the code for each

individual search engine or browser (unless they honor specific tags).

Main Meta Robots Tags Parameters

As I mentioned above, there are four main REP tag

parameters: follow, index, nofollow, and noindex. Here is

how you can use them:

index, follow: allow search bots to index a page and follow its links

noindex, nofollow: prevent search bots from indexing a page and

following its links

index, nofollow: allow search engines to index a page but hide its

links from search spiders

noindex, follow: exclude a page from search but allow following its

links (link juice helps increase SERPs)

REP tag parameters vary. Here are some of the rarely used

ones:

none

noarchive

nosnippet

unavailabe_after

noimageindex

nocache

noodp

notranslate

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Meta robots tags are essential if you need to optimize specific

pages. Just access the code and instruct developers on what to do.

If your site runs on an advanced CMS (OpenCart, PrestaShop) or

uses specific plugins (like WP Yoast), you can also inject meta tags

and their parameters directly into page templates. This allows you to

cover multiple pages at once without having to ask developers for

help.

Robots.txt & Meta Robots

Tags Non-Compliance

Incoherence between directives in robots.txt and on-page meta tags

is a common mistake.

For example, the robots.txt file hides the page from indexing, but the

meta robots tags do the opposite.

In such cases, Google will

pay attention to what is

prohibited by the robots.

txt file. Most likely, bots will

ignore the directives that

encourage indexing of the

content.

Pay attention to the

fact that robots.txt is

a recommendation by

Google, but not a demand.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Therefore, you still have a chance to see your page indexed, as long

as there are external links that lead to them.

If robots.txt does not hide the page, but the directives do – Google

bots will accomplish the most restricting task and will not index the

on-page content.

The conclusion is simple: eliminate non-compliance between meta

robots tags and robots.txt to clearly show Google which pages

should be indexed, and which should not.

Another noteworthy example is incoherence between on-page meta

tags.

Yandex search bots opt for positive value when they notice conflicts

between the meta tags on a page:

<!–Bots will choose the ‘all’ value and index all the links and texts.–>

By contrast, Google bots opt for the strongest directive, indexing only

links and ignoring the content.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

The sitemap.xml, robots.txt and meta robots tags instructions

complement one another when set up correctly.

The major rules are:

Sitemap.xml, robots.txt and meta robots tags should not be

conflicting.

All the pages that are blocked in robots.txt and meta robots tags

must be excluded from sitemap.xml as well.

All the pages that are opened for indexing must be included in the

sitemap.xml as well.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

The Sitemap.xml Role

The sitemap.xml, robots.txt and meta robots tags instructions

complement one another when set up correctly.

The major rules are:

Sitemap.xml, robots.txt and meta robots tags should not be

conflicting.

All the pages that are blocked in robots.txt and meta robots tags

must be excluded from sitemap.xml as well.

All the pages that are opened for indexing must be included in the

sitemap.xml as well.

To Sum It Up

Knowing how to set up and use a robots.txt file and meta robots

tags is extremely important. A single mistake can spell death to your

entire campaign.

I personally know several digital marketers who have spent months

doing SEO, only to realize that their websites were closed to

indexation in robots.txt. Others abused the “nofollow” tag so much

that they lost backlinks in droves.

Dealing with robots.txt files and REP tags is pretty technical, which

can potentially lead to many mistakes. Fortunately, there are several

basic rules that will help you implement them successfully.

Robots.txt

1. Place your robots.txt file in the top-level directory of your website

code to simplify crawling and indexing.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

However, a few exceptions exist:

Starting the second pagination page, you should add ‘noindex,

follow’ to the meta robots tags, leaving those pages open for

indexing in robots.txt.

Consider adding all the pagination pages to the si temap.xml, so

all the links can be re-indexed.

2. Structure your robots.txt properly, like this: User-agent - Disallow

- Allow - Host - Sitemap. This way, search engine spiders access

categories and web pages in the appropriate order.

3. Make sure that every URL you want to “Allow:” or “Disallow:” is

placed on an individual line. If several URLs appear on one single

line, crawlers will have a problem accessing them.

4. Use lowercase to name your robots.txt. Having “robots.txt” is

always better than “Robots.TXT.” Also, file names are case sensitive.

5. Do not separate query parameters with spacing. For instance, a

line query like this “/cars/ /audi/” would cause mistakes in the robots.

txt file.

6. Do not use any special characters except * and $. Other

characters are not recognized.

7. Create separate robots.txt files for different subdomains. For

example, “hubspot.com” and “blog.hubspot.com” have individual files

with directory- and page-specific directives.

8. Use # to leave comments in your robots.txt file. Crawlers do not

honor lines with the # character.

9. Do not rely on robots.txt for security purposes. Use passwords

and other security mechanisms to protect your site from hacking,

scraping, and data fraud.

Meta Robots Tags

Be case sensitive. Google and other search engines may recognize

attributes, values, and parameters in both uppercase and lowercase,

and you can switch between the two if you want. I strongly

recommend that you stick to one option to improve code readability.

Avoid multiple <meta> tags. By doing this, you will avoid conflicts

in code. Use multiple values in your <meta> tag, like this: <meta

name=“robots” content=“noindex, nofollow”>.

Do not use conflicting meta tags to avoid indexing mistakes.

For example, if you have several code lines with meta tags like

this <meta name=“robots” content=“follow”> and this <meta

name=“robots” content=“nofollow”>, only “nofollow” will be taken

into account. This is because robots put restrictive values first.

Note: You can easily implement both robots.txt and meta robots

tags on your site. However, be careful to avoid confusion between

the two.

The basic rule here is, restrictive values take precedent. So, if you

“allow” indexing of a specific page in a robots.txt file but accidentally

“noindex” it in the <meta>, spiders will not index the page.

Also, remember: If you want to give instructions specifically to

Google, use the <meta> “googlebot” instead of “robots”, like this:

“robots” but avoids all the other search crawlers.

BEST PRACTICES FOR SETTING UP META ROBOTS TAGS & ROBOTS.TXT

Your Indexed Pages

Are Going Down – 5

Possible Reasons Why

Chapter 5

Written By

SEO Director, Myers Media Group

Benj Arriola

Getting your webpages

indexed by Google (and other

search engines) is essential.

Pages that aren’t indexed

can’t rank.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

How do you see how many pages you have indexed? You can:

Use the site: operator.

Check the status of your XML Sitemap Submissions in Google

Search Console.

Check your overall indexation status.

Each will give different numbers, but why they are different is another

story.

For now, let’s just talk about analyzing a decrease in the number of

indexed pages reported by Google.

If your pages aren’t being indexed, this could be a sign that Google

may not like your page or may not be able to easily crawl it.

Therefore, if your indexed page count begins to decrease,

this could be because either:

You’ve been slapped with a Google penalty.

Google thinks your pages are irrelevant.

Google can’t crawl your pages.

Here are a few tips on how to diagnose and fix the issue of

decreasing numbers of indexed pages.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

Make sure they have the proper 200 HTTP Header Status.

Did the server experience frequent or long downtime? Did the

domain recently expire and was renewed late?

Action Item

You can use a free HTTP Header Status checking tool to

determine whether the proper status is there. For massive sites,

typical crawling tools like Xenu, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, or

Botify can test these.

The correct header status is 200. Sometimes some 3xx (except

the 301), 4xx, or 5xx errors may appear – none of these are good

news for the URLs you want to be indexed.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

1. Are the Pages Loading

Properly?

Sometimes a change in CMS, backend programming, or server

setting that results in a change in domain, subdomain, or folder may

consequently change the URLs of a site.

Search engines may remember the old URLs but, if they don’t

redirect properly, a lot of pages can become de-indexed.

Action Item

Hopefully a copy of the old site can still be visited in some way

or form to take note of all old URLs so you can map out the 301

redirects to the corresponding URLs.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

2. Did Your URLs Change

Recently?

Fixing duplicate content often involves implementing canonical tags,

301 redirects, noindex meta tags, or disallows in robots.txt. All of

which can result in a decrease in indexed URLs.

This is one example where the decrease in indexed pages might be

a good thing.

Action Item

Since this is good for your site, the only thing you need to do is to

double check that this is definitely the cause of the decrease of

indexed pages and not anything else.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

3. Did You Fix Duplicate Content

Issues?

Some servers have bandwidth restrictions because of the

associated cost that comes with a higher bandwidth; these servers

may need to be upgraded. Sometimes, the issue is hardware related

and can be resolved by upgrading your hardware processing or

memory limitation.

Some sites block IP addresses when visitors access too many

pages at a certain rate. This setting is a strict way to avoid any

DDOS hacking attempts but it can also have a negative impact on

your site.

Typically, this is monitored at a page’s second setting and if the

threshold is too low, normal search engine bot crawling may hit the

threshold and the bots cannot crawl the site properly.

Action Item

If this is a server bandwidth limitation, then it might be an

appropriate time to upgrade services.

If it is a server processing/memory issue, aside from upgrading

the hardware, double check if you have any kind of server caching

technology in place, this will give less stress on the server.

If an anti-DDOS software is in place, either relax the settings or

whitelist Googlebot to not be blocked anytime. Beware though,

there are some fake Googlebots out there; be sure to detect

googlebot properly. Detecting Bingbot has a similar procedure.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

4. Are Your Pages Timing Out?

Sometimes what search engine spiders see is different than what

we see.

Some developers build sites in a preferred way without knowing the

SEO implications.

Occasionally, a preferred out-of-the-box CMS will be used without

checking if it is search engine friendly.

Sometimes, it might have been done on purpose by an SEO

who attempted to do content cloaking, trying to game the search

engines.

Other times, the website has been compromised

by hackers, who cause a different page

to be shown to Google to promote

their hidden links or cloak the

301 redirections to their own

site.

The worse situation would

be pages that are infected

with some type of malware

that Google automatically

deindexes the page

immediately once detected.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

5. Do Search Engine Bots See

Your Site Differently?

Action Item

Using Google Search Console’s fetch and render feature is

the best way to see if Googlebot is seeing the same content as

you are.

You may also try to translate the page in Google Translate

even if you have no intention to translate the language or check

Google’s Cached page, but there are also ways around these

to still cloak content behind them.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

Index Pages Are Not Used as

Typical KPIs

A Decrease in Indexed Pages Isn’t

Always Bad

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which help measure the success

of an SEO campaign, often revolve around organic search traffic and

ranking. KPIs tend to focus on the goals of a business, which are tied

to revenue.

An increase in indexed pages pages may increase the possible

number of keywords you can rank for that can result in higher

profits. However, the point of looking at indexed pages is mainly just

to see whether search engines are able to crawl and indexed your

pages properly.

Remember, your pages can’t rank when search engines can’t see,

crawl, or index them.

Most of the time, a decrease in indexed pages could mean a bad

thing, but a fix to duplicate content, thin content, or low-quality

content might also result in a decreased number of indexed pages,

which is a good thing.

Learn how to evaluate your site by looking at these five possible

reasons why your indexed pages are going down.

YOUR INDEXED PAGES ARE GOING DOWN – 5 POSSIBLE REASONS WHY

An SEO Guide to HTTP

Status Codes

Chapter 6

Written By

SEO Director, Site Objective

Brian Harnish

One of the most important

assessments in any SEO audit

is determining what hypertext

transfer protocol status codes

(or HTTP Status Codes) exist on a

website.

AN SEO’S COMPLETE GUIDE TO HTTP: STATUS CODES

These codes can become complex, often turning into a hard puzzle that

must be solved before other tasks can be completed.

For instance, if you put up a page that all of a sudden disappears with a

404 not found status code, you would check server logs for errors and

assess what exactly happened to that page.

If you are working on an audit, other status codes can be a

mystery, and further digging may be required.

These codes are segmented into different types:

1xx status codes are informational codes.

2xx codes are success codes.

3xx redirection codes are redirects.

4xx are any codes that fail to load on the client side, or client error

codes.

5xx are any codes that fail to load due to a server error.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

1xx Informational Status Codes

These codes are informational in nature and usually have no realworld

impact for SEO.

100 – Continue

Definition: In general, this protocol designates that the initial serving

of a request was received and not yet otherwise rejected by the

server.

SEO Implications: None

Real World SEO Application: None

101 - Switching Protocols

Definition: The originating server of the site understands, is willing

and able to fulfill the request of the client via the Upgrade header

field. This is especially true for when the application protocol on the

same connection is being used.

SEO Implications: None

Real World SEO Application: None

102 – Processing

Definition: This is a response code between the server and the

client that is used to inform the client side that the request to the

server was accepted, although the server has not yet completed the

request.

SEO Implications: None

Real World SEO Application: None

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

2xx Client Success Status Codes

This status code tells you that a request to the server was

successful. This is mostly only visible server-side. In the real world,

visitors will never see this status code.

SEO Implications: A page is loading perfectly fine, and no action

should be taken unless there are other considerations (such as

during the execution of a content audit, for example).

Real-World SEO Application: If a page has a status code of 200

OK, you don’t really need to do much to it if this is the only thing you

are looking at. There are other applications involved if you are doing

a content audit, for example.

However, that is beyond the scope of this article, and you should

already know whether or not you will need a content audit based on

initial examination of your site.

How to find all 2xx success codes on a website via Screaming Frog:

There are two ways in Screaming Frog that you can find 2xx HTTP

success codes: through the GUI, and through the bulk export

option.

Method 1 – Through the GUI

1. Crawl your site using the settings that you are comfortable with.

2. All of your site URLs will show up at the end of the crawl.

3. Look for the Status Code column. Here, you will see all 200 OK,

2xx based URLs.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

Method 2 – The Bulk Export Option

1. Crawl your site using the settings that you are comfortable with.

2. Click on Bulk Export

3. Click on Response Codes

4. Click on 2xx Success Inlinks

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

201 – Created

This status code will tell you that the server request has been

satisfied and that the end result was that one or multiple resources

were created.

202 – Accepted

This status means that the server request was accepted to be

processed, but the processing has not been finished yet.

203 – Non-Authoritative Information

A transforming proxy modified a successful payload from the origin

server’s 200 OK response.

204 – No Content

After fulfilling the request successfully, no more content can be sent

in the response payload body.

205 – Reset Content

This is similar to the 204 response code, except the response

requires the client sending the request reset the document view.

206 – Partial Content

Transfers of one or more components of the selected page that

corresponds to satisfiable ranges that were found in the range

header field of the request. The server, essentially, successfully

fulfilled the range request for said target resource.

207 – Multi-Status

In situations where multiple status codes may be the right thing, this

multi-status response displays information regarding more than one

resource in these situations.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

3xx Redirection Status Codes

How Can 301 Redirects Impact

SEO?

Mostly, 3xx Redirection codes denote redirects. From temporary to

permanent. 3xx redirects are an important part of preserving SEO

value.

That’s not their only use, however. They can explain to Google

whether or not a page redirect is permanent, temporary, or

otherwise.

In addition, the redirect can be used to denote pages of content that

are no longer needed.

301 – Moved Permanently

These are permanent redirects. For any site migrations, or other

situations where you have to transfer SEO value from one URL to

another on a permanent basis, these are the status codes for the

job.

Google has said several things about the use of 301 redirects and

their impact. John Mueller has cautioned about their use.

“So for example, when it comes to links, we will say well, it’s this link

between this canonical URL and that canonical URL- and that’s how

we treat that individual URL.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

In that sense it’s not a matter of link equity loss across redirect

chains, but more a matter of almost usability and crawlability. Like,

how can you make it so that Google can find the final destination

as quickly as possible? How can you make it so that users don’t

have to jump through all of these different redirect chains. Because,

especially on mobile, chain redirects, they cause things to be really

slow.

If we have to do a DNS lookup between individual redirects, kind of

moving between hosts, then on mobile that really slows things down.

So that’s kind of what I would focus on there.

Not so much like is there any PageRank being dropped here. But

really, how can I make it so that it’s really clear to Google and to users

which URLs that I want to have indexed. And by doing that you’re

automatically reducing the number of chain redirects.”

It is also important to note here that not all 301 redirects will pass

100 percent link equity. From Roger Montti’s reporting:

“A redirect from one page to an entirely different page will result in no

PageRank being passed and will be considered a soft 404.”

John Mueller also mentioned previously:

“301-redirecting for 404s makes sense if you have 1:1 replacement

URLs, otherwise we’ll probably see it as soft-404s and treat like a

404.”

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

302 – Found

Also known as temporary redirects, rather than permanent

redirects. They are a cousin of the 301 redirects with one important

difference: they are only temporary.

You may find 302s instead of 301s on sites where these redirects

have been improperly implemented.

Usually, they are done by developers who don’t know any better.

The other 301 redirection status codes that you may come across

include:

300 – Multiple Choices

This redirect involves multiple documents with more than one

version, each having its own identification. Information about these

documents is being provided in a way that allows the user to select

the version that they want.

303 – See Other

A URL, usually defined in the location header field, redirects the user

agent to another resource. The intention behind this redirect is to

provide an indirect response to said initial request.

The matching of the topic of the page in this instance is what’s

important. “the 301 redirect will pass 100 percent PageRank only if

the redirect was a redirect to a new page that closely matched the

topic of the old page.”

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

304 – Not Modified

The true condition, which evaluated false, would normally have

resulted in a 200 OK response should it have evaluated to true.

Applies to GET or HEAD requests mostly.

305 – Use Proxy

This is now deprecated, and has no SEO impact.

307 – Temporary Redirect

This is a temporary redirection status code that explains that the

targeted page is temporarily residing on a different URL. It lets the

user agent know that it must NOT make any changes to the method

of request if an auto redirect is done to that URL.

308 – Permanent Redirect

Mostly the same as a 301 permanent redirect.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

4xx Client Error Status Codes

4xx client error status codes are those status codes that tell us that

something is not loading – at all – and why.

While the error message is a subtle difference between each code,

the end result is the same. These errors are worth fixing and should

be one of the first things assessed as part of any website audit.

Error 400 Bad Request

403 Forbidden

404 Not Found

These statuses are the most common requests an SEO will

encounter – the 400, 403 and 404 errors. These errors simply mean

that the resource is unavailable and unable to load.

Whether it’s due to a temporary server outage, or other reason,

it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the end result of the bad

request – your pages are not being served by the server and is

There are two ways to find 4xx errors that are plaguing a site in

Screaming Frog – through the GUI, and through bulk export.

Screaming Frog GUI Method:

1. Crawl your site using the settings that you are comfortable with.

2. Click on the down arrow to the right.

3. Click on response codes.

4. Filter by Client Error (4xx).

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

Screaming Frog Bulk

Export Method:

1. Crawl your site with the

settings you are familiar

with.

2. Click on Bulk Export.

3. Click on Response

Codes.

4. Click on Client error

(4xx) Inlinks.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

These are other 4xx errors that you may come across, including:

401 - Unauthorized

402 - Payment Required

405 - Method Not Allowed

406 - Not Acceptable

407 - Proxy Authentication Required

408 - Request Timeout

409 - Conflict

410 - Gone

411 - Length Required

412 - Precondition Failed

413 - Payload Too Large

414 - Request-URI Too Long

415 - Unsupported Media Type

416 - Requested Range Not Satisfiable

417 - Expectation Failed

418 - I’m a teapot

421 - Misdirected Request

422 - Unprocessable Entity

423 - Locked

424 - Failed Dependency

426 - Upgrade Required

428 - Precondition Required

429 - Too Many Requests

431 - Request Header Fields Too Large

444 - Connection Closed Without Response

451 - Unavailable For Legal Reasons

499 - Client Closed Request

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

5xx Server Error Status Codes

All of these errors imply that there is something wrong at the server

level that is preventing the full processing of the request.

The end result will always (in most cases that serve us as SEOs) be

the fact that the page does not load and will not be available to the

client side user agent that is viewing it.

This can be a big problem for SEOs.

Again, using Screaming Frog, there are two methods you can use

to get to the root of the problems being caused by 5xx errors on a

website. A GUI method, and a Bulk Export method.

Screaming Frog GUI Method for Unearthing 5xx Errors

1. Crawl your site using the settings that you are comfortable with.

2. Click on the dropdown arrow on the far right.

3. Click on “response codes”.

4. Click on Filter > Server Error (5xx)

5. Select Server Error (5xx).

6. Click on Export

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

Screaming Frog Bulk Export Method for Unearthing 5xx Errors

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

1. Crawl your site using the settings you are comfortable with.

2. Click on Bulk Export.

3. Click on Response Codes.

4. Click on Server Error (5xx) Inlinks.

This will give you all of the 5xx errors that are presenting on your

site.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

There are other 5xx http status codes that you may come across,

including the following:

500 - Internal Server Error

501 - Not Implemented

502 - Bad Gateway

503 - Service Unavailable

504 - Gateway Timeout

505 - HTTP Version Not Supported

506 - Variant Also Negotiates

507 - Insufficient Storage

508 - Loop Detected

510 - Not Extended

511 - Network Authentication Required

599 - Network Connect Timeout Error

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

Making Sure That HTTP Status

Codes Are Corrected On Your Site

Is a Good First Step

When it comes to making a site that is 100 percent crawlable, one of

the first priorities is making sure that all content pages that you want

the search engines to know about are 100 percent crawlable. This

means making sure that all pages are 200 OK.

Once that is complete, you will be able to move forward with more

SEO audit improvements as you assess priorities and additional

areas that need to be improved.

“A website’s work is never done” should be an SEO’s mantra. There

is always something that can be improved on a website that will

result in improved search engine rankings.

If someone says that their

site is perfect, and that they

need no further changes,

then I have a $1 million

dollar bridge to sell you in

Florida.

AN SEO GUIDE TO HTTP STATUS CODES

404 vs. Soft 404

Errors: What’s the

Difference & How to

Fix Both

Chapter 7

Written By

SEO Director, Myers Media Group

Benj Arriola

Every page that loads in a

web browser has a response

code included in the HTTP

headers, which may or may

not be visible on the web

page itself.

404 VS SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE & HOW TO FIX BOTH

There are many different response codes a server gives to

communicate the loading-status of the page; one of the most well-known

codes is the 404-response code.

Generally, any code within 400 to 499 indicates that the page didn’t load.

The 404-response code is the only one that carries a specific meaning

– that the page is actually gone and probably isn’t coming back anytime

soon.

What’s a Soft 404 Error?

Potentially Misidentified as Soft

404

A soft 404 error isn’t an official response code sent to a web

browser. It’s just a label Google adds to a page within their index.

As Google crawls pages, it allocates resources carefully ensuring

that no time is wasted by crawling missing pages which do not

need to be indexed.

However, there are some servers that are poorly configured and

their missing page loads a 200 code when it should display a

404-response code. If the invisible HTTP header displays a 200

code even if the web page clearly states that the page isn’t found,

the page might be indexed, which is a waste of resources for

Google.

To combat this issue, Google notes the characteristics of 404 pages

and attempts to discern whether the 404 page really is a 404 page.

In other words, Google learned that if it looks like a 404, smells like a

404, and acts like a 404, then it’s probably a genuine 404 page.

There are also cases wherein the page isn’t actually missing, but

certain characteristics have triggered Google to categorize it as a

missing page.

Some of these characteristics include a small amount or lack of

content on the page and having too many similar pages on the site.

404 VS. SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE & HOW TO FIX BOTH

These characteristics are also similar to the factors that the Panda

algorithm tackles. The Panda update considers thin and duplicate

content as negative ranking factors.

Therefore, fixing these issues will help avoid both soft 404s and

Panda issues.

404 errors have two main causes:

An error in the link, directing users to a page that doesn’t exist.

A link going to a page that used to exist and suddenly disappeared.

Linking Error

If the cause of the 404 is a linking error, you just have to fix the links.

The difficult part of this task is finding all the broken links on a site.

It can be more challenging for large, complex sites that have

thousands or millions of pages. In instances like this, crawling

tools come in handy. You can try using software such as Xenu,

DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, or Botify.

A Page That No Longer Exists

When a page no longer exists, you have two options:

Restore the page if it was accidentally removed.

301 redirect it to the closest related page if it was removed on

purpose.

404 VS. SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE & HOW TO FIX BOTH

First, you have to locate all the linking errors on the site. Similar to

finding all errors in linking for a large scale website, you can use

crawling tools. However, crawling tools may not find orphaned

pages, which are pages that are not linked from anywhere within

the navigational links or from any of the pages.

Orphaned pages can exist if they used to be part of the website,

then after a website redesign, the link going to this old page

disappeared, but external links from other websites might still be

linking to them. To double check if these kinds of pages exist on

your site, you can use a variety of tools.

Google Search Console

Search console will report 404 pages as Google’s crawler goes

through all the pages it can find. This can include links from other

sites going to a page that used to exist on your website.

Google Analytics

You won’t find a missing page report in

Google Analytics by default. However,

you can track them in a number of ways.

For one, you can create a

custom report

and segment

out pages

that have a

page title

mentioning Error

404 – Page Not Found.

404 VS. SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE & HOW TO FIX BOTH

Another way to find orphaned pages within Google Analytics is to

create custom content groupings and to assign all 404 pages to a

content group.

Site: Operator Search Command

Searching Google for “site:example.com” will list all pages of

example.com that are indexed by Google. You can then individually

check if the pages are loading or if they’re giving 404s.

To do this at scale, I like using WebCEO, which has a feature to

run the site: operator not only on Google, but also on Bing, Yahoo,

Yandex, Naver, Baidu, and Seznam.

Since all the search engines will only give you a subset, running it

on multiple search engines can help give a larger list of pages of

your site. This list can be exported and run on tools for a mass 404

check. I simply do this by adding all URLs as links within an HTML

file and loading it on Xenu to massively check for 404 errors.

Other Backlink Research Tools

Backlink research tools like Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz Open Site

Explorer, Sistrix, LinkResearchTools, and CognitiveSEO can also

help.

Most of these tools will export a list of backlinks linking to your

domain. From there, you can check all the pages that are being

linked to and look for 404 errors.

404 VS. SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE & HOW TO FIX BOTH

How to Fix Soft 404 Errors

Crawling tools won’t detect a soft 404 because it isn’t really a 404

error. But you can use crawling tools to detect something else.

Here are a few things to find:

Thin Content: Some crawling tools not only report pages that

have thin content, but also show a total word count. From there,

you can sort URLs based on your content’s number of words.

Start with pages that have the least amount of words and evaluate

whether the page has thin content.

Duplicate Content: Some crawling tools are sophisticated

enough to discern what percentage of the page is template

content. If the main content is nearly the same as many other

pages, you should look into these pages and determine why

duplicate content exists on your site.

Aside from the crawling tools, you can also use Google Search

Console and check under crawl errors to find pages that are listed

under soft 404s.

Crawling an entire site to find issues that cause soft 404s allows

you to locate and correct problems before Google even detects

them.

After detecting these soft 404 issues, you will need to correct them.

404 VS. SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE & HOW TO FIX BOTH

Most of the time, the solutions appear to be common sense. This

can include simple things like expanding pages with thin content

or replacing duplicate content with new and unique ones.

Throughout this process, here are a few things to

consider:

Consolidate Pages: Sometimes thin content is caused by being

too specific with the page topic, which can leave you with little

to say. Merging several thin pages into one page can be more

appropriate if the topics are related. Not only does this solve thin

content issues, but it can fix duplicate content issues as well. For

example, an e-commerce site selling shoes that come in different

colors and sizes may have a different URL for each size and color

combination. This leaves a large number of pages with content

that is thin and relatively identical. The more effective approach

is to put this all on one page instead and enumerate the options

available.

Find Technical Issues That Cause Duplicate Content: Using

even the simplest web crawling tool like Xenu (which doesn’t look

at content but only URLs, response codes, and title tags), you can

still find duplicate content issues by looking at URLs. This includes

things like www vs non-www URLs, http and https, with index.html

and without, with tracking parameters and without, etc. A good

summary of these common duplicate content issues found in

URLs patterns can be found on slide 6 of this presentation.

404 VS. SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE & HOW TO FIX BOTH

Google Treats 404 Errors & Soft

404 Errors the Same Way

A soft 404 is not real 404 error, but Google will deindex those pages

if they aren’t fixed quickly. It is best to crawl your site regularly to

see if 404 or soft 404 errors occur. Crawling tools should be a major

component of your SEO arsenal. 404 VS. SOFT 404 ERRORS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE &

HOW TO FIX BOTH

8 Tips to Optimize

Crawl Budget for SEO

Chapter 8

Written By

Founder and CMO, SEO PowerSuite

Aleh Barysevich

When you hear the words

“search engine optimization,”

what do you think of? 8

TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

My mind leaps straight to a list of SEO ranking factors, such as proper

tags, relevant keywords, a clean sitemap, great design elements, and a

steady stream of high-quality content.

However, a recent article by my colleague, Yauhen Khutarniuk, made

me realize that I should be adding “crawl budget” to my list.

While many SEO experts overlook crawl budget because it’s not very well

understood, Khutarniuk brings some compelling evidence to the table –

which I’ll come back to later in this chapter – that crawl budget can, and

should, be optimized.

This made me wonder: how does crawl budget optimization overlap with

SEO, and what can websites do to improve their crawl rate?

First Things First – What Is a Crawl

Budget?

Web services and search engines use web crawler bots, aka

“spiders,” to crawl web pages, collect information about them, and

add them to their index. These spiders also detect links on the

pages they visit and attempt to crawl these new pages too.

Examples of bots that you’re probably familiar with include

Googlebot, which discovers new pages and adds them to the

Google Index, or Bingbot, Microsoft’s equivalent.

Most SEO tools and other web services also rely on spiders to

gather information. For example, my company’s backlink index, SEO

PowerSuite Backlink Index, is built using a spider called BLEXBot,

which crawls up to 7.1 billion web pages daily gathering backlink

data.”

The number of times a search engine spider crawls your website

in a given time allotment is what we call your “crawl budget.” So

if Googlebot hits your site 32 times per day, we can say that your

typical Google crawl budget is approximately 960 per month.

You can use tools such

as Google Search

Console and Bing

Webmaster

Tools to figure

out your

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

Is Crawl Budget Optimization the

Same as SEO?

Yes – and no. While both types of optimization aim to make your

page more visible and may impact your SERPs, SEO places a

heavier emphasis on user experience, while spider optimization is

entirely about appealing to bots.

So how do you optimize your crawl budget specifically? I’ve

gathered the following nine tips to help you make your website as

crawlable as possible.

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

website’s approximate crawl budget. Just log in to Crawl > Crawl

Stats to see the average number of pages crawled per day.

How to Optimize Your Crawl

Budget

1. Ensure Your Pages Are Crawlable

Your page is crawlable if search engine spiders can find and follow

links within your website. You’ll have to configure your .htaccess and

robots.txt so that they don’t block your site’s critical pages.

You may also want to provide text versions of pages that rely heavily

on rich media files, such as Flash and Silverlight.

Of course, the opposite is true if you do want to prevent a page from

showing up in search results.

However, it’s not enough to simply set your Robots.txt to “Disallow,”

if you want to stop a page from being indexed. According to

Google: “Robots.txt Disallow does not guarantee that a page will

not appear in results.”

If external information (e.g., incoming links) continue to direct traffic

to the page that you’ve disallowed, Google may decide the page is

still relevant.

In this case, you’ll need to manually block the page from being

indexed by using the noindex robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag

HTTP header.

noindex meta tag: Place the following meta tag in the <head>

section of your page to prevent most web crawlers from indexing

your page:

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

noindex” />

X-Robots-Tag: Place the following in your HTTP header response to

tell crawlers not to index a page:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Note that if you use noindex meta tag or X-Robots-Tag, you should

not disallow the page in robots.txt, The page must be crawled

before the tag will be seen and obeyed.

2. Use Rich Media Files Cautiously

There was a time when Googlebot couldn’t crawl content like

JavaScript, Flash, and HTML. Those times are mostly past (though

Googlebot still struggles with Silverlight and some other files).

However, even if Google can read most of your rich media files,

other search engines may not be able to, which means that you

should use these files judiciously, and you probably want to avoid

them entirely on the pages you want to be ranked.

You can find a full list of the files that Google can index here.

3. Avoid Redirect Chains

Each URL you redirect to wastes a little of your crawl budget.

When your website has long redirect chains, i.e., a large number of

301 and 302 redirects in a row, spiders such as Googlebot may drop

off before they reach your destination page, which means that page

won’t be indexed.

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

Best practice with redirects is to have as few as possible on your

website, and no more than two in a row.

4. Fix Broken Links

When asked whether or not broken links affect web ranking,

Google’s John Mueller once said:

If what Mueller says is true, this is one of the fundamental

differences between SEO and Googlebot optimization, because

it would mean that broken links do not play a substantial role in

rankings, even though they greatly impede Googlebot’s ability to

index and rank your website.

That said, you should take Mueller’s advice with a grain of salt –

Google’s algorithm has improved substantially over the years, and

anything that affects user experience is likely to impact SERPs.

5. Set Parameters on Dynamic URLs

Spiders treat dynamic URLs that lead to the same page as separate

pages, which means you may be unnecessarily squandering your

crawl budget.

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

You can manage your URL parameters by going to your Google

Search Console and clicking Crawl > Search Parameters.

From here, you can let Googlebot know if your CMS adds

parameters to your URLs that doesn’t change a page’s content.

6. Clean Up Your Sitemap

XML sitemaps help both your users and spider bots alike, by making

your content better organized and easier to find.

Try to keep your sitemap up-to-date and purge it of any clutter

that may harm your site’s usability, including 400-level pages,

unnecessary redirects, non-canonical pages, and blocked pages.

The easiest way to clean up your sitemap is to use a tool like

Website Auditor (disclaimer: my tool). You can use Website Auditor’s

XML sitemap generator to create a clean sitemap that excludes all

pages blocked from indexing.

Plus, by going to Site Audit, you can easily find and fix all 4xx status

pages, 301

and 302

redirects,

and noncanonical

pages.

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

7. Build External Links

Link building is still a hot topic – and I doubt it’s going away anytime

soon. As SEJ’s Anna Crowe elegantly put it:

“Cultivating relationships online, discovering new communities,

building brand value – these small victories should already be

imprints on your link-planning process. While there are distinct

elements of link building that are now so 1990s, the human need to

connect with others will never change.”

Now, in addition to Crowe’s excellent point, we also have evidence

from Yauhen Khutarniuk’s experiment that external links closely

correlate with the number of spider visits your website receives.

In his experiment, he used our tools to measure all of the internal

and external links pointing to every page on 11 different sites. He

then analyzed crawl stats on each page and compared the results.

This is an example of what he found on just one of the sites he

analyzed:

While the data set couldn’t prove any conclusive connection

between internal links and crawl rate, Khutarniuk did find an overall

“strong correlation (0,978) between the number of spider visits and

the number of external links.”

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

8. Maintain Internal Link Integrity

While Khutarniuk’s experiment proved that internal link building

doesn’t play a substantial role in crawl rate, that doesn’t mean you

can disregard it altogether.

A well-maintained site structure makes your content easily

discoverable by search bots without wasting your crawl budget.

A well-organized internal linking structure may also improve user

experience – especially if users can reach any area of your website

within three clicks.

Making everything more easily accessible in general means visitors

will linger longer, which may improve your SERPs.

8 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE CRAWL BUDGET FOR SEO

Conclusion: Does Crawl Budget

Matter?

By now, you’ve probably noticed a trend in this article – the bestpractice

advice that improves your crawlability tends to improve

your searchability as well.

So if you’re wondering whether or not crawl budget

optimization is important for your website, the

answer is YES – and it will probably go

hand-in-hand with your SEO efforts

anyway.

Put simply, when you make

it easier for Google to

discover and index your

website, you’ll enjoy

more crawls, which

means faster updates

when you publish new content.

You’ll also improve overall user experience,

which improves visibility, which ultimately

results in better SERPs rankings.

How to Improve Your

Website Navigation:

7 Essential Best

Practices

Chapter 9

Written By

SEO Director, Myers Media Group

Benj Arriola

Website navigation, when

done right, is great for

your users and your SEO

performance. HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7

ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Good website navigation makes it easy for your visitors to find what they

want and for search engines to crawl.

The result: more conversions and greater search visibility.

But how do you actually do it? By using these website navigation best

practices.

What is Website Navigation?

Website navigation (a.k.a., internal link architecture) are the links

within your website that connect your pages. The primary purpose

of website navigation is to help users easily find stuff on your site.

Search engines use your website navigation to discover and index

new pages. Links help search engines to understand the content

and context of the destination page, as well as the relationships

between pages.

Users come first. This is the underlying objective of website

navigation you must always remember.

Satisfy users first. Make navigation easy. Then, optimize for search

engines without hurting the user experience.

If you more basic information on website navigation, you’ll

find these SEJ posts helpful:

Internal Linking Guide to Boost Your SEO by Syed Balkhi

Your Essential Guide to Internal Content Linking by Julia

McCoy

The remainder of this post will maintain a broader focus on website

navigation best practices, outlining various internal linking situations

that can cause issues for your website visitors and search engines.

This topic will be especially relevant and important for anyone

working on large websites.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Website Navigation & Content

Hierarchies

When searching for a specific page within a book, you can simply

read through the table of contents or the index. When you walk

around the grocery store, the aisles are labeled with general section

categories and more subcategories are listed on the shelves

themselves. Both provide an efficient way to navigate through a lot of

content.

Content hierarchies exist to simplify the process of locating content.

When a mass amount of content exists, it can be broken down into a

few broad categories.

Within those broad categories, you can create even narrower

classifications; this builds differing hierarchical levels that users

can easily navigate. Utilizing content hierarchies organizes pages

of a website in a way that makes sense to the user and the search

engine.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Importance of Content Hierarchies & Website Navigation

The categorization and sub-categorization of content help pages

improve in rank for general head terms and for specific long-tail

terms.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Problems Caused by Content Hierarchies

Categorization of content and building hierarchies create content

silos, like clusters of closely related topics. Google will crawl different

pages at different rates, following links from different sites.

Some content silos are more popular than others. These pages may

get more external links and traffic than others and, as a result, earn

more prominent positions in organic search.

When content is too siloed and fails to get links and traffic, it might

not perform as well – even if your other content silos perform

extremely well. The content hierarchies can isolate certain popular

page clusters that may be located too deep within the site.

This is where horizontal linking comes into play.

As much as link relevancy helps in ranking, the lack of cross-linking

between content silos can be detrimental to your overall rankings.

There are always ways to create relationships that horizontally link

categories to one another.

The fact that all pages belong to the same website already indicates

that these pages are not completely irrelevant to each other.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Action Items: Linking Between Content Categories

Categorize content in a way that forms category hierarchies that

make sense to the user and interlink these pages properly, going up

and down the hierarchy. These are the majority of the links.

Create cross-linking between pages that are under different

categories but still have similarities.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Links Between Product & Content

Marketing Pages

Companies selling more than one product or service will do

everything mentioned above on categorizing the pages, creating

content silos, and interlinking them.

However, many SEO teams and content teams also create assets

that are designed to be compelling and shareable. Oftentimes, this

comes in the form of a blog, with posts containing links to specific

products and services.

Blog posts can be useful because they direct more traffic toward

product pages. However, many sites fail to link the product pages

back to the blog pages. Using this type of horizontal linking helps

inform users about your product or service and increases your SEO

performance.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Action Items: Linking Between Product and Content

Pages

Product pages should also link back to related content marketing

pages. This may include blog posts, FAQs, and product manuals.

Website Navigation Using

JavaScript Effects

Occasionally, links and web pages are written in JavaScript. This is

a problem because search engines have difficulty locating internal

links that are created in JavaScript.

Although Google has improved in recent years in terms of reading

JavaScript, SEO specialists have concluded that results are

inconsistent. Other search engines still have no capabilities when it

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

comes to reading JavaScript. This means your internal linking could

be completely lost when search engines crawl your content.

The SEO world is divided over whether using JavaScript is practical.

On one hand, some SEO experts avoid JavaScript altogether. On

the other hand, web designers and usability experts claim that

JavaScript is essential to the user experience. I believe there is a

middle ground where JavaScript can be used while avoiding any

SEO issues.

Links That Display and Hide Content Already on the Page

JavaScript can be used to display and hide certain content on a

page without actually changing the page you are on. When this

happens, all of your content is pre-loaded to the page.

In this case, search engines are still able to crawl all of your content,

even when some of it is hidden. This is only successful when the

amount of content that is hidden remains minor; it can become

problematic when the entire page changes but the URL remains the

same.

Problems arise because

of the fact that when you

hide too much content within

one URL, it dilutes the content

focus of what that page is all about. A

completely different topic should have

its own page.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Action Items: Links That Display and Hide Content

For small amounts of content, remove the anchor tag and replace

with a JavaScript onclick event handler.

Use CSS to control the cursor and change from an arrow to a

hand pointer.

For large amounts of content, including single-page parallax

scrolling websites, not all content should be pre-loaded.

Only pre-load content directly related to the URL.

For all anchor tags, there should be an href value and an

onclick setting.

This href value leads to a new URL that only pre-loads

the content related to this new URL.

The onclick function will prevent the new URL from

loading but will allow content from the destination URL

to load.

Use the pushState function to update the URL even if

that page did not load.

A more in-depth presentation of how this can be specifically

implemented on websites is explained well in this presentation

done at seoClarity in 2016. It specifically talks about AngularJS,

a popular JavaScript framework, and its SEO issues and

solutions. However, the lessons here are also applicable to

almost any JavaScript framework.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Using Tracking Parameters in the

URL

Usability experts and conversion optimization specialists track user

behavior in different ways.

Sometimes, this involves using tracking parameters in URLs within

the site. This causes duplicate content issues due to linking to

different URLs that have the exact same content. This can be

resolved in a number of ways.

Action Items: Tracking Parameters in URLs

Avoid using tracking parameters in the URL. Instead, track these by

using JavaScript tracking onclick event handlers on links that will

pass the same tracking parameters. If using Google Analytics, this

can be done with event tracking.

Always using a self-referencing canonical tag is a good practice to

have to avoid many kinds of duplicate content issues.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

The First Link Priority

in search engine crawling where only the first link is considered and

the duplicate link is disregarded. This has been discussed in forums

and tested in 2008 by a number of people, including Rand Fishkin

and myself.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

First Link Priority as Illustrated on Moz, by Rand Fishkin

A few things worth mentioning:

In 2014 Matt Cutts, former head of Google’s spam team, said this is

no longer an issue. I have yet to test this again and I haven’t seen

any other SEO professionals test this recently.

When this was first tested and detected to be an issue, the HTML

version was 4.1, XHTML 1.1 was on the rise, and HTML 5 did not

yet exist. Today, HTML 5 exists with tags like <header>, <article>,

and <sidebar>. Maybe this time Google treats links in the header,

sidebar, and article tags.

SEO Issues That Arise From the First Link Priority

Top-bar navigation and left side-bar often comes first within the

source code before the main content. Additionally, navigational

elements in these menus often have short anchor text. They tend to

be less keyword focused and more design focused.

Links within the main content of a page have a tendency to be

more keyword focused, with surrounding content that supports

the keyword. They are also more flexible in length, with longer,

more specific anchor text; this longer text increases the variety of

keywords that a page can potentially rank for. However, because of

first link priority issues, these links are often overlooked by search

engines.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Action Items: First Link Priority Issue

Consider code order. Prioritize the main content before the sidebar

and top bar navigation. CSS can be used to control float direction,

from left to right or right to left to make the sidebar navigation load

after the main content. The top bar navigation can be controlled

with absolute positioning.

Handling Navigation in Large

Websites

For large websites (those with hundreds of thousands or millions

pages), website navigation can be a huge challenge. The natural

site navigation within categorized menus generally links to all pages

of the site, and an XML sitemap can help index all pages. However,

the lack of cross-linking between content silos can create distance

between pages.

On a large site, it can be difficult to identify all possible links between

product pages and the corresponding product marketing pages.

Some sections of large sites may not be receiving much of the link

love they need from other pages. Additionally, other issues like the

first link priority and issues with JavaScript could be hard to detect

across millions of pages.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Here are three solutions to these challenges:

1. Delegate to Different Departments

Large companies have proportionately large websites with multiple

employees belonging to different departments. Many departments

may correspond to different sections of the website.

Make sure that everyone involved in maintaining the different

website sections abides by the same SEO principles and practices.

Then, distribute the labor in optimizing navigation across the whole

website.

2. Use Tools or Build Tools

Automation always makes manual processes more scalable. Unless

you have your own proprietary tool, there may not be a single tool to

identify and fix all issues mentioned above.

Crawling tools like Xenu, Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, or Botify

can analyze your existing links, determine the issues, and provide a

description of the site architecture. If you want to visualize the site

architecture, tools like DynoMapper and PowerMapper can help

achieve this.

Link research tools like Moz’s Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, Majestic,

Sistrix, LRT, and CognitiveSEO can analyze which pages get the

most backlinks externally then add cross-links from these pages

leading to more important pages of the site. The proprietary tool we

use automates the process of crawling the page and determining

which pages link to one another.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

3. Use a Phased Approach

Large websites don’t always have large teams behind them

to distribute the work of optimizing pages. If there is a lack of

resources, you can create your own tools to ease this process.

If these tools do not provide the help you need, then consider a

phased approach. This entails working on one section at a time with

an optimization schedule. This is a day-by-day process and may take

longer, but relying on metrics like organic search traffic will help you

determine what to optimize first.

Users come first: Your website navigation should satisfy users

first. Then, optimize your navigation for SEO performance. Never

compromise the user experience.

Cross-linking between content silos: Content relevancy

between pages is important for ranking, which comes naturally in

a well-categorized, hierarchical site architecture. However, this can

have limitations when it lacks cross-linking between content silos

where some pages are just too deep or too far away from receiving

a good amount of link juice from other sources.

Blogs to products, products to blogs: Create high-quality

content that is helpful and relevant to your target audience. If these

blog posts help in a product buying decision, then link to the blog

post from the specific product page(s).

7 Key Takeaways

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

Tracking parameters: Avoid using them; use the onClick event

handler on links for tracking purposes. It is always safe to have a

self-referencing canonical tag.

JavaScript links: Avoid using JavaScript to write content and

links. If there is no way around it, there are methods to make it

work.

First link priority: Ideally, main content comes first. Next, is the

sidebar, followed by the top bar. Lastly, handle the footer. Further

testing is needed to determine if this is really still a valid concern,

but it doesn’t hurt to stick to this method.

Huge websites: Thousands to millions of pages are hard to do

all of the above. Delegate to a team, automate tasks by using tools,

or handle the issues one at a time.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE NAVIGATION: 7 ESSENTIAL BEST PRACTICES

HTTP or HTTPS? Why

You Need a Secure

Site

Chapter 10

Written By

President, JLH Marketing

Jenny Halasz

When Google first started

encouraging sites to go to

HTTPS in May 2010, many

webmasters scoffed at the

idea.

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

After all, HTTPS was only for sites that have transactions or which collect

personal information, right?

Then on August 6, 2014, Google announced that they would be

showing a preference for HTTPS sites in search results. This led

SEOs all over the world to declare that HTTPS was now mandatory, and a

ranking factor.

Finally, Google amended its advice on May 13, 2015. They stated

that HTTPS was not actually a ranking factor, just that when

it came to certain types of queries, they’d show a preference for

it. HTTPS was a “tiebreaker”. Google doubled down on this on

September 15 of that year.

Webmasters breathed a collective sigh of relief, as their SEOs and

marketing directors stopped pushing HTTPS so hard. After all,

migrating to HTTPS is a lot of work!

It requires that all of the former pages be redirected, that all images

and other linked file types be secure, and back then, it could even

slow down the server response time a bit as that “handshake”

verification took place (this is no longer true).

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

Many SEOs Didn’t Believe in

HTTPS at First

Public Wi-Fi networks can insert advertising on

your site if your site is not HTTPS.

As all this was happening, I went on speaking about SEO, always

indicating that I felt HTTPS was not that important unless you were

collecting personal information or credit card numbers through your

site.

But in 2012, I attended a conference where I learned something that

would change the way I felt about HTTPS forever.

Every time I tell people this tidbit, they are surprised to learn about it.

Are you ready for it?

Still not sure why that’s a

big deal? Here’s what my

website looked like back

in 2012. It was not secure:

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

Here’s what my

website looked like

that day my opinion

on HTTPS changed

forever.

You see, I was connected to the free Wi-Fi network provided by my

hotel. I saw these ads show up on my website and immediately

went into a tailspin… I could not understand how I could have ads on

my site!

I didn’t use AdSense; I had never added any ad code on my site.

But there it was, right there in the HTML! I dug around in the code,

thinking for sure that I’d been hacked.

Hint: The difference is

the AdSense block in

the lower left corner

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

Finally, I called the tech support number on the notepad

by the phone:

“Hello Tech Support for XYZ Hotel Wi-Fi”

“Hi, can you tell me why I’m seeing ads on websites that I

typically never see ads on?”

“Yes ma’am. The hotel uses Google AdSense to defray the cost

of the free Wi-Fi service. The ads are dynamically inserted in

applicable websites.”

I hung up the phone in shock. Really? The network could

change what appeared in the code?

I tested a few other sites. Sure enough, there was my son’s preschool.

With an ad for a Las Vegas hotel in the bottom left corner

– same place the ad on my site had been.

I checked a few others… the local police station… with an ad for a

nearby restaurant.

The nearby mall had an ad for skin care products not sold in any

of the stores at the mall.

That’s when I realized that this had some serious possible

consequences.

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

What if an ad for a steak restaurant started showing up on a site

of vegan recipes? That would be completely off-brand and could

potentially lose them a visitor.

Not to mention the other nefarious things people could potentially

do to an insecure site.

I researched and realized that the protocol was what made this

possible.

Without a public/private key pair (as is provided in HTTPS), an

intermediary could easily intercept and steal or change any

information before it got to its destination (the browser).

You Need to Go to HTTPS

This means that without that secure connection, any network that is

between the source host and the destination host can change what

the destination host gets.

If you don’t understand why that’s important, check out this trace

route (tracert) from my home network to Google.com. Each one of

these entries is a separate “hop” or server.

Without HTTPS, any one of these servers could change what

Google delivered to my browser as a result (Google is HTTPS so that

wouldn’t happen).

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

For the safety and security of your visitors, your network, and

yourself, you need to make your site HTTPS.

It really doesn’t matter if your site is just a brochure site. Even if you

don’t collect any emails or have any login screens, you still need to

migrate your site to HTTPS.

TL;DR? More Reasons You Should

Switch to HTTPS

Protect Your Users’ Information. Make sure their data is

protected as it passes through all of those hops to get to you.

Get the Lock Icon in the Browser Window. It looks like this:

You Have to Have it to Implement AMP. AMP technology only

works on a secure server. AMP’s creators designed it that way on

purpose.

Protect Your Brand. There’s a lot more that can be inserted in

websites beyond ads. Think pr0n, pills, and gambling.

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

Better Analytics Data. HTTPS connections don’t allow data

from HTTP connections to be sent through HTTPS channels.

If your site is not HTTPS, you can lose referrer data and other

information from secure sites that link to your site.

Many Applications, Third Parties, and Browser Service

Workers Will Not Support HTTP Sites. If your site is not

secure, you will have problems installing, creating and even

using many third-party tools and scripts.

It’s a Tie-Breaker for Google Ranking. All things being

equal, Google will choose to rank sites that are HTTPS before

sites that are HTTP.

Ready to Switch to HTTPS?

We highly recommend this guide: HTTP to HTTPS Migration: The

Ultimate Stress-Free Guide.

HTTP OR HTTPS? WHY YOU NEED A SECURE SITE

How to Improve Page

Speed for More Traffic

& Conversions

Chapter 11

Written By

CEO, Spartan Media

Jeremy Knauff

Page speed is a critical factor

in digital marketing today.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

It has a significant impact on:

How long visitors stay on your site.

How many of them convert into paying customer.

How much you pay on a CPC basis in paid search.

Where you rank in organic search.

Unfortunately, most websites perform poorly when it comes to page

speed, and that has a direct negative impact on their revenue.

There is an almost infinite number of things we can spend our days

doing as digital marketers, and there’s never enough time to do them all.

As a result, some things get pushed to the back burner.

One of the things that seem to get pushed back most often is

optimizing page speed. This is easy to understand because

most people don’t truly comprehend the importance of this often

overlooked detail, so they don’t see the value in investing time and

money to improve it by a few seconds or less.

What may seem like an inconsequential amount of time to some

marketers, including those who focus solely on search engine

optimization, has been proven to be monumental by data from

industry giants all the way down to our own analytics data.

I’ll assume that you’re like me and you want to maximize your results,

and of course, your revenue, right? Then let’s get started in making

your website faster than greased snot! (That’s quite a visual, isn’t it?)

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

1. Ditch the Budget Web Hosting

We’re all trying to save money these days, after all, those

subscriptions to Raven, SEMrush, Moz, and all the other tools we

use on a daily basis add up quickly. It’s almost like having an extra

kid.

One way a lot of people try to save money is by choosing the kind

of cheap shared hosting that crams as many websites as they

can fit onto a server, much like a bunch of clowns piling into a

single car. Performance be damned!

Sure, your website will be available most of the time as it would

with most any web host, but it will load so bloody slowly that your

visitors will leave frustrated without ever converting into buyers.

“But it’s barely noticeable!” these bargain shoppers insist.

Here’s the thing — it might be barely noticeable to you

because it’s your baby and you love it.

But everyone else only wants to get in

and get out of your website as quickly

as possible.

People want to be on your site for just

long enough to do what they came

to do, whether that means to get an

answer, buy a product, or some other

specific objective. If you slow them

down even a little bit, they will be likely to

hate their experience and leave without converting.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

Think about it like this:

Most people love their own kids unconditionally. But someone

else’s kid screaming, throwing things, disrupting their night out at a

restaurant? They hate that kid. It’s the same with your website.

How Much of a Difference Does It Really Make?

According to a study conducted by Amazon, a difference of just

100ms — a unit of time that a human can’t even perceive, was

enough to reduce their sales by 1 percent. Walmart found similar

results.

If that tiny unit of time has that much direct impact on sales, what

kind impact do you think an extra second or more will have?

But it doesn’t stop there because how quickly (or slowly) your

website loads also has an impact on organic search ranking and

pay-per-click costs. In other words, if your website loads slowly, you

should expect your competitors who have invested in this critical

area to eat your lunch.

Bottom line: skip the budget web hosting. If they are selling it like a

commodity (based mainly on price) then they’ll treat their customers

like a commodity too.

There are a lot of web hosts that are optimized for speed,

particularly for WordPress websites, and some of them are priced

similarly to the budget options. So ask around, do some testing, and

invest in a web host that will give you the performance to satisfy

both your visitors and Google.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

Every file needed for a webpage to render and function, such as

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and fonts require a separate HTTP

request. The more requests made, the slower that page will load.

Now if you’re anything like most of the people I talk to, you’re

probably thinking “Oh, I don’t need to worry about that, Jeremy. I

know what I’m doing and I don’t add a bunch of bloated garbage

into my website!”

That may be partially true. You may not add a bunch of bloated

garbage to your website, but for 90 percent+ of the websites that I

encounter — it’s still there anyway.

That bloat isn’t there because the Bloat Fairy snuck it in while you

were sleeping. It’s there because a majority of web designers,

regardless of skill or experience, don’t make page speed a priority.

The sad truth is that most don’t even know how.

Here’s where the problem starts:

Most themes load one or more CSS files and several JavaScript files.

Some, such as Jquery or FontAwesome, are usually loaded remotely

from another server, which dramatically increases the time it takes a

page to load.

This becomes even more problematic when you consider the

additional CSS and JavaScript files added by plugins. It’s easy to

end up with half a dozen or more HTTP requests just from CSS and

JavaScript files alone.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

2. Reduce HTTP Calls

When you factor in all of the images on a page, which

each require a separate HTTP request, it quickly gets out

of hand.

Merge JavaScript files into one file.

Merge CSS files into one file.

Reduce or eliminate plugins that load their own JavaScript and/

or CSS files. In some cases, as with Gravity Forms, you have the

option to disable them from being loaded.

Use sprites for frequently used images.

Use a font like FontAwesome or Ionic Icons instead of image

files wherever possible because then only one file needs to be

loaded.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

3. Include the Trailing Slash

Omitting the trailing slash on links pointing to your website, whether

from external sources (link building efforts) or from within your own

website, has an adverse impact on speed.

Here’s how:

When you visit a URL without the trailing slash, the web server will

look for a file with that name. If it doesn’t find a file with that name,

it will then treat it as a directory and look for the default file in that

directory.

In other words, by omitting the trailing slash, you’re forcing the

server to execute an unnecessary 301 redirect. While it may seem

instantaneous to you, it does take slightly longer, and as we’ve

already established, every little bit adds up.

https://example.com (this is bad)

https://example.com/services (this is also bad)

https://example.com/ (this is good)

https://example.com/services/ (this is also good)

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

Enabling GZIP compression can significantly reduce the amount of

time it takes to download your HTML, CSS, JavaScript files because

they are downloaded as much smaller compressed files, which are

then decompressed once they get to the browser.

Don’t worry — your visitors won’t have to do anything extra because

all modern browsers support GZIP and automatically process it for

all HTTP requests already.

With browser caching enabled, the elements of a webpage are

stored in your visitors’ browser so the next time they visit your site,

or when they visit another page, their browser can load the page

without having to send another HTTP request to the server for any of

the cached elements.

Once the first page has been loaded and its elements are stored

in the user’s cache, only new elements need to be downloaded on

subsequent pages. This can drastically reduce the number of files

that need to be downloaded during a typical browsing session.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

4. Enable Compression

5. Enable Browser Caching

Minifying your CSS and JavaScript files removes unnecessary

white space and comments to reduce the file size, and as a

result, the time it takes to download them.

Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be a manual process because

there are several tools available online to convert a file into a

smaller, minified version of itself.

There are also several plugins available for WordPress that will

replace the links in your website head for your regular CSS and

JavaScript files with a minified version of them without modifying

your original files, including popular caching plugins such

as:

W3 Total Cache

WP Super Cache

WP Rocket

It may take a bit of effort to get the settings just right because

minification can often break CSS and JavaScript, so once you’ve

minified everything, be sure to test your website thoroughly.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

6. Minify Resources

Your website can appear to the visitor to load more quickly if it’s

coded to prioritize above-the-fold content — in other words, the

content that is visible before a visitor scrolls.

This means ensuring that any elements that appear above the fold

are also as near the beginning of the HTML code so the browser

can download and render them first.

It’s also critical to include any CSS and JavaScript that are required to

render that area inline rather than in an external CSS file.

Because mobile devices with high-quality cameras are common and

modern content management systems such as WordPress makes

it convenient to upload images, many people simply shoot a photo

and upload it without realizing that, often, the image is at least four

times bigger than is necessary.

This slows your website down considerably — especially for mobile

users.

Optimizing the media files on your website has the potential to

improve your page speed tremendously, and doing so is relatively

easy, so it’s a good investment of your time.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

7. Prioritize Above-the-Fold

Content

8. Optimize Media Files

Optimizing Images

Opt for the ideal format. JPG is perfect for photographic images,

while GIF or PNG are best for images with large areas of solid color.

8-bit PNG files are for images without an alpha channel (transparent

background) and 24-bit files are for images with an alpha channel.

Ensure images are properly sized. If an image is displayed at 800

pixels wide on your website, there is no benefit to using a 1600

pixels wide image.

Compress the image file. Aside from being the top image editing

program, Adobe Photoshop has awesome image compression

capabilities and starts at $9.99/month. You can also use free

WordPress plugins – such as WWW Image Optimizer, Imsanity,

and TinyJPG – that automatically compress uploaded images.

Optimizing Video

Choose the ideal format. MP4 is best in most cases because it

produces the smallest file size.

Serve the optimal size (dimensions) based on visitors’ screen size.

Eliminate the audio track if the video is used in the background as a

design element.

Compress the video file. I use Adobe Premiere most of the time, but

Camtasia is a solid choice too.

Reduce the video length.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

Consider uploading videos to YouTube or Vimeo instead of

serving them locally and use their iframe embedding code.

You shouldn’t stop there though because that only scratches the

surface.

To truly optimize the media on your website, you need to serve the

appropriately-sized images based on the screen size rather than

simply resizing them.

There are two ways to handle this, based on the implementation

of an image.

Images within the HTML of your website can be served using src

set, which enables the browser to select, download, and display

the appropriate image based on the screen size of the device a

visitor is using.

Images placed via CSS – typically as background images, can be

served using media queries to select the appropriate image based

on screen size of the device a visitor is using.

Caching enables your web server to store a static copy of your

webpages so they can be delivered more quickly to a visitor’s

browser, while a CDN allows those copies to be distributed to

servers all over the world so that a visitor’s browser can download

them from the server closest to their location. This improves page

speed dramatically.

HOW TO IMPROVE PAGE SPEED FOR MORE TRAFFIC & CONVERSIONS

9. Utilize Caching & CDNs

7 Ways a Mobile-First

Index Impacts SEO

Written By

Chapter 12

Search Engine Journal

Roger Montti

If you don’t like change, then

the Internet is not for you.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

Google is constantly changing how they’re indexing and ranking sites. It’s

realistic to expect more changes on the way.

I’ve identified seven insights about a mobile-first index and how that

may influence rankings and SEO.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

It may be inappropriate to generalize what kind of content is best

for a mobile-first index. Every search query is different and how it is

ranked in Google can be different.

Here is a sample of a few kinds of queries:

Long tail queries

Informational queries (what actor starred in...)

Local search queries

Transactional queries

Research queries

“How do I” queries?

Conversational Search

Personal Search

Personal Search & Conversational Search in Mobile

Personal Search and Conversational Search are the latest evolution

in how people search. It is driven by mobile searches.

The way people search has changed because they are searching

on phones. This must be taken into consideration when creating

your search strategy.

1. Mobile-First Informational

Needs Are Changing

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SE0

Personal Search

According to Google’s page on Personal Searches:

“Over the past two years, we’ve seen an increase in searches

that include highly personal and conversational language—using

words like “me,” “my,” and “I.”

60% + Growth in mobile searches for “__ for me” in the past two

years.

80% + Growth in mobile searches for “__ should I __” in the past

two years.”

According to Google, Personal Searches fall into three

categories:

Solving a problem

Getting things done

Exploring around me

Conversational Search

Conversational search is a reference to the use of natural language

in search queries. This means that users are literally speaking to

their devices and expecting a natural response.

This is another change in how people search that is changing how

we must think of content when creating content.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

Many publishers, including Search Engine Journal, have

experienced an increase in traffic by refashioning existing content

to better meet the needs of mobile users.

According to Google’s web page on Conversational Search:

1. Mobile searches for “do I need” have grown over 65%.

For example, “how much do I need to retire,” “what size generator

do I need,” and “how much paint do I need.”

2. Mobile searches for “should I” have grown over 65%.

For example, “what laptop should I buy,” “should I buy a house,”

“what SPF should I use,” and “what should I have for dinner.”

3. Mobile searches starting with “can I” have grown over

85%.

For example, “can I use paypal on amazon,” “can I buy stamps at

walmart,” and “can I buy a seat for my dog on an airplane.”

Mobile Search Trends Drive Content Relevance Trends

The above kinds of queries for both personal and conversational

search are trending upwards and represent a meaningful change

in what people are looking for. Content should adapt to that.

Each kind search query can be answered by a different kind of

web page, with different content length, with different needs for

diagrams, maps, depth, and so on.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SE0

One simply cannot generalize and say that Google prefers

short form content because that’s not always what mobile

users prefer.

Thinking in terms of what most mobile users might prefer for a

specific query is a great start.

But the next step involves thinking about the problem that a

specific search query is trying to solve and what the best solution

for most users is going to be.

Then crafting a content-based response that is appropriate for that

situation.

And as you’ll read below, for some queries the most popular

answer might vary according to time. For some queries, a desktop

optimal content might be appropriate.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

Identifying the problem users are trying to solve can lead to multiple

answers.

If you look at the SERPs you will see there are different kinds of sites.

Some might be review sites, some might be informational, some

might be educational.

Those differences are indications that there multiple problems

users are trying to solve. What’s helpful is that Google is highly likely

to order the SERPs according to the most popular user intent, the

answer that satisfies the most users.

So if you want to know which kind of answer to give on a page, take

a look at the SERPs and let the SERPs guide you.

Sometimes this means that most users tend to be on mobile and

short-form content works best.

Sometimes it’s fifty/fifty and most users prefer in-depth content or

multiple product choices or fewer product choices.

Don’t be afraid of the mobile index. It’s not changing much.

It’s simply adding an additional layer, to understand which kind

of content satisfies the typical user (mobile, laptop, desktop,

combination) and the user intent.

It’s just an extra step to understanding who the most users are and

from there asking how to satisfy them, that’s all.

2. Satisfy the Most Users

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SE0

Every search query demands a specific kind of result because the

user intent behind each query is different. Mobile adds an additional

layer of intent to search queries.

In a Think with Google publication about how people use their

devices (PDF), Google stated this:

“The proliferation of devices has changed the way people interact

with the world around them. With more touchpoints than ever

before, it’s critical that marketers have a full understanding of how

people use devices so that they can be here and be useful for their

customers in the moments that matter.”

3. Time Influences Observed

User Intent

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

Time plays a role in how the user intent changes.

The time of day that a query is made can influence what device that

user is using, which in turn says something about that users needs

in terms of speed, convenience, and information needs.

Google’s research from the above-cited document states this:

“Mobile leads in the morning, but computers become dominant

around 8 a.m. when people might start their workday. Mobile takes

the lead again in the late afternoon when people might be on the

go, and continues to increase into the evening, spiking around

primetime viewing hours.”

This is what I mean when I say that Google’s mobile index is

introducing a new layer of what it means to be relevant. It’s not about

your on-page keywords being relevant to what a user is typing.

A new consideration is about how your web page is relevant to

someone at a certain time of day on a certain device and how you’re

going to solve the most popular information need at that time of day.

Google’s March 2018 official mobile-first announcement

stated it like this:

“We may show content to users that’s not mobile-friendly or that

is slow loading if our many other signals determine it is the most

relevant content to show.”

What signals is Google looking at? Obviously, the device itself could

be a signal.

But also, according to Google, time of day might be a signal because

not only does device usage fluctuate during the day but the intent

does too.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SE0

Google’s focus on user intent 100 percent changes what the phrase

“relevant content” means, especially in a mobile-first index.

People on different devices search for different things. It’s not that

the mobile index itself is changing what is going to be ranked.

The user intent for search queries is constantly changing,

sometimes in response to Google’s ability to better understand

what that intent is.

Some of those core algorithm updates could be changes related to

how Google understands what satisfies users.

You know how SEOs are worrying about click-through data? They

are missing an important metric. CTR is not the only measurement

tool search engines have.

Do you think CTR 100 percent tells what’s going on in a mobilefirst

index? How can Google understand if a SERP solved a user’s

problem if the user does not even click through?

That’s where a metric similar to Viewport Time comes in. Search

engines have been using variations of Viewport Time to understand

mobile users.

4. Defining Relevance in a

Mobile-First Index

Yet the SEO industry is still wringing its hands about CTR. Ever feel

like a piece of the ranking puzzle is missing? This is one of

those pieces.

Google’s understanding of what satisfies users is constantly

improving. And that impacts the rankings. How we provide the best

experience for those queries should change, too.

An important way those solutions have changed involves

understanding the demographics of who is using a specific kind of

device.

What does it mean when someone asks a question on one device

versus another device?

One answer is that the age group might influence who is asking a

certain question on a certain device.

For example, Google shared the following insights about mobile

and desktop users (PDF). Searchers in the Beauty and Health

niche search for different kinds of things according to device.

Examples of top beauty and health queries on mobile devices are

for topics related to tattoos and nail salons.

Examples of Beauty and Health desktop queries indicate an older

user because they’re searching for stores like Saks and beauty

products such as anti-aging creams.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SE0

It’s naïve to worry about whether you have enough synonyms on

your page. That’s not what relevance is about.

Relevance is not about keyword synonyms. Relevance is often

about problem-solving at certain times of day and within specific

devices to specific age groups.

You can’t solve that by salting your web page with synonyms.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

An important quality of the mobile-first index is

convenience when satisfying a user intent.

Does the user intent behind the search query demand a quick

answer or a shorter answer?

Does the web page make it hard to find the answer?

Does the page enable comparison between different

products?

Now answer those questions by adding the phrase, on mobile,

on a tablet, on a desktop and so on.

5. Mobile First Is Not About

User-Friendliness

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SE0

Google can know if a user understands your content. Users vote

with their click and viewport time data and quality raters create

another layer of data about certain queries.

With enough data Google can predict it what a user might find

useful. This is where machine learning comes in.

Here’s what Google says about machine learning in the

context of User Experience (UX):

“Machine learning is the science of making predictions based

on patterns and relationships that’ve been automatically

discovered in data.”

If content that is difficult to read is a turn-off, that may be

reflected in what sites are ranked and what sites are not.

If the topic is complex and a complex answer solves the problem

then that might be judged the best answer.

I know we’re talking about Google but it’s useful to understand

the state of the art of search in general.

6. Would a Visitor Understand

Your Content?

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SEO

Microsoft published a fascinating study about teaching a machine

to predict what a user will find interesting. The paper is titled,

Predicting Interesting Things in Text.

This research focused on understanding what made content

interesting and what caused users to keep clicking to another page.

In other words, it was about training a machine to understand what

satisfies users.

Here’s a synopsis:

“We propose models of “interestingness”, which aim to predict the

level of interest a user has in the various text spans in a document.

We obtain naturally occurring interest signals by observing user

browsing behavior in clicks from one page to another. We cast the

problem of predicting interestingness as a discriminative learning

problem over this data.

We train and test our models on millions of real world transitions

between Wikipedia documents as observed from web browser

session logs. On the task of predicting which spans are of most

interest to users, we show significant improvement over various

baselines and highlight the value of our latent semantic model.”

In general, I find good results with content that can be appreciated

by the widest variety of people.

7 WAYS A MOBILE-FIRST INDEX IMPACTS SE0

This isn’t strictly a mobile-first consideration but it is increasingly

important in an Internet where so people of diverse backgrounds

are accessing a site with multiple intents multiple kinds of devices.

Achieving universal popularity becomes increasingly difficult so it

may be advantageous to appeal to the broadest array of people in

a mobile-first index.

Looked at a certain way, it could be said that Google’s desire to

show users what they want to see has remained consistent.

What has changed is the users’ age, what they desire, when they

desire it and what device they desire it on. So the intent of Google’s

algorithm likely remains the same.

The mobile-first index can be seen as a logical response to how

users have changed. It’s backwards to think of it as Google forcing

web publishers to adapt to Google.

What’s really happening is that web publishers must adapt to how

their users have changed.

Ultimately that is the best way to think of the mobile-first index. Not

as a response to what Google wants but to approach the problem

as a response to the evolving needs of the user.

7. Google’s Algo Intent Hasn’t

Changed

The Complete Guide

to Mastering Duplicate

Content Issues

Written By

Chapter 13

VP Search and Advertising, The Karcher Group

Stoney G deGeyter

In the SEO arena of website

architecture, there is little

doubt that eliminating

duplicate content can be one

of the hardest fought battles.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Too many content management systems and piss-poor developers build

sites that work great for displaying content but have little consideration

for how that content functions from a search-engine-friendly perspective.

And that often leaves damaging duplicate content dilemmas for the SEO

to deal with.

There are two kinds of duplicate content, and both can

be a problem:

Onsite duplication is when the same content is duplicated on two

or more unique URLs of your site. Typically, this is something that

can be controlled by the site admin and web development team.

Offsite duplication is when two or more websites publish the

exact same pieces of content. This is something that often

cannot be controlled directly but relies on working with thirdparties

and the owners of the offending websites.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Why Is Duplicate Content a

Problem?

The best way to explain why duplicate content is bad is to first tell

you why unique content is good.

Unique content is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from

other websites. When the content on your website is yours and

yours alone, you stand out. You have something no one else has.

On the other hand, when you use the same content to describe your

products or services or have content republished on other sites, you

lose the advantage of being unique.

Or, in the case of onsite duplicate content, individual pages lose the

advantage of being unique.

Look at the illustration below. If A represents content

that is duplicated on two pages, and B

through Q represents pages linking to that

content, the duplication causes a split

the link value being passed.

Now imagine if pages B-Q all linked to

only on page A. Instead of splitting the

value each link provides, all the value

would go to a single URL instead, which

increases the chances of that content

ranking in search.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Whether onsite or offsite, all duplicate content competes against

itself. Each version may attract eyeballs and links, but none will

receive the full value it would get if it were the sole and unique

version.

However, when valuable and unique content can be found on no

more than a single URL anywhere on the web, that URL has the

best chance of being found based on it being the sole collector of

authority signals for that content.

Now, having that understanding, let’s look at the problems and

solutions for duplicate content.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Offsite Duplicate Content

Offsite duplication has three primary sources:

Third-party content you have republished on your own site.

Typically, this is in the form of generic product descriptions

provided by the manufacturer.

Your content that has been republished on third-party sites with

your approval. This is usually in the form of article distribution or

perhaps reverse article distribution.

Content that someone has stolen from your site and republished

without your approval. This is where the content scrapers and

thieves become a nuisance.

Let’s look at each.

Content Scrapers & Thieves

Content scrapers are one of the biggest offenders in duplicate

content creation. Spammers and other nefarious perpetrators

build tools that grab content from other websites and then publish

it on their own.

For the most part, these sites are trying to use your content to

generate traffic to their own site in order to get people to click their

ads. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Google!)

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do about this other than to

submit a copyright infringement report to Google in hopes that

it will be removed from their search index. Though, in some cases,

submitting these reports can be a full-time job.

Another way of dealing with this content is to ignore it, hoping

Google can tell the difference between a quality site (yours) and

the site the scraped content is on. This is hit and miss as I’ve seen

scraped content rank higher than the originating source.

What you can do to combat the effects of scraped content is to

utilize absolute links (full URL) within the content for any links

pointing back to your site. Those stealing content generally aren’t

in the business of cleaning it up so, at the very least, visitors can

follow that back to you.

You can also try adding a canonical tag back to the source page (a

good practice regardless). If the scrapers grab any of this code, the

canonical tag will at least provide a signal for Google to recognize

you as the originator.

Article Distribution

Several years ago, it seemed like every SEO was republishing their

content on “ezines” as a link building tactic. When Google cracked

down on content quality and link schemes, republishing fell by the

wayside.

But with the right focus, it can be a solid marketing strategy. Notice,

I said “marketing” rather than “SEO” strategy.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

For the most part, any time you’re publishing content on other

websites, they want the unique rights to that content.

Why? Because they don’t want multiple versions of that content on

the web devaluing what the publisher has to offer.

But as Google has gotten better about assigning rights to the

content originator (better, but not perfect), many publishers are

allowing content to be reused on the author’s personal sites as well.

Does this create a duplicate content problem? In a small way, it can,

because there are still two versions of the content out there, each

potentially generating links.

But in the end, if the number of duplicate versions is limited and

controlled, the impact will be limited as well. In fact, the primary

downside lands on the author rather than the secondary publisher.

The first published version of the content will generally be credited

as the canonical version. In all but a few cases, these publishers

will get more value from the content over the author’s website that

republishes it.

Generic Product Descriptions

Some of the most common forms of duplicated content comes from

product descriptions that are reused by each (and almost every)

seller.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

A lot of online retailers sell the exact same products as thousands

of other stores. In most cases, the product descriptions are

provided by the manufacturer, which is then uploaded into each

site’s database and presented on their product pages.

While the layout of the pages will be different, the bulk of the

product page content (product descriptions) will be identical.

Now multiply that across millions of different products and

hundreds of thousands of websites selling those products, and

you can wind up with a lot of content that is, to put it mildly, not

unique.

How does a search engine differentiate between one or another

when a search is performed?

On a purely content-analysis level, it can’t. Which means the

search engine must look at other signals to decide which one

should rank.

One of these signals is links. Get more links and you can win the

bland content sweepstakes.

But if you’re up against a more powerful competitor, you may

have a long battle to fight before you can catch them in the link

building department. Which brings you back to looking for another

competitive advantage.

The best way to achieve that is by taking the extra effort to write

unique descriptions for each product. Depending on the number

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Any page with unique content is going to automatically have an

inherent advantage over similar but duplicate content. That may or

may not be enough to outrank your competition, but it surely is the

baseline for standing out to not just Google, but your customers as

well.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

of products you offer, this could end up being quite a challenge, but

in the end, it’ll be well worth it.

Take a look at the illustration below. If all the gray pages represent

the same product with the same product descriptions, the yellow

represents the same product with a unique description.

If you were Google, which one would you want to rank higher?

Onsite Duplicate Content

Technically, Google treats all duplicate content the same, so onsite

duplicate content is really no different than offsite.

But onsite is less forgivable because this is one type of duplication

that you can actually control. It’s shooting your SEO efforts in the

proverbial foot.

Onsite duplicate content generally stems from bad site architecture.

Or, more likely, bad website development!

A strong site architecture is the foundation for a strong website.

When developers don’t follow search-friendly best practices, you can

wind up losing valuable opportunity to get your content to rank due

to this self-competition.

There are some who argue against the need for good architecture,

citing Google propaganda about how Google can “figure it out.” The

problem with that is that it relies on Google figuring things out.

Yes, Google can determine that some duplicate content should be

considered one and the same, and the algorithms can take this into

account when analyzing your site, but that’s no guarantee they will.

Or another way to look at it is that just because you know someone

smart doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be able to protect you from

your own stupidity! If you leave things to Google and Google fails,

you’re screwed.

Now, let’s dive into some common onsite duplicate content

problems and solutions.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

The Problem: Product Categorization Duplication

Far too many ecommerce sites suffer from this kind of

duplication. This is frequently caused by content management

systems that allow you to organize products by category, where a

single product can be tagged in multiple categories.

That in itself isn’t bad (and can be great for the visitor), however

in doing so, the system generates a unique URL for each

category in which a single product shows up in.

Let’s say you’re on a home repair site and you’re looking for a

book on installing bathroom flooring.

You might find the book you’re looking for by following

any of these navigation paths:

Home > flooring > bathroom > books

Home > bathroom > books > flooring

Home > books > flooring > bathroom

Each of these is a viable navigation path, but the problem

arises when a unique URL is generated for each path:

https://www.myfakesite.com/flooring/bathroom/books/fakebook-

by-fake-author

https://www.myfakesite.com/bathroom/books/flooring/fakebook-

by-fake-author

https://www.myfakesite.com/books/flooring/bathroom/fakebook-

by-fake-author

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

I’ve seen sites like this create up to ten URLs for every single

product turning a 5k product website into a site with 45k duplicate

pages. That is a problem.

If our example product above generated ten links, those links would

end up being split three ways. Whereas, if a competitor’s page for

the same product got the same ten links, but to only a single URL,

which URL is likely to perform better in search? The competitor’s!

Not only that, but search engines limit their crawl bandwidth so they

can spend it on indexing unique and valuable content.

When your site has that many duplicate pages, there is a strong

chance the engine will stop crawling before it even gets a fraction of

your unique content indexed.

This means hundreds of valuable pages won’t be available in search

results and those that are indexed are duplicates competing against

each other.

The Solution: Master URL Categorizations

One fix to this problem is to only tag products for a single category

rather than multiples. That solves the duplication issue, but it’s not

necessarily the best solution for the shoppers since it eliminates

the other navigation options for finding the product(s) they want. So,

scratch that one off the list.

Another option is to remove any type of categorization from the

URLs altogether.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

This way, no matter the navigation path used to find the

product, the product URL itself is always the same, and

might look something like this:

https://www.myfakesite.com/products/fake-book-by-fake-author

This fixes the duplication without changing how the visitor is able to

navigate to the products. The downside to this method is that you

lose the category keywords in the URL. While this provides a small

benefit to the totality of SEO, every little bit can help.

If you want to take your solution to the next level, getting the most

optimization value possible while keeping the user experience at the

same time, build an option that allows each product to be assigned

to a “master” category, in addition to others.

When a master category is in play, the product can continue to be

found through the multiple navigation paths, but the product page is

accessed by a single URL that utilizes the master category.

That might make the URL look something like this:

https://www.myfakesite.com/flooring/fake-book-by-fake-author OR

https://www.myfakesite.com/bathroom/fake-book-by-fake-author OR

https://www.myfakesite.com/books/fake-book-by-fake-author

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

This latter solution is the best overall, though it does take some

additional programming. However, there is one more relatively

easy “solution” to implement, but I only consider it a band-aid until

a real solution can be implemented.

Band-Aid Solution: Canonical Tags

Because the master-categorization option isn’t always available

to out of the box CMS or ecommerce solutions, there is an

alternative option that will “help” solve the duplicate content

problem.

This involves preventing search engines from indexing all noncanonical

URLs. While this can keep duplicate pages out of

the search index, it doesn’t fix the issue of splitting the page’s

authority. Any link value sent to a non-indexable URL will be lost.

The better band-aid solution is to utilize canonical tags. This is

similar to selecting a master category but generally requires little, if

any, additional programming.

You simply add a field for each product that allows you to assign a

canonical URL, which is just a fancy way of saying, “the URL you

want to show up in search.”

The canonical tag looks like this:

fake-book-by-fake-author” />

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Despite the URL the visitor is on, the behind-the-scenes canonical

tag on each duplicate URL would point to a single URL.

In theory, this tells the search engines not to index the non-canonical

URLs and to assign all other value metrics over to the canonical

version. This works most of the time, but in reality, the search

engines only use the canonical tag as a “signal.” They will then

choose to apply or ignore it as they see fit.

You may or may not get all link authority passed to the correct page,

and you may or may not keep non-canonical pages out of the index.

I always recommend implementing a canonical tag, but because it’s

unreliable, consider it a placeholder until a more official solution can

be implemented.

The Problem: Redundant URL Duplication

One of the most basic website architectural issues revolves around

how pages are accessed in the browser.

By default, almost every

page of your site can

be accessed using a

slightly different URL.

If left unchecked,

each URL leads to

the exact same page

with the exact same

content.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Considering the home page alone, it can likely be accessed

using four different URLs:

http://site.com

http://www.site.com

https://site.com

https://www.site.com

And when dealing with internal pages, you can get an

additional version of each URL by adding a trailing slash:

http://site.com/page

http://site.com/page/

http://www.site.com/page

http://www.site.com/page/

Etc.

That’s up to eight alternate URLs for each page! Of course, Google

should know that all these URLs should be treated as one, but

which one?

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

The Solution: 301 Redirects & Internal Link Consistency

Aside from the canonical tag, which I addressed above, the

solution here is to ensure you have all alternate versions of the

URLs redirecting to the canonical URL.

Keep in mind, this isn’t just a home page issue. The same issue

applies to every one of your site URLs. Therefore, the redirects

implemented should be global.

Be sure to force each redirect to the canonical version. For

instance, if the canonical URL is https://www.site.com, each

redirect should point there.

Many make the mistake of adding additional redirect

hops that might look like this:

Site.com > https://site.com > https://www.site.com

Site.com > www.site.com > https://www.site.com

Instead, the redirects should look like this:

http://site.com > https://www.site.com/

http://www.site.com > https://www.site.com/

https://site.com > https://www.site.com/

https://www.site.com > https://www.site.com/

http://site.com/ > https://www.site.com/

http://www.site.com/ > https://www.site.com/

https://site.com/ > https://www.site.com/

By reducing the number of redirect hops you speed up page load,

reduce server bandwidth, and have less that can go wrong along

the way.

Finally, you’ll need to make sure all internal links in the site point to

the canonical version as well.

While the redirect should solve the duplicate problem, redirects can

fail if something goes wrong on the server or implementation side

of things.

If that happens, even temporarily, having only the canonical pages

linked internally can help prevent a sudden surge of duplicate

content issues from popping up.

The Problem: URL Parameters & Query Strings

Years ago, the usage of session IDs created a major duplicate

content problem for SEOs.

Today’s technology, however, has made session IDs all but

obsolete, but another problem has arisen that is just as bad, if not

worse: URL parameters.

Parameters are used to pull fresh content from the server, usually

based on one or more filter or selections being made.

The two examples below show alternate URLs for a single URL:

site.com/shirts/.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

The first shows the shirts filtered by color, size, and style,

the second URL shows shirts sorted by price, then a

certain number of products to show per page:

Site.com/shirts/?color=red&size=small&style=long_sleeve

Site.com/shirts/?sort=price&display=12

Based on these filters alone, there are three viable URLs that search

engines can find.

But the order of these parameters can change based on the

order in which they were chosen, which means you might

get several more accessible URLs like this:

Site.com/shirts/?size=small&color=red&style=long_sleeve

Site.com/shirts/?size=small&style=long_sleeve&color=red

Site.com/shirts/?display=12&sort=price

And this:

Site.com/shirts/?size=small&color=red&style=long_

sleeve&display=12&sort=price

Site.com/shirts/?display=12&size=small&color=red&sort=price

Site.com/

shirts/?size=small&display=12&sort=price&color=red&style=long_

sleeve

Etc.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

You can see that this can produce a lot of URLs, most of which

will not pull any type of unique content. Of the parameters above,

the only one you might want to write sales content for is the style.

The rest, not so much.

The Solution: Parameters for Filters, Not Legitimate

Landing Pages

Strategically planning your navigation and URL structure is critical

for getting out ahead of the duplicate content problems.

Part of that process includes understanding the difference

between having a legitimate landing page and a page that allows

visitors to filter results. And then be sure to treat these accordingly

when developing the URLs for them.

Landing page (and canonical) URLs should look like this:

Site.com/shirts/long-sleeve/

Site.com/shirts/v-neck/

Site.com/shirts/collared/

And the filtered results URLs would look something like

this:

Site.com/shirts/long-sleeve/?size=small&color=red&display=12&

sort=price

Site.com/shirts/v-neck/?color=red

Site.com/shirts/

collared/?size=small&display=12&sort=price&color=red

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

With your URLs built correctly, you can do two things:

Add the correct canonical tag (everything before the “?” in the

URL).

Go into Google Search Console and tell Google to ignore all such

parameters.

If you consistently use parameters only for filtering and sorting

content, you won’t have to worry about accidentally telling Google

not to crawl a valuable parameter… because none of them are.

But because the canonical tag is only a signal, you must complete

step two for best results. And remember this only affects Google.

You have to do the same with Bing.

Pro Developer Tip: Search engines typically ignore everything to

the right of a pound “#” symbol in the URL.

If you program that into every URL prior to any parameter,

you won’t have to worry about the canonical being only a

band-aid solution:

Site.com/shirts/long-sleeve/#?size=small&color=red&display=12

&sort=price

Site.com/shirts/v-neck/#?color=red

Site.com/shirts/

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

collared/#?size=small&display=12&sort=price&color=red

If any search engine were to access the URLs above, they would

only index the canonical part of the URL and ignore the rest.

The Problem: Ad Landing Page & A/B Test Duplication

It’s not uncommon for marketers to develop numerous versions of

similar content, either as a landing page for ads, or A/B/multivariate

testing purposes.

This can often get you some great data and feedback, but if those

pages are open for search engines to spider and index, it can

create duplicate content problems.

The Solution: NoIndex

Rather than use a canonical tag to point back to the master page,

the better solution here is to add a noindex meta tag to each page

to keep them out of the search engines’ index altogether.

Generally, these pages tend to be orphans, not having any direct

links to them from inside the site. But that won’t always keep search

engines from finding them.

The canonical tag is designed to transfer page value and authority

to the primary page, but since these pages should not be collecting

any value, keeping them out of the index is preferred.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

When Duplicate Content Isn’t

(Much Of) a Problem

One of the most common SEO myths is that there is a duplicate

content penalty.

There isn’t. At least no more than there is a penalty for not putting

gas in your car and letting it run empty.

Google may not be actively penalizing duplicate content, but that

doesn’t mean there are not natural consequences that occur

because of it.

Without the threat of penalty, that gives marketers a little more

flexibility in deciding which consequences they are willing to live

with.

While I would argue that you should aggressively eliminate (not just

band-aid over) all on-site duplicate content, offsite duplication may

actually create more value than consequences.

Getting valuable content republished off-site can help you build

brand recognition in a way that publishing it on your own can’t.

That’s because many offsite publishers have a bigger audience and

a vastly larger social reach.

Your content, published on your own site may reach thousands of

eyeballs, but published offsite it might reach hundreds of thousands.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Many publishers do expect to maintain exclusive rights to the

content they publish, but some allow you to repurpose it on your

own site after a short waiting period. This allows you to get the

additional exposure while also having the opportunity to build up

your own audience by republishing your content on your site at a

later date.

But this type of article distribution needs to be limited in order

to be effective for anyone. If you’re shooting your content out to

hundreds of other sites to be republished, the value of that content

diminishes exponentially.

And typically, it does little to reinforce your brand because the

sites willing to publish mass duplicated content are of little value to

begin with.

In any case, weigh the pros and cons of your content being

published in multiple places.

If duplication with a lot of branding outweighs the smaller authority

value you’d get with unique content on your own site, then, by all

means, pursue a measured republishing strategy.

But the keyword there is measured. What you don’t want to be is

the site that only has duplicate content. At that point, you begin to

undercut the value you’re trying to create for your brand.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

By understanding the problems, solutions and, in some cases,

value, of duplicate content, you can begin the process of

eliminating the duplication you don’t want and pursuing the

duplication you do.

In the end, you want to build a site that is known for strong,

unique content, and then use that content to get the highest value

possible. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO MASTERING DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

A Technical SEO Guide

to Redirects

Chapter 14

Written By

Lead Developer, Search Engine Journal

Vahan Petrosyan

Websites change structure,

delete pages and often move

from one domain to another. A

TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECTS

Handling redirects correctly is crucial in order to avoid losing rankings

and help search engines understand the changes you have done.

Redirects have a status code starting with number three (i.e., 3XX).

There are 100 different possible status codes but only a few are

implemented to carry certain information.

In this guide, we will cover 3XX redirects relevant to SEO.

301: Moved Permanently

307: Temporary Redirect

This well-known redirect indicates to a client* that the resource was

changed to another location and that it should use the new URL for

future requests. When search engines see a 301 redirect, they pass

the old page’s ranking to the new one.

Before making a change, you need to be careful when deciding to

use a 301 redirect. This is because if you change your mind later

and decide to remove the 301 redirect, your old URL may not rank

anymore.

Even if you swap the redirects, it will not help you get the old page

back to its previous ranking position. So the main thing to remember

is that there’s no way to undo a 301 redirect.

(*For beginners who may get confused with generic name client is

used instead of browser since not only browsers are able to browse

URLs but also search engine bots which are not browsers.)

In HTTP 1.1, a 301 redirect means the resource is temporarily moved

and the client should use the original resource’s URL for future

requests.

For SEO, this means the client should follow a redirect but search

engines should not update their links in the SERPs to the new,

temporary page.

In a 307 redirect, PageRank is not passed from the original resource

to the new one – contrary to a 301 redirect.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

302: Found

302 vs. 307

This means that the resource a client is looking for was found on

another URL in the HTTP 1.1 version but was temporarily moved in

HTTP 1.0.

In almost all cases, 302 and 307 redirects will be treated the same.

But a 302 status code doesn’t necessarily mean the client must

follow a redirect and it is not considered an error if it decides to stay

there.

Modern clients will most likely follow the new destination but some

old clients may incorrectly stay on the same URL.

Contrary to a 302 status code, the 307 status code guarantees that

the request method will not be changed. For instance, the GET

request must continue to GET and POST to POST.

With a 302 status code, some old or buggy clients may change the

method which may cause unexpected behavior.

For temporary redirects, you can use either 302 or 307 – but I do

prefer 307.

For routine redirect tasks, 301 (permanent redirect) and 307

(temporarily redirect) status codes should be used depending on

what type of change you are implementing on your website. On both

cases, the syntax of redirects doesn’t change.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

You may handle redirect via server config files .htaccess on Apache,

example.conf file on Ngix, or via plugins if you are using WordPress.

In all instances, they have the same syntax for writing redirect rules.

They differ only with commands used in configuration files.

For example, redirect on Apache will look like this:

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

RedirectMatch 301 ^/oldfolder/ /newfolder/

( you can read about symlinks here ). and on Ngix servers like

rewrite ^/oldfolder/ /newfolder/ permanent;

The commands used to tell servers status code of redirect

and the action command differ. For instance:

Servers status code of redirect: “301” vs. “permanent”

Action command: “RedirectMatch” vs. “rewrite”.

But the syntax of the redirect ( ^/oldfolder/ /newfolder/ ) is the same

for both.

On Apache, make sure on your server mod_rewrite and mod_alias

modules (which are responsible for handling redirects) are enabled.

Since the most widely spread server types is Apache, here are

examples for .htaccess apache files. Make sure that the .htaccess

file has these two lines

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

above the redirect rules and put the rules below them.

For understanding the examples below you may refer table below

on RegExp basics.

Redirect Single URL

The most common and widely used type of redirect that is used

when deleting pages or changing page URLs. For instance, say

you changed URL from /old-page/ to /new-page/. The redirect rule

would be:

RewriteRule ^old-page(/?|/.*)$ /new-page/ [R=301,L]

RedirectMatch 301 ^/old-page(/?|/.*)$ /new-page/

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

The only difference between the two methods is that the first one

uses Apache mod_rewrite module and the second one uses mod_

alias. It can be done using both methods.

Regular expression “^” means URL must start with “/old-page” while

(/?|/.*)$ indicates that anything that follows “/old-page/” with slash

“/” or without exact match must be redirected to /new-page/.

We could also use (.*) ie. ^/old-page(.*), but the problem is, if you

have another page with a similar URL like /old-page-other/, it will

also be redirected when we only want to redirect /old-page/.

The following URLs will match and directed to new page

It will redirect any variation of page URL to new one.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

Redirect All Except

Directory Change

Let’s say we have bunch of URLs like /category/old-subcategory-1/, /

category/old-subcategory-2/, /category/final-subcategory/ and want

to merge all subcategories into /category/final-subcategory/. We

need here “all except” rule

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/category/final-subcategory/

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteRule ^(category/). /category/final-subcategory/ [R=301,L]

Here, we want to redirect all under /category/ on the fifth line except

if it is /category/final-subcategory/ on the fourth line. We also have

“!-f” rule on the fourth line which means to ignore any file like images,

CSS or javascript files.

Otherwise, if we have some assets like “/category/image.jpg” it will

be also redirected to “/final-subcategory/” and cause a page break.

In case you did a category restructuring and want to move

everything under the old directory to the new one, you can use the

rule below.

RewriteRule ^old-directory$ /new-directory/ [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteRule ^old-directory/(.*)$ /new-directory/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

I used $1 in the target to tell the server that it should remember

everything in the URL that follows /old-directory/ (i.e., /old-directory/

subdirectory/) and pass it (i.e., “/subdirectory/” ) onto the destination.

As a result, it will be redirected to /new-directory/subdirectory/.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

I used two rules: one case with no trailing slash at the end and the

other one with a trailing slash.

I could combine them into one rule using (/?|.*)$ RegExp at the end,

but it would cause problems and add “//” slash to the end of URL

when the requested URL with no trailing slash has a query string

(i.e., “/old-directory?utm_source=facebook” would be redirected to

“/new-directory//?utm_source=facebook”).

Remove a Word from URL

Let’s say you have 100 URLs in your website with city name

“chicago” and want to remove it.

Example, for the URL http://yourwebiste.com/example-chicagoevent/,

the redirect rule would be:

RewriteRule ^(.*)-chicago-(.*) http://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1-$2

[NC,R=301,L]

If the example URL is in the form http:// yourwebiste.com/example/

chicago/event/, then redirect will be:

RewriteRule ^(.*)/chicago/(.*) http://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1/$2

[NC,R=301,L]

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

Canonicalization

Having canonical URLs is the most important part of SEO.

If it is missing, you might endanger your website with duplicate

content issues because search engines treat URLs with “www” and

“non-www” versions as different pages with the same content.

Therefore, it is mandatory to make sure you run website only with

only one version you choose.

If you want to run your website with “www” version, use this rule:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite\.com [NC]

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

For a “non-www” version:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourwebsite\.com [NC]

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

Trailing slash is also part of canonicalization since URLs with a

slash at the end or without are also treated differently.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

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

This will make sure /example-page is redirected to /example-page/.

You may choose to remove the slash instead of adding then you will

need the other rule below:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

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

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

HTTP to HTTPS Redirect

Redirect from Old Domain to New

After Google’s initiative to encourage website owners to use SSL,

migrating to HTTPS is one of the commonly used redirects that

almost every website has.

The rewrite rule below can be used to force HTTPS on every

website.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite\.com [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.yourwebsite\.com [NC]

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

Basically, you can combine www or non-www version redirect into

one HTTPS redirect rule using this.

This is also one of the most used redirects when you decide to

do rebranding and you need to change domain. The rule below

redirects old-domain.com to new-domain.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^old-domain.com$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.old-domain.com$

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

It uses two cases: one with “www” version of URLs and another

“non-www” because any page for historical reasons may have

incoming links to both versions.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

Most site owners use WordPress and may not need to use

.htaccess file for redirects but use plugin instead. Handling redirects

by using plugins may be a little different from what we discussed

above and you may need to read their documentation in order to be

able to handle RegExp correctly for specific plugin.

From existing ones I would recommend free plugin called

Redirection which has many parameters to control redirect rules

and many useful docs.

Redirect Bad Practices

1. Redirecting All 404 Broken URLs to the Home Page

This case often happens when you are lazy to investigate all of your

404 URLs and map them to the appropriate landing page.

According to Google, they are still all treated as 404s.

If you have too many pages like this, you should consider creating

beautiful 404 pages and engage users to browse further or find

something other than what they were looking for by displaying a

search option.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

It is strongly recommended by Google that redirected page content

should be equivalent to the old page. Otherwise, such redirect may

be considered as soft 404 and you will lose the rank of that page.

2. Wrong Mobile Page Specific Redirects

If you have different URLs for desktop and mobile websites (i.e.,

“yoursite.com” for desktop and “m.yoursite.com” for mobile), you

should make sure to redirect users to the appropriate page of the

mobile version.

Correct: “yoursite.com/sport/” to “m.yoursite.com/sport/”

Wrong: “yoursite.com/sport/” to “m.yoursite.com”

Also, you have to make sure that if one page is a 404 on desktop, it

should also be a 404 on mobile.

If you have no mobile version for a page, you can avoid redirecting

to mobile version and keep them on the desktop page.

3. Using Meta Refresh

It is possible to do redirect using meta refresh tag like example

below:

If you insert this tag in /old-page/ it will redirect the user

immediately to /new-page/. This redirect is not prohibited by

Google but they clearly don’t recommend using it.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

According to John Mueller, search engines may not be able to

recognize that type of redirect properly. The same is also true about

JavaScript redirects.

4. Too Many Redirects

This message displays when you have a wrong regular expression

setup and it ends up in an infinite loop.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

Usually, this happens when you have a redirects chain.

Let’s say you redirected page1 to page2 a long time ago. Now you

might have forgotten that page1 is redirected and decide to redirect

page2 to page1 again.

As a result, you will end up with a rule like this:

RewriteRule ^page1 /page2 [R=301,NC,L]

RewriteRule ^page2 /page1 [R=301,NC,L]

This will create an infinite loop and produce the error shown above.

A TECHNICAL SEO GUIDE TO REDIRECT

SEO-Friendly

Pagination: A Complete

Best Practices Guide

Chapter 15

Written By

International Digital Director, Ringier

Jes Scholz

Site pagination is a wily

shapeshifter.

SEO FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

It’s used in contexts ranging from displaying items on category pages, to

article archives, to gallery slideshows and forum threads.

For SEO professionals, it isn’t a question of if you’ll have to deal with

pagination, it’s a question of when.

At a certain point of growth, websites need to split content across a

series of component pages for user experience (UX).

Our job is to help search engines crawl and understand the

relationship between these URLs so they index the most

relevant page.

Over time, the SEO best practices of pagination handling have

evolved. Along the way, many myths have presented themselves as

facts. But no longer.

This article will:

Debunk the myths around how pagination hurts SEO.

Present the optimal way to manage pagination.

Review misunderstood or subpar methods of pagination

handling.

Investigate how to track the KPI impact of pagination.

But, before I dig into these details. It’s important to note that

pagination isn’t for ranking purposes, but it still has value.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

How Pagination Can Hurt SEO

You’ve probably read that pagination is bad for SEO.

However, in most cases, this is due to a lack of correct pagination

handling, rather than the existence of pagination itself.

Let’s look at the supposed evils of pagination and how to overcome

the SEO issues it could cause.

Pagination Causes Duplicate Content

Correct if pagination has been improperly implemented, such

as having both a “View All” page and paginated pages without a

correct rel=canonical or if you have created a page=1 in addition to

your root page.

Incorrect when you have SEO friendly pagination. Even if your H1

and meta tags are the same, the actual page content differs. So it’s

not duplication.

Joost de Valk

@jdevalk

John

@JohnMu

@JohnMu do you agree that people can safely ignore the

duplicate meta description warning in Google Search

Console for paginated archive URLs?

Yep, that’s fine. It’s useful to get feedback on duplicate

titles & descriptions if you accidentally use them on

totally separate pages, but for paginated series, it’s kinda

normal & expected to use the same.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Pagination Creates Thin Content

Correct if you have split an article or photo gallery across multiple

pages (in order to drive ad revenue by increasing pageviews), leaving

too little content on each page.

Incorrect when you put the desires of the user to easily consume

your content above that of banner ad revenues or artificially inflated

pageviews. Put a UX-friendly amount of content on each page.

Pagination Dilutes Ranking Signals

Correct if pagination isn’t handled well as it can cause internal

link equity and other ranking signals, such as backlinks and social

shares, to be split across pages.

Incorrect when rel=”prev” and rel=”next” link attributes are used on

paginated pages, so that Google knows to consolidate the ranking

signals.

Pagination Uses Crawl Budget

Correct if you’re allowing Google to crawl paginated pages. And

there are some instances where you would want to use that budget.

For example, for Googlebot to travel through paginated URLs to

consolidate ranking signals and to reach deeper content pages.

Often incorrect when you set Google Search Console pagination

parameter handling to “Do not crawl” or set a robots.txt disallow, in

the case where you wish to conserve your crawl budget for more

important pages.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Managing Pagination According to

SEO Best Practices

Use rel=”next” & rel=”prev” Link Attributes

You should indicate the relationship between component URLs in a

paginated series with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes.

Google recommends this option, noting they take this markup as

“a strong hint” that you would like the pages to be treated “as a logical

sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually

sending searchers to the first page.”

Practically, this means rel=”next” / “prev” are treated as signals rather

than directives. They won’t always prevent paginated pages from

being displayed in search results. But such an occurrence would be

rare.

Complement the rel=”next” / “prev” with a self-referencing

rel=”canonical” link. So /category?page=4 should rel=”canonical” to /

category?page=4.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

This is the recommended approach by Google, as pagination

changes the page content and so is the master copy of that page.

If the URL has additional parameters, include these in

the rel=”prev” / “next” links, but don’t include them in the

rel=”canonical”.

For example:

category?page=2&order=newest” />

category?page=2” />

Doing so will indicate a clear relationship between the pages,

without sending ranking signals to non-SEO relevant parameterbased

URLs and preventing the potential of duplicate content.

Common errors to avoid:

Placing the link attributes in the <body> content. They’re only

supported by search engines within the <head> section of your

HTML.

Adding a rel=”prev” link to the first page (a.k.a. the root page) in

the series or a rel=”next” link to the last. For all other pages in the

chain, both link attributes should be present.

Beware of your root page canonical URL. Chances are on

?page=2, rel=prev should link to the canonical, not a ?page=1.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

The <head> code of a four-page series will look

something like this:

One pagination tag on the root page, pointing to the next page

in series.

category?page=2″>

category”>

Two pagination tags on page 2.

category”>

category?page=3″>

category?page=2”>

Two pagination tags on page 3.

category?page=2″>

category?page=4″>

category?page=3”>

One pagination tag on page 4, the last page in the paginated

series.

category?page=3”>

category?page=4”>

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Modify Paginated Pages Titles & Meta Descriptions

Although the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes should, in most

cases, cause Google to return the root page in the SERPs, you can

further encourage this and prevent “Duplicate meta descriptions”

or “Duplicate title tags” warnings in Google Search Console with an

easy modification to your code.

If the root page has the formula:

These paginated URL page titles and meta description are

purposefully suboptimal to dissuade Google from displaying these

results, rather than the root page.

Don’t Include Paginated Pages in XML Sitemaps

While rel=”next” / “prev” pagination URLs are technically indexable,

they aren’t an SEO priority to spend crawl budget on.

As such, they don’t belong in your XML sitemap.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Handle Pagination Parameters in Google Search Console

If you have a choice, run pagination via a parameter rather than a

static URL. For example:

example.com/category?page=2 over example.com/category/page-

You can then configure the parameter in Google Search Console

to “Paginates” and at any time change the signal to Google to crawl

“Every URL” or “No URLs”, based on how you wish to use your crawl

budget. No developer needed!

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Misunderstood, Outdated or Plain

Wrong SEO Solutions to Paginated

Content

Do Nothing

Google says they do “a good job returning the most relevant results

to users, regardless of whether content is divided into multiple

pages” and recommends you can handle pagination by doing

nothing.

While there is a core of truth to this statement, by doing nothing

you’re gambling with your SEO.

There’s always value in giving clear guidance to crawlers how you

want them to index and display your content.

Canonicalize to a View All Page

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

The last option recommended by Google is a View All page. This

version should contain all the component page content on a single

URL.

Additionally, the paginated pages should all rel=”canonical” to the

View All page to consolidate ranking signals.

The argument here is that searchers prefer to view a whole article

or list of categories items on a single page, as long as it’s fast

loading and easy to navigate.

So if your paginated series has an alternative View All version that

offers the better user experience, Google will favor this page for

inclusion in the search results as opposed to a relevant segment

page of the pagination chain.

Which raises the question – why do you have paginated pages in

the first place?

Let’s make this simple.

If you can provide your content on a single URL while offering a

good user experience, there is no need for pagination or a View All

version.

If you can’t, for example, a category page with thousands of

products would be ridiculously large and take too long to load, then

paginate with rel=”next” / “prev”. View All is not the best option as it

would not offer a good user experience.

Using both rel=”next” / “prev” and a View All version gives no clear

mandate to Google and will result in confused crawlers.

Don’t do it.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Canonicalize to the First Page

A common mistake is to point the rel=”canonical” from all paginated

results to the root page of the series.

Some ill-informed SEO people suggest this as a way to consolidate

authority across the set of pages to the root page, but this is

unnecessary when you have rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes.

Incorrect canonicalization to the root page runs the risk of

misdirecting search engines into thinking you have only a single

page of results.

Googlebot then won’t index pages that appear further along the

chain, nor acknowledge the signals to the content linked from those

pages.

You don’t want your detailed content pages dropping out of the

index because of poor pagination handling.

Google is clear on the requirement. Each page within a paginated

series should have a self-referencing canonical, unless you use a

View All page.

Use the rel=canonical incorrectly and chances are Googlebot will

just ignore your signal.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Noindex Paginated Pages

A classic method to solve pagination issues was a robots noindex

tag to prevent paginated content from being indexed by search

engines.

Relying solely on the noindex tag for pagination handling will

result in ranking signals from your component pages not being

consolidated. Clearly inferior SEO to using rel=”next” / “prev”.

But as the rel=”next” / “prev” method allows search engines to index

pagination pages, I’ve also seen some SEO folks advising to add

“extra security” with a noindex tag.

This is unnecessary. Only in rare circumstances would Google

choose to return a paginated page in the SERPs. The benefits are, at

best, theoretical.

But what you may not be aware of is that a long-term noindex on

a page will eventually lead Google to nofollow the links on that

page. So, again, it could potentially cause content linked from the

paginated pages to be removed from the index.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Pagination & Infinite Scrolling

A newer form of pagination handling is by infinite scroll, where

content is pre-fetched and added directly to the user’s current page

as they scroll down.

Users may appreciate this, but Googlebot? Not so much.

Googlebot doesn’t emulate behavior like scrolling to the bottom of a

page or clicking to load more. Meaning without help, search engines

can’t effectively crawl all of your content.

To be SEO-friendly, convert your infinite scroll page to an equivalent

paginated series that is accessible even with JavaScript disabled.

As the user scrolls, use JavaScript to adapt the URL in the address

bar to the component paginated page.

Additionally, implement a pushState for any user action that

resembles a click or actively turning a page. You can check out this

functionality in the demo created by John Mueller.

Essentially, you’re still implementing the SEO best practice

recommended above, you are just adding additional user experience

functionality on top.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Discourage or Block Pagination Crawling

Some SEO pros recommend avoiding the issue of pagination

handling altogether by simply blocking Google from crawling

paginated URLs.

In such a case, you would want to have well-optimized XML

sitemaps to ensure pages linked via pagination have a chance to be

indexed.

There are three ways to do this:

The messy way: Add nofollow to all links that point towards

paginated pages.

The cleaner way: Use a robots.txt disallow.

The no dev needed way: Set paginated page parameter to

“Paginates” and for Google to crawl “No URLs” in Google Search

Console.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

By using one of these methods to discourage search

engines from crawling paginated URLs you:

Stop search engines from consolidating ranking signals of

paginated pages.

Prevent the passing of internal link equity from paginated pages

down to the destination content pages.

Hinder Google’s ability to discover your destination content pages.

The obvious upside is that you save on crawl budget.

There is no clear right or wrong here. You need to decide what is

the priority for your website.

Personally, if I were to prioritize crawl budget, I would do so by

using pagination handling in Google Search Console as it has the

optimum flexibility to change your mind.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

Tracking the KPI Impact of

Pagination

So now you know what to do, how do you track the effect of

optimization pagination handling?

Firstly, gather benchmark data to understand how your current

pagination handing is impacting SEO.

Sources for KPIs can include:

Server log files for the number of paginated page crawls.

Site: search operator (for example site:example.com inurl:page) to

understand how many paginated pages Google has indexed.

Google Search Console Search Analytics Report filtered by pages

containing pagination to understand the number of impressions.

Google Analytics landing page report filtered by paginated URLs to

understand on-site behavior.

If you see an issue getting search engines to crawl your site

pagination to reach your content, you may want to change the

pagination links.

Once you have launched your best practice pagination handling,

revisit these data sources to measure the success of your efforts.

SEO-FRIENDLY PAGINATION: A COMPLETE BEST PRACTICES GUIDE

What is Schema

Markup & Why It’s

Important for SEO

Chapter 16

Written By

Founder, Measurable SEO

Chuck Price

What is Schema Markup?

Schema markup, found at Schema.org, is a form of microdata.

Once added to a webpage, schema markup creates an

enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet),

which appears in search results.

Top search engines – including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex

– first started collaborating to create Schema.org, back in 2011.

Schema markup is especially important in the age of

Hummingbird and RankBrain. How a search engine interprets

the context of a query will determine the quality of a search

result.

Schema can provide context to an otherwise ambiguous

webpage.

Via Schema.org:

“Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their

pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the

information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1>

tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading

1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information

about what that text string means—”Avatar” could refer to the

hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile

picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to

intelligently display relevant content to a user.”

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

Does Schema Improve Your

Search Rankings?

There is no evidence that microdata has a direct affect on organic

search rankings.

Nonetheless, rich snippets do make your webpages appear more

prominently in SERPs. This improved visibility has been shown to

improve click-through rates.

According to a study by acmque, less than one-third of Google’s

search results include a rich snippet with Schema.org markup. This

exposes a huge opportunity for the rest. Very few things in SEO,

today, can move the dial quickly. This can.

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

What Is Schema Used For?

Businesses and organizations

Events

People

Products

Recipes

Reviews

Videos

Above are some of the most popular uses of schema. However,

there’s a good chance that if you have any sort of data on your

website, it’s going to have an associated itemscope, itemtype and

itemprop.

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

Adding Schema to Your

Webpages

Using Microdata

Microdata is a set of tags that aims to make annotating HTML

elements with machine-readable tags much easier. Microdata is a

great place for beginners to start because it’s so easy to use.

However, the one downside to using microdata is that you have to

mark every individual item within the body of your webpage. As you

can imagine, this can quickly get messy.

Before you begin to add schema to your webpages, you need to

figure out the ‘item type’ of the content on your webpage.

For example, does your web content focus on food? Music? Tech?

Once you’ve figured out the item type, you can now determine how

you can tag it up.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you own a store that sells

high-quality routers. If you were to look at the source code of your

homepage you would likely see something akin to this:

<div>

<h1>TechHaven</h1>

<h2>The best routers you’ll find online!</h2>

<p>Address:</p>

<p>459 Humpback Road</p>

<p>Rialto, Ca</p>

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

<p><a href=”http://www.techhaven.com/menu”>Click here to

view our best routers!</a></p>

</div>

Once you dive into the code, you’ll want to find the portion of your

webpage that talks about what your business has to offer. In this

example, that data can be found between the two <div> tags.

Now, at the top you can add in:

By adding this tag, we’re stating that the HTML code contained

between the <div> blocks are identifying a specific item.

Next, we have to identify what that item is by using the ‘itemtype’

attribute to identify the type of item our webpage is about (tech).

An item type comes in the form of a URL (such as http://schema.

org/tech). Let’s say, for example, that your site revolved around

beauty products instead of technology. Your item type URL might

look like this:

http://schema.org/beauty.

To make things easier you can browse a list of item types here,

plus you can view extensions to identify the specific entity that

you’re looking for. Keep in mind that this list is not all encompassing,

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

so there is a possibility that you won’t find the item type for your

specific niche.

Tracking back to the tech page, you want to tag the part of the

webpage that contains the name of the business. You can do this

between the <h1> tags.

Now, we’ll be using the ‘itemprop’ tag, which labels the properties of

an item:

<h1 itemprop=”name”>Tech Haven</h1>

You can apply these tags to the rest of the page now. When using

tags to identify item properties, it’s not necessary to tag the entire

line, just the one portion the property is making reference to.

For example, if you have a line that says Address: 1234 w sunshine

blvd, then you only need to apply the tags around the address itself

and nothing else.

<h2 itemprop=”description”>The best routers you’ll find

online!</h2>

<p>Address:</p>

<span itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://

schema.org/PostalAddress”>

<p itemprop=”streetAddress”>459 Humpback Road </p>

<p itemprop=”addressLocality”>Rialto, Ca</p></span>

<p>Tel: <span itemprop=”telephone”>909 574 3903</

span></p>

<p><a itemprop=”menu” href=”http:// http://www.techhaven.

com/menu “>Click here to view our tasty range of dishes!</

a></p>

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

</div>

This code may look complicated, but schema.org provides examples

on how to use the different item types, so you can actually see what

the code is supposed to do. Don’t worry, you won’t be left out in the

cold trying to figure this out on your own!

If you’re still feeling a little intimidated by the code, Google’s

Structured Data Markup Helper makes it super easy to tag your

webpages.

To use this amazing tool, just select your item type, paste in the

URL of the target page or the content you want to target, and then

highlight the different elements so that you can tag them.

Using RDFa

RDFa is an acronym for Resource Description Framework in

Attributes. Essentially, RDFa is an extension to HTML5 and it was

designed to aid users in marking up structured data.

RDFa is considered to be a W3C recommendation, meaning that

it is a web standard, and it can be used to chain structured data

vocabularies together. This is especially useful if you want to add

structured data that stretches beyond the limits of Schema.org.

You can breathe a sigh of relief. RDFa isn’t much different from

Microdata.

Similar to microdata, RDFa tags incorporate with the preexisting

HTML code in the body of your webpage. For the sake of familiarity,

we’ll look at the tech website once again as an example.

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

The HTML for your tech site would likely look like this before it was

modified:

<div>

<h1>Tech Haven</h1>

<h2>The best routers online!</h2>

<p>Address:</p>

<p>459 Humpback Road </p>

<p>Rialto, Ca</p>

<p><a href=”http://www.techhaven.com/menu”>Click here

to view our best routers!</a></p>

</div>

To begin, you want to ensure that the vocabulary that you’re using is

Schema.org and that the webpage in question is making reference

to a technology page.

For this example, you can search for “technology” on Schema.org

to learn how to tag different elements. Typically, you’ll find examples

near the bottom of the page that will show you how to use them in

practice.

Simply click on the RDFa tab to view specific RDFa examples.

Next, you need to use the vocab tag combined with the URL http://

schema.org to identify the vocabulary for the markup. To identify the

page type, use the typeoftag. Unlike microdata, which uses a URL to

identify types, RDFa uses one or more words to classify types.

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

If you wish to identify a property further than you should use the

typeof attribute.

For example, if you wish to further expand upon an address

property you can use “PostalAddress” like so:

Comparing microdata and RDFa side by side, the typeof attribute

is the equivalent of the itemtype attribute found in Microdata.

Furthermore, the propertyattribute would be the equivalent to the

itemprop attribute.

For further explanation, you can visit Schema.org to check lists and

view examples. You can find which kinds of elements are defined as

properties, and which are defined as types.

Going back to our earlier example, the tech page would look like

this after it has been appropriately tagged:

<h2 property=”description”>The best routers on the

internet!</h2>

<p>Address:</p>

<p property=”streetAddress”>459 Humpback Road</p>

<p property=”addressLocality”>Rialto, Ca</p>

</div>

<p>Tel: <span property=”telephone”>909 574 3903</

span></p>

<p><a property=”menu” href=”http://www.techhaven/

menu”>Click here to view our best routers!</a></p>

</div>

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

Conclusion

Hopefully, any fears that you might have had when you heard the

word “Schema” or “Structured Data” have been put to rest.

Schema is much easier to apply than it seems and it’s a best practice

that you need to incorporate into your webpages.

The work may seem tedious. But given time and effort, you’ll be

certain to reap the benefits from your labor.

To aid you, every page on Schema.org provides examples on how

to properly apply tags. Of course, you can also fall back on Google’s

Structured Data Testing Tool.

WHAT IS SCHEMA MARKUP & WHY IT’S IMPORTANT FOR SEO

Faceted Navigation:

Best Practices for SEO

Chapter 17

Written By

Digital Marketing Specialist, Forthea

Interactive

Natalie Hoben

When it comes to large websites,

such as e-commerce sites with

thousands upon thousands of

page, the importance of things

like crawl budget cannot be

understated.

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

Building a website with an organized architecture and smart internal

linking strategy is key for these types of sites.

However, doing that properly oftentimes involves new challenges when

trying to accommodate various attributes that are a common theme with

e-commerce (sizes, colors, price ranges, etc.).

Faceted navigation can help solve these challenges on large websites.

However, faceted navigation must be well thought out and executed

properly so that both users and search engine bots remain happy.

What is Faceted Navigation?

To begin, let’s dive into what faceted navigation actually is.

Faceted navigation is, in most cases, located on the sidebars of an

e-commerce website and has multiple categories, files, and facets.

It essentially allows people to customize their search based on what

they are looking for on the site.

For example, a visitor may want a purple cardigan, in a size medium,

with black trim.

Facets are indexed categories that help to narrow down a

production listing and also function as an extension of a site’s main

categories.

Facets, in their best form, should ideally provide a unique value for

each selection and, as

they are indexed, each

one on a site should send

relevancy signals to search

engines by making sure

that all critical attributes

appear within the content

of the page.

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

Filters are utilized to sort items with a listings page.

While the user can use this to narrow down what they are looking for,

the actual content on the page remains the same.

This can potentially lead to multiple URLs creating duplicate content,

which is a concern for SEO.

There are a few potential issues that faceted navigation can create

that can negatively affect SEO.

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

The main three issues boil down to:

Duplicate content.

Wasted crawl budget.

Diluted link equity.

As different parameters are created, they can quickly multiply. The

number of incredibly-related pieces of content continues to grow

significantly and different links may be going to all of these different

versions of a page, which can dilute link equity, and thus affect the

page’s ranking ability.

In order to be able to make sure that search engine crawlers aren’t

wasting valuable crawl budget on pages that have little to no value,

you need to take certain steps.

That starts with preventing search engine bots from crawling certain

multi-selected facets, such as “color” or “size”.

When trying to determine how to solve this faceted navigation

conundrum, there are a few solutions that are implementable. Which

one to use, however, will rely heavily on what parts of the site should

be indexed.

Noindex tags can be implemented to inform bots of which pages

not to include in the index. This method will remove pages of the

index, however, there will still be crawl budget spent on them and

link equity that is diluted.

Noindex

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

A disallow can be implemented for certain sections of a site.

The advantage to this solution is that it’s fast and customizable.

However, the disallow is merely a directive for Google, and they do

not have to abide by it.

In addition, link equity may be hindered from flowing to different

parts of the site.

For example, we could disallow red sweaters under $50 in the

robots file, instructing Google to not visit a page with the >$50

parameter. However, if any follow links pointing to any URL with that

parameter in it existed, Google could still possible index it.

Robots.txt

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

For example, if you wished to include a page for “red sweaters” in

the index, but did not want “red sweaters under $50” in the index,

then a noindex tag to the second result would exclude it.

Bots would still be able to find and crawl the page, though, and

this causes crawl budget to be wasted.

The pages would also still get wasted link equity.

Canonical tags allow you to instruct Google that a group of alike

pages has a preferred version.

Link equity can be consolidated into the chosen preferred page

utilizing this method. However, crawl budget will still be wasted.

Canonical tags can also be ignored by search engines, so this

solution should be used along with another.

For example, /red-sweaters?under-50/ could have the canonical

URL set as /red-sweaters/. Google would attribute the authority and

link equity to the canonicalized page, but crawl budget would still be

wasted.

When it comes to using AJAX to solve faceted navigation issues, the

main positive benefit is that a different, new URL is not generated

when a visitor visits a page and selects a filter.

JavaScript hosted client-slide takes care of the entire process. No

web server is needed.

In order to ensure that this method is effective, it is necessary that a

crawl path is accessible to the particular pages that are important to

get into rankings.

The pushState method of the HTML5 history API and server

configuration that responds to these requests with HTML rendered

server-side can help ensure that AJAX can fully work its magic and

keep SEO in a healthy state.

Canonicalization

AJAX

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

This should ideally be a last resort option.

It is a decent temporary solution while adjustments are being made

to the navigation. This is because it only instructs Google on how a

site should be crawled, instead of correcting the issue.

By navigating to the URL parameters tool in Google Search

Console, you can choose what effect each parameter has on the

page and how Google should treat those pages.

Implement pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in order to

group indexing properties, from pages to a series as a whole.

Each page needs to link to children pages and parent. This can be

done with breadcrumbs.

Use rigorous URL facet ordering so that duplication problems do

not arise.

Prevent clicks when no items are present for the filter.

Only use canonical URLs in sitemaps.

Facets should always be presented in a unified, logical manner

(i.e., alphabetical order).

Google Search Console

Other Ways to Get the Most out of

Faceted Navigation

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

Although faceted navigation can be great for UX, it can cause a

multitude of problems for SEO.

Duplicate content, wasted crawl budget, and diluted link equity can

all cause severe problems on a site.

It is crucial to carefully plan and implement the necessary methods

available in order to avoid any many issues down the line when it

comes to faceted navigation.

Conclusion

FACETED NAVIGATION: BEST PRACTICES FOR SEO

Don’t rely solely on one “fix” if it doesn’t take care of indexing, link

dilution, and crawl. For example, noindex and nofollow tags do

not help with crawl budget. Same with configuring parameters in

Google Search Console.

If a particular combination of facets occurs that receive a good

amount of traffic, consider allowing indexation.

Understanding

JavaScript

Fundamentals: Your

Cheat Sheet

Chapter 18

Written By

Technical SEO & Content Manager,

DeepCrawl

Rachel Costello

JavaScript is a complex topic

that can be extremely difficult

to get a handle on. UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

However, it has never been more important to understand it because

JavaScript is becoming increasingly prevalent on the websites that we

manage.

As the modern web continues to evolve, JavaScript usage continues

to rise.

SEO professionals may long for times gone by when websites were static

and coded only in HTML and CSS. However, engaging websites often

require interactivity, which is usually powered by JavaScript.

The number of JavaScript bytes across the entire web has

increased by 35 percent on desktop and 62.7 percent on mobile

over the last three years.

As Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller put it:

JavaScript is “not going away.”

This programming language is all around us, so we should get

better acquainted with it. Let’s be proactive and learn more about

JavaScript rather than fearing it.

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

There is often a misconception that JavaScript is solely for

developers to worry about.

I would argue that this isn’t the case, as it can cause a problem for

anyone who wants customers and search engines to be able to

access their website’s content.

If you aren’t completely familiar with JavaScript, or even have

absolutely no idea what it is or does, don’t worry.

I’ve put together a glossary of the key terms and fundamental

concepts you should know to help you get started on your journey

of discovery.

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

JavaScript is a programming language that allows you to

implement complex features on a website, such as dynamic

elements or interactivity.

JavaScript is executed once the information from the HTML and

CSS in the source code has been parsed and constructed.

The JavaScript will then trigger any events or variables specified

within it, the Document Object Model (DOM) will be updated,

and, finally, the JavaScript will be rendered in the browser.

The HTML and CSS will often form the foundations of a page’s

structure, and any

JavaScript will make

the final tweaks and

alterations.

What Is JavaScript?

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

The Document Object Model (DOM) is created when a page

is loaded, and it is made up of nodes and objects which map out

all of the different elements and attributes on a page.

The page is mapped out in this way so that other programs can

modify and manipulate the page in terms of its structure, content,

and styling.

Altering the elements of a page’s DOM is possible through using a

language like JavaScript.

Document Object Model (DOM)

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

ECMAScript (ES) is a scripting language that was created to

standardize the use of JavaScript code.

Different editions of ECMAScript are released when the language is

updated and tweaked over time, such as ES5 and ES6 (which is also

referred to as ES2015).

A transpiler is a tool that transforms source code into a different

programming language. The concept is a bit like Google Translate,

but for code.

You can convert a particular

source language into a

different target language, for

example, JavaScript to C++ or

Python to Ruby.

With regard to JavaScript rendering

particularly, a transpiler is often

recommended for transforming ES6

into ES5 because Google currently

uses an old version of Chrome for

rendering which doesn’t yet support

ES6.

ECMAScript

Transpiling

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

When rendering pages, Google uses a web rendering service

which is based on Chrome 41. This means that Google’s rendering

engine supports the same features and functionalities of that

particular version of Chrome.

When you consider that the most up-to-date version is Chrome

71, you can see that many versions have been launched since

Chrome 41 went live in 2015, and all of these versions came

with new features. This is why Google’s rendering service currently

supports ES5 rather than the later ES6 version of the language.

A single-page application (SPA) is a website or web app that

dynamically re-writes and re-renders a page as a user interacts

with it, rather than making separate requests to the server for new

HTML and content.

JavaScript frameworks can be used to support the dynamically

changing elements of SPAs.

Chrome 41

Single-page Application (SPA)

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

These are all different types of JavaScript frameworks.

Angular and Polymer were developed by Google.

React was developed by Facebook.

Vue was developed by Evan You, who used to work on Google’s

Angular team.

Each JavaScript framework has its own pros and cons, so

developers will choose to work with the one that best suits them and

the project they’re working on.

If you want to learn more about how the different frameworks

measure up, this guide gives a detailed comparison.

Angular, Polymer, React & Vue

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

JavaScript rendering involves taking the script and the

instructions it contains, processing it all, then running it so that

the required output is shown in the browser. There are many

different methods you can use to control the way in which

JavaScript is rendered.

Requiring JavaScript to be rendered on a page can

negatively impact two key areas:

Site speed

Search engine crawling and indexing

Depending on which rendering method you use, you can reduce

page load speed and make sure content is accessible to search

engines for crawling and indexing.

Pre-rendering

Pre-rendering involves rendering the content on a page before it

is requested by the user or search engine, so that they receive a

static page with all of the content on there ready to go.

By preloading a page in this way, it means that your content will

be accessible rather than a search engine or user’s browser

having to render the page themselves.

JavaScript Rendering

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

Pre-rendering is usually used for search engine bots rather than

humans. This is because a static, pre-rendered page will be less

engaging for users as it will lack any dynamic content or interactivity.

Server-side Rendering

The hosting server does the heavy lifting and renders the page so

that the JavaScript has already been processed and the content

is ready to be handed over to the user’s browser or search engine

crawler when it is requested.

This method helps to reduce any strain on the user’s device that

would have been caused by processing JavaScript, and this can

increase page load speed.

Server-side rendering also ensures the full content can be seen and

indexed by search engines.

Client-side Rendering

During client-side rendering, JavaScript is processed by the user’s

browser or by the search engine that’s requesting a page.

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

It is often advised against to use client-side rendering as there is

a delay between Google crawling pages and then being able to

render them.

Google puts pages that need to be rendered into a queue until

enough resources become available to process them.

If you’re relying on Google to render a page clientside,

this can delay indexing by up to a

week after it is initially crawled.

Dynamic Rendering

Dynamic rendering

involves using different

rendering methods

depending on whether a user’s

browser or a search engine bot

is requesting a page.

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

The server will handle the initial request, but the rest of the work of

processing and rendering a page falls on the user’s device or the

search engine.

Hybrid Rendering

Hybrid rendering involves a combination of both server-side

rendering and client-side rendering.

The core content is pre-rendered server-side and sent to the client,

whether that’s the user’s browser or the search engine crawler that’s

requesting the content.

After the page is initially loaded, additional JavaScript for any

interactivity is then rendered client-side.

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

If your site usually renders client-side, when Googlebot is detected

the page will be pre-rendered using a mini client-side renderer (for

example, Puppeteer or Rendertron), so the content can be seen

and indexed straight away.

Hopefully you found this guide useful, and that it helped you better

understand the basics of JavaScript and how it impacts websites.

Now that you’ve brushed up on the key terms, you should be better

equipped to hold your own in conversations with the developers!

Conclusion

UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

An SEO Guide to URL

Parameter Handling

Chapter 19

Written By

International Digital Director, Ringier

Jes Scholz

While parameters are loved

by developers and analytics

aficionados, they are often an

SEO nightmare. UNDERSTANDING JAVASCRIPT FUNDAMENTALS: YOUR CHEAT SHEET

Endless combinations of parameters can create thousands of URL

variations out of the same content.

The problem is we can’t simply wish parameters away. They play an

important role in a website’s user experience. So we need to understand

how to handle them in an SEO-friendly way.

To do so we explore:

The basics of URL parameters

SEO issues caused by parameters

Assessing the extent of your parameter problem

SEO solutions to tame parameter

Best practice URL parameter handling

Also known by the aliases of query strings or URL variables,

parameters are the portion of a URL that follows a question mark.

They are comprised of a key and a value pair, separated by an equal

sign. Multiple parameters can be added to a single page by using an

ampersand.

The most common use cases for parameters are:

Tracking – For example ?utm_medium=social, ?sessionid=123 or

?affiliateid=abc

Reordering – For example ?sort=lowest-price, ?order=highest-rated

or ?so=newest

Filtering – For example ?type=widget, colour=blue or ?pricerange=

20-50

Identifying – For example ?product=small-blue-widget,

categoryid=124 or itemid=24AU

Paginating – For example, ?page=2, ?p=2 or viewItems=10-30

Searching – For example, ?query=users-query, ?q=users-query or

?search=drop-down-option

Translating – For example, ?lang=fr, ?language=de or

What Are URL Parameters?

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

1. Parameters Create Duplicate Content

Often, URL parameters make no significant change to the content

of a page. A re-ordered version of the page is often not so different

from the original. A page URL with tracking tags or a session ID is

identical to the original.

For example, the following URLs would all return collection

of widgets.

Static URL: https://www.example.com/widgets

Tracking parameter: https://www.example.com/

widgets?sessionID=32764

Reordering parameter: https://www.example.com/

widgets?sort=newest

Identifying parameter: https://www.example.

com?category=widgets

Searching parameter: https://www.example.com/

products?search=widget

That’s quite a few URLs for what is effectively the same content –

now imagine this over every category on your site. It can really add

up.

The challenge is that search engines treat every parameter based

URL is a new page. So they see multiple variations of the same

SEO Issues with URL

Parameters

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

page. All serving duplicate content and all targeting the same

keyword phrase or semantic topic.

While such duplication is unlikely to cause you to be completely

filtered out of the search results, it does lead to keyword

cannibalization and could downgrade Google’s view of your

overall site quality as these additional URLs add no real value.

2. Parameters Waste Crawl Budget

Crawling redundant parameter pages drains crawl budget, reducing

your site’s ability to index SEO relevant pages and increasing server

load.

Google sums up this point perfectly.

“Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple

parameters, can cause a problems for crawlers by creating

unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar

content on your site. As a result, Googlebot may consume much

more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely

index all the content on your site.”

3. Parameters Split Page Ranking Signals

If you have multiple permutations of the same page content, links

and social shares may be coming in on various versions.

This dilutes your ranking signals. When you confuse a crawler, it

becomes unsure which of the competing pages to index for the

search query.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

4. Parameters Make URLs Less Clickable

Let’s face it. Parameter URLs are unsightly. They’re hard to read.

They don’t seem as trustworthy. As such, they are less likely to be

clicked.

This will impact page performance. Not only because CTR can

influence rankings, but also because it’s less clickable on social

media, in emails, when copy pasted into forums or anywhere else

the full URL may be displayed.

While this may only have a fractional impact on a single page’s

amplification, every tweet, like, share, email, link, and mention

matters for the domain.

Poor URL readability could contribute to a decrease in brand

engagement.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

It’s important to know every parameter used on your website. But

chances are your developers don’t keep an up to date list.

So how do you find all the parameter that need handling? Or

understand how search engines crawl and index such pages?

Know the value they bring to users?

Follow these five steps:

Run a crawler: With a tool like Screaming Frog you can search for

“?” in the URL.

Look in Google Search Console URL Parameters Tool: Google

auto-adds the query strings it finds.

Review your log files: See if Googlebot is crawling parameter

based URLs.

Search with site: inurl: advanced operators: Know how Google

is indexing the parameters you found by putting the key in a

site:example.com inurl:key combination query.

Assess the Extent of Your

Parameter Problem

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Look in Google Analytics All Pages report: Search for “?” to

see how each of the parameters you found are used by users.

Be sure to check that URL query parameters have not been

excluded in the view setting.

Armed with this data, you can now decide how to best handle

each of your website’s parameters.

You have six tools in your SEO arsenal to deal with URL parameters

on a strategic level.

Limit Parameter-Based URLs

A simple review of how and why parameters are generated can

provide an SEO quick win. You will often find ways to reduce the

number of parameter URLs and so minimize the negative SEO

impact. There are four common issues to begin your review.

1. Eliminate Unnecessary Parameters

Ask you developer for a list of every website parameters and its

function. Chances are, you will discover parameters that no longer

perform a valuable function.

For example, users can be better identified by cookies than

sessionIDs. Yet the sessionID parameter may still exist on your

website as it was used historically.

SEO Solutions to Tame URL

Parameters

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

URL parameters should be added to a URL only when they have

a function. Don’t permit parameter keys to be added if the value is

blank.

In the above example, key2 and key3 add no value both literally and

figuratively.

3. Use Keys Only Once

Avoid applying multiple parameters with the same parameter name

and a different value.

For multi-select option, it is better to combine the values together

after a single key.

Or you may discover that a filter in your faceted navigation is rarely

applied by your users.

Any parameters caused by technical debt should be immediately

eliminated.

2. Prevent Empty Values

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

4. Order URL Parameters

If the same URL parameter are rearranged, the pages are

interpreted by search engines as equal. As such, parameter order

doesn’t matter from a duplicate content perspective. But each of

those combinations burn crawl budget and split ranking signals.

Avoid these issues by asking your developer to write a script to

always place parameters in a consistent order, regardless of how

the user selected them.

In my opinion, you should start with any translating parameters,

followed by identifying, then pagination, then layering on filtering

and reordering or search parameters and finally tracking.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Pros:

Allows more efficient use

of crawl budget.

Reduces duplicate

content issues.

Consolidates ranking

signals to fewer pages.

Suitable for all parameter

types.

Cons:

Moderate technical

implementation time

The rel=”canonical” link attribute calls out that a page has identical

or similar content to another. This encourages search engines to

consolidate the ranking signals to the URL specified as canonical.

You can rel=canonical your parameter based URLs to your SEOfriendly

URL for tracking, identifying or reordering parameters. But

this tactic is not suitable when the parameter page content is not

close enough to the canonical, such as pagination, searching,

translating or some filtering parameters.

Rel=”Canonical” Link Attribute

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Pros:

Relatively easy technical

implementation.

Very likely to safeguard

against duplicate content

issues.

Consolidates ranking signals

to the canonical URL.

Cons:

Wastes crawl budget on

parameter pages.

Not suitable for all parameter

types.

Interpreted by search

engines as a strong hint, not

a directive.

Set a noindex directive for any parameter based page that doesn’t

add SEO value. This tag will prevent search engines from indexing

the page.

URLs with a “noindex” tag are also likely to be crawled less

frequently and if it’s present for a long time will eventually lead

Google to nofollow the page’s links.

Meta Robots Noindex Tag

Pros:

Relatively easy technical

implementation.

Very likely to safeguard against

duplicate content issues.

Suitable for all parameter types

you do not wish to be indexed.

Removes existing parameterbased

URLs from the index.

Cons:

Won’t prevent search engines

from crawling URLs, but will

encourage them to do so less

frequently.

Doesn’t consolidate ranking

signals.

Interpreted by search engines

as a strong hint, not a directive.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

The robots.txt file is what search engines look at first before crawling

your site. If they see something is disallowed, they won’t even go

there.

You can use this file to block crawler access to every parameter

based URL (with Disallow: /*?*) or only to specific query strings you

don’t want to be indexed.

Pros:

Simple technical

implementation.

Allows more efficient use

of crawl budget.

Avoids duplicate content

issues.

Suitable for all parameter

types you do not wish to

be crawled.

Cons:

Doesn’t consolidate ranking

signals.

Doesn’t remove existing

URLs from the index.

Robots.txt Disallow

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Configure the Google’s URL parameter tool to tell crawlers the

purpose of your parameters and how you would like them to be

handled.

Google Search Console has a warning message that using the tool

“could result in many pages disappearing from a search.”

This may sound ominous. But what’s more menacing is thousands

of duplicate pages hurting your website’s ability to rank.

So it’s best to learn how to configure URL parameters in Google

Search Console, rather than letting Googlebot decide.

The key is to ask yourself how the parameter impacts the

page content:

Tracking parameters don’t change page content. Configure them

as “representative URLs”.

URL Parameter Tool in Google Search Console

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Configure parameters that reorder page content as “sorts”. If this

is optionally added by the user, set crawl to “No URLs”. If a sort

parameter it is applied by default, use “Only URLs with value”,

entering the default value.

Configure parameters that filter page down to a subset of content

as “narrows”. If these filters are not SEO relevant, set crawl to “No

URLs”. If they are SEO relevant set to “Every URL”.

Configure parameters that shows a certain piece or group of

content as “specifies”. Ideally, this should be static URL. If not

possible, you will likely want to set this to “Every URL”.

Configure parameters that display a translated version of the

content as “translates”. Ideally, translation should be achieved via

subfolders. If not possible, you will likely want to set this to “Every

URL”.

Configuration parameters that display a component page of a

longer sequence as “paginates”. If you have achieved efficient

indexation with XML sitemaps, you can save crawl budget and

set crawl to “No URL”. If not, set to “Every URL” to help crawlers to

reach all of the items.

Google will automatically add parameters to the list under the

default “Let Googlebot decide”. The challenge is, these can never

be removed, even if the parameter no longer exists. So whenever

possible, it’s best to proactively add parameters yourself. So that if

at any point that parameter no longer exists, you may delete it from

GSC.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

For any parameter you set in Google Search Console to “No URL”,

you should also consider adding it in Bing’s ignore URL parameters

tool.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Pros:

No developer time needed.

Allows more efficient use of

crawl budget.

Likely to safeguard against

duplicate content issues.

Suitable for all parameter

types.

Cons:

Doesn’t consolidate ranking

signals.

Interpreted by Google as a

helpful hint, not a directive.

Only works for Google and

with lesser control for Bing.

Many people think the optimal way to handle URL parameters is

simply avoid them in the first place. After all, subfolders surpass

parameters to help Google understand site structure and static,

keyword based URLs have always been a cornerstone of on-page

SEO.

To achieve this, you can use server-side URL rewrites to convert

parameters into subfolder URLs.

For example, the URL:

www.example.com/view-product?id=482794

Would become:

www.example.com/widgets/blue

This approach works well for descriptive keyword based parameters,

such as those which identify categories, products, or filter for search

engine relevant attributes. It is also effective for translated content.

But it becomes problematic for non-keyword relevant elements of

faceted navigation, such as price. Having such a filter as a static,

indexable URL offers no SEO value.

It’s also an issue for searching parameters, as every user generated

query would create a static page that vies for ranking against the

canonical – or worse presents to crawlers low quality content pages

whenever a user has searched for a item you don’t offer.

Move From Dynamic to Static URLs

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

It’s somewhat odd when applied to pagination (although not

uncommon due to WordPress), which would give a URL such as

www.example.com/widgets/blue/page2

Very odd for reordering, which would give a URL such as

www.example.com/widgets/blue/lowest-price

And is often not a viable option for tracking. Google Analytics will

not acknowledge a static version of UTM parameter.

More to the point, by replacing dynamic parameters with static

URLs for things like pagination, onsite search box results or sorting

does not address duplicate content, crawl budget or internal link

equity dilution.

And having all the combinations of filters from your faceted

navigation as indexable URLs often results in thin content issues.

Especially if you offer multi-select filters.

Many SEO pros argue it’s possible to provide the same user

experience without impacting the URL. For example, by using

POST rather than GET requests to modify the page content. Thus,

preserving the user experience and avoiding the SEO problems.

But stripping out parameters in this manner would remove the

possibility for your audience to bookmark or share a link to that

specific page. And if obviously not feasible for tracking parameters

and not optimal for pagination.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

The crux of the matter is that for many websites, completing

avoiding parameters is simply not possible if you want to provide the

ideal user experience. Nor would it be best practice SEO.

So we are left with this. For parameters that you don’t want to be

indexed in search results (paginating, reordering, tracking, etc)

implement as query strings. For parameters that you do want to be

indexed, use static URL paths.

Pros:

Shifts crawler focus from

parameter based to static

URLs which have a higher

likelihood to rank.

Cons:

Significant investment of

development time for URL

rewrites and 301 redirects.

Doesn’t prevent duplicate

content issues.

Doesn’t consolidate ranking

signals.

Not suitable for all

parameter types.

May lead to thin content

issues.

Doesn’t always provide a

linkable or bookmarkable

URL.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

So which of these six SEO tactics should you implement?

The answer can’t be all of them.

Not only would that create unnecessary complexity. But often the

SEO solutions actively conflict with one another.

For example, if you implement robots.txt disallow, Google would not

be able to see any meta noindex tag. You also shouldn’t combine

a meta noindex tag with a rel=canonical link attribute.

What becomes clear is there is no one perfect solution.

Even Google’s John Mueller can’t decide on an approach. In a

Google Webmaster hangout, he initially recommended against

disallowing parameters, but when questioned on this from a faceted

navigation perspective, answered “it depends.”

There are occasions when crawling efficiency is more important

than consolidating authority signals.

Ultimately, what’s right for your website will depend on your

priorities.

Best Practice URL Parameter

Handling for SEO

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Personally, I don’t use noindex or block access to parameter pages.

If Google can’t crawl and understand all the URL variables, it can’t

consolidate the ranking signals to the canonical page.

I take the following plan of attack for SEO-friendly

parameter handling:

Do keyword research to understand what parameters should be

search engine friendly, static URLs.

Implement correct pagination handling with rel=”next &

rel=”prev”.

For all remaining parameter based URLs, implement consistent

ordering rules, which use keys only once and prevent empty values

to limit the number of URLs.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

Add a rel=canonical link attribute to suitable parameter pages to

combine ranking ability.

Configure URL parameter handling in both Google and Bing as

a failsafe to help search engines understand each parameter’s

function.

Double check no parameter based URLs are being submitted in

the XML sitemap.

No matter what parameter handling strategy you choose to

implement, be sure to document the impact of your efforts on

KPIs.

AN SEO GUIDE TO URL PARAMETER HANDLING

How to Perform an

In-Depth Technical SEO

Audit

Chapter 20

Written By

Assistant Editor, Search Engine Journal

Anna Crowe

I’m not going to lie:

Conducting an in-depth SEO

audit is a major deal.

HOW TO PERFORM AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

And, as an SEO consultant, there are a few sweeter words than, “Your

audit looks great! When can we bring you onboard?”

Even if you haven’t been actively looking for a new gig, knowing your SEO

audit nailed it is a huge ego boost.

But, are you terrified to start? Is this your first SEO audit? Or, you just

don’t know where to begin? Sending a fantastic SEO audit to a potential

client puts you in the best possible place.

It’s a rare opportunity for you to organize your processes and rid

your potential client of bad habits (cough*unpublishing pages

without a 301 redirect*cough) and crust that accumulates like the

lint in your dryer.

So take your time. Remember: Your primary goal is to add value to

your customer with your site recommendations for both the shortterm

and the long-term.

Ahead, I’ve put together the need-to-know steps for conducting

an SEO audit and a little insight to the first phase of my processes

when I first get a new client. It’s broken down into sections below. If

you feel like you have a good grasp on a particular section, feel free

to jump to the next.

This is a series, so stay tuned for more SEO audit love.

HOW TO PERFORM AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

Jump to:

When Should I Perform an SEO Audit?

What You Need from a Client Before an SEO Audit

Tools for SEO Audit

Technical > DeepCrawl

Technical > Screaming Frog

Technical > Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster

Tools

Technical > Google Analytics

After a potential client sends me an email expressing interest in

working together and they answer my survey, we set-up an intro call

(Skype or Google Hangouts is preferred).

Before the call, I do my own mini quick SEO audit (I invest at least

one hour to manually researching) based on their survey answers

to become familiar with their market landscape. It’s like dating

someone you’ve never met.

You’re obviously going to stalk them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

and all other channels that are public #soIcreep.

Here’s an example of what my survey looks like:

Here are some key questions you’ll want to ask the client

during the first meeting:

1. What are your overall business goals? What are your channel

goals (PR, social, etc.)?

2. Who is your target audience?

3. Do you have any business partnerships?

4. How often is the website updated? Do you have a web developer

or an IT department?

5. Have you ever worked with an SEO consultant before? Or, had

any SEO work done previously?

When Should I Perform an SEO

Audit?

HOW TO PERFORM AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

Sujan Patel also has some great recommendations on questions

to ask a new SEO client.

After the call, if I feel we’re a good match, I’ll send over my formal

proposal and contract (thank you HelloSign for making this an easy

process for me!).

To begin, I always like to offer my clients the first month as a trial

period to make sure we vibe.

This gives both the client and I a chance to become friends first

before dating. During this month, I’ll take my time to conduct an indepth

SEO audit.

These SEO audits can take me anywhere from 40 hours to 60 hours

depending on the size of the website.

These audits are bucketed into three separate parts and

presented with Google Slides.

Technical: Crawl errors, indexing, hosting, etc.

Content: Keyword research, competitor analysis, content maps,

meta data, etc.

Links: Backlink profile analysis, growth tactics, etc.

HOW TO PERFORM AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

After that first month, if the client likes my work, we’ll begin

implementing the recommendations from the SEO audit. And going

forward, I’ll perform a mini-audit monthly and an in-depth audit

quarterly.

To recap, I perform an SEO audit for my clients:

First month

Monthly (mini-audit)

Quarterly (in-depth audit)

When a client and I start working together, I’ll share a Google doc

with them requesting a list of passwords and vendors.

This includes:

Google Analytics access and any third-party analytics tools

Google and Bing ads

Webmaster tools

Website backend access

Social media accounts

List of vendors

List of internal team members (including any work they outsource)

What You Need from a Client Before

an SEO Audit

HOW TO PERFORM AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

Before you begin your SEO audit, here’s a recap of the

tools I use:

Screaming Frog

Integrity (for Mac users) and Xenu Sleuth (for PC users)

SEO Browser

Wayback Machine

Moz

Buzzsumo

DeepCrawl

Copyscape

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager Chrome Extension

Annie Cushing’s Campaign Tagging Guide

Google Analytics (if given access)

Google Search Console (if given access)

Bing Webmaster Tools (if given access)

You Get Signal

Pingdom

PageSpeed Tool

Sublime Text

Tools for SEO Audit

HOW TO PERFORM AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

Technical

Tools needed for technical SEO audit:

Screaming Frog

DeepCrawl

Copyscape

Integrity for Mac (or Xenu Sleuth for PC users)

Google Analytics (if given access)

Google Search Console (if given access)

Bing Webmaster Tools (if given access)

My 30-Point Technical SEO

Checklist

Tools:

DeepCrawl

Copyscape

Screaming Frog

Google Analytics

Integrity

Google Tag Manager

Google Analytics code

Step 1: Add Site to DeepCrawl and

Screaming Frog

HOW TO PERFORM AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT

What to Look When Using DeepCrawl

The first thing I do is add my client’s site to DeepCrawl. Depending

on the size of your client’s site, the crawl may take a day or two to get

the results back.

Once you get your DeepCrawl results back, here are the things I look

for:

Duplicate Content

Check out the “Duplicate Pages” report to locate duplicate content.

If duplicate content is identified, I’ll make this a top priority in my

recommendations to the client to rewrite these pages and in the

meantime, I’ll add the <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,

nofollow”> tag to the duplicate pages.

Common duplicate content errors you’ll discover:

Duplicate meta titles and meta descriptions

Duplicate body content from tag pages (I’ll use Copyscape to help

determine if something is being plagiarized).

Two domains (ex: yourwebsite.co, yourwebsite.com)

Subdomains (ex: jobs.yourwebsite.com)

NNPO

Pages

Monday, 10 July 2023

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