I was searching on the web after I analyzed the link structure of Yoast. There he uses links to redirect users to a different page.
Here a example:
https://yoast.com/out/synthesis/
Can someone tell me what this is called, or how I create such links as well?
It's actually really simple. He isn't using it for SEO purposes since it's just a 301 redirect. He is purposefully hiding the affiliate url AND adding 'onclick' Google Analytics tracking to the link. Also - the "/out/" directory is being blocked by robots.txt and then redirect's back to the index page.
To answer your question:
This is not for SEO reasons. He is using it for both tracking click and hiding his affiliate link/url.
These are called internal links, when you link to you one of your domain or subdomain pages. Internal links adds values for SEO as it makes the crawlers aware of those existing pages. There are many options for generating internal links. It depends on your page structure etc. Some of the common options are by using html sitemap like trip advisor's does, using header and footer. For html sitemaps, go to http://www.tripadvisor.com/, scroll all the way bottom to the footer section. There you can sitemap link, which is a path way for many internal links.
Related
Is it possible to help search engines by giving them a list of urls to crawl? It might be hard to make the site SEO friendly when using heavy AJAX logic. Let's say that the user chooses a category, then a sub-category and a product. It seems unnecessary to give categories and subcategories urls. But giving only products a url makes sense. When I see the url for the product, I can make the application navigate to that product. So, is it possible to use robots.txt or some other method to direct search engines to the urls I designate?
I am open to other suggestions if this somehow does not make sense.
Yes. What you're describing is called a sitemap -- it's a list of pages on your site which search engines can use to help them crawl your web site.
There are a couple ways of formatting a sitemap, but by far the easiest is to just list out all the URLs in a text file available on your web site -- one per line -- and reference it in robots.txt like so:
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.txt
Here's Google's documentation on the topic: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en
So, I have been building an ecommerce site for a small company.
The url structure is : www.example.com/product_category/product_name and the site has around 1000 products.
I've checked google webmaster tools and in the HTML improvements section it shows that I have multiple title and meta description tags for all the product pages. They all appear two times, both:
-www.example.com/product_category/product_name
and
-www.example.com/product_category/product_name/ (with slash in the end)
got indexed as separate pages.
I've added a 301 redirect from every www.example.com/product_category/product_name/ to www.example.com/product_category/product_name, but this was almost two weeks ago. I have resubmitted my sitemap and asked google to fetch the whole page a few times. Nothing has changed, GWT still shows the pages as duplicate tags.
I did not get any manual action message.
So I have two questions:
-how can I accelerate the reindexation process, if it's possible?
-and do these tags hurt my organic search results? I've googled it, yes and some say it does and some say it doesn't.
An option is to set a canonical link on both URLs (with and without /) using the URL without a /. Little by little, Google will stop complaining. Keep in mind Google Webmaster Tools is slow to react, especially when you don't have much traffic or backlinks.
And yes, duplicate tags can influence your rankings negatively because users won't have proper and specific information for each page.
Set a canonical link on both Urls is a solution but it take time from my experience.
The fasted way is to block old URL in robots.txt file.
Disallow: /old_url
canonical tag is option but why you are not adding different title and description for all pages.
you can add dynamic meta tags one time and it will create automatically for all pages so we dont worry about duplication.
I have a site with an input text.
User types the name of a city, hits enter and it's linked there.
my sitemap.xml looks like this:
<urlset>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/rome.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/london.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/newyork.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/paris.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/berlin.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/toronto.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/milan.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/edinburgh.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/nice.html</loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/boston.html</loc></url>
...
</urlset>
My question is:
Will I be penalized (from a SEO point of view) because my links only appear on the sitemap.xml instead as in a list of anchors in the html page.
Note: the anchor approach was excluded because I have about 5,000 listed cities
It won't be penalised. Google themselves say the primary purpose of a sitemap is "a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover."
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en
You are rare in that you are using the sitemap correctly to help Google find your pages.
Often SEOs just add one for the sake of it, rather than taking the time to identify and using it to fix potential crawling errors.
The only negative aspect for SEO I can think of is that page rank will not flow between your pages if there is no direct link.
No, you will not be penalized. The sole purpose of sitemaps is to tell search engines where to find your content. That content may or may not be available through hyperlinks on your website.
I understand the og:url meta tag is the canonical url for the resource in the open graph.
What strategies can I use if I wish to support 301 redirecting of the resource, while preserving its place in the open graph? I don't want to lose my likes because i've changed the URLs.
Is the best way to do this to store the original url of the content, and refer to that? Are there any other strategies for dealing with this?
To clarify - I have page:
/page1, with an og:url of http://www.example.com/page1
I now want to move it to
/page2, using a 301 redirect to http://www.example.com/page2
Do I have any options to avoid losing the likes and comments other than setting the og:url meta to /page1?
Short answer, you can't.
Once the object has been created on Facebook's side its URL in Facebook's graph is fixed - the Likes and Comments are associated with that URL and object; you need that URL to be accessible by Facebook's crawler in order to maintain that object in the future. (note that the object becoming inaccessible doesn't necessarily remove it from Facebook, but effectively you'd be starting over)
What I usually recommend here is (with examples http://www.example.com/oldurl and http://www.example.com/newurl):
On /newpage, keep the og:url tag pointing to /oldurl
Add a HTTP 301 redirect from /oldurl to /newurl
Exempt the Facebook crawler from this redirect
Continue to serve the meta tags for the page on http://www.example.com/oldurl if the request comes from the Facebook crawler.
No need to return any actual content to the crawler, just a simple HTML page with the appropriate tags
Thus:
Existing instances of the object on Facebook will, when clicked, bring users to the correct (new) page via your redirect
The Like button on the (new) page will still produce a like of the correct object (but at the old URL)
If you're moving a lot of URLs around or completely rewriting your URL scheme you should use the new URLs for new articles/products/etc, but you'll need to keep the redirect in place if you want to retain likes, comments, etc on the older content.
This includes if you're changing domain.
The only problem here is maintaining the old URL -> new URL mapping somewhere in your code, but it's not technically difficult, just an additional thing to maintain in the future.
BTW, The Facebook crawler UA is currently facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)
I'm having the same problem with my old sites. Domains are changing, admins want to change urls for seo etc
I came to conclusion its best to have some sort uniqe id in db just for facebook - from the beginning. For articles for example I have myurl.com/a/123 where 123 is ID of the article.
Real url is myurl.com/category/article-title. Article can then be put in different category, renamed etc with extensive logic for 301 redirects behind it. But the basic fb identifier can stay the same for ever.
Of course this is viable only when starting with a fresh site or when implementing fb comments for the first time.
Just an idea if you can plan ahead :) Let me know what you think.
I am creating a site map for a website.I have recently come to know that instead of site map I can give footer links.So I am confused whether to have a site map or footer links or both.Can anyone suggest me? (considering both Search engine optimization and users navigation)
When you submit sitemap to google - googlebot will visit your site more frequenly, and when you create new site it will index it sooner.
Adding a sitemap will not damage your website. Even with a good set of footer links it's good practice to submit your sitemap to Google et al.
Considering user navigation though I must say a good footer can prove a real good tool to show users what's what and how to find it. A footer isn't a sitemap though, just a summary usually. So why not add both?