I have a problem on my hands.
I run a website with promotional products, at work,
that maily is structured into catalogues with sub-pages for each category (lighters, t-shirts, other promotional items).
Now at some point, I had to delete a big catalogue, create 3 little catalogues instead,
and move all the links from the main catalogue to these 3.
You can imagine that links have changed also.
Now Google has already indexed the old ones, and of course, he will index the new ones when he does, but still, I have "broken" links, the old ones that are not anymore because I moved them to diff categories, and the link structure has changed.
I heard that for SEO, it's bad to have broken links (links that don't work no more) that are already indexed by Google.
My question is: how do I clear the broken links from Google, the links that moved away and not working anymore. Is there a way?
From your .htaccess file you must redirect the old links to the new one.
Here you can find an useful documentation:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=ro
For the old links having a new corresponding link, implement a 301 redirect, or your will loose a lot of your existing rankings.
If the old link corresponds to content you have deleted from your site forever, then return a 410 Gone http status code.
Related
We have got a deprecated domain www.deprecateddomain.com. Specific fact is that we have got reverse proxy working and redirecting all requests from this domain to the new one www.newdomain.com.
The problem is when you type "deprecateddomain.com" in google search, there is a link to www.deprecateddomain.com in search results besides results with "newdomain.com". It means that there is such entries in google index. Our customer don't want to see links to old site.
We were suggested to create fake robots.txt with Disallow: / directive for www.deprecateddomain.com and reverse proxy rules to get this file from some directory. But after investigation the subject I started hesitating that it will help. Will it remove entries with old domain from index?
Why not to just create the request in search console to remove www.deprecateddomain.com from index? In my opinion it might help.
Anyway, I'm novice in this question. Could you give me advice what to do?
Google takes time to remove old/obsolete entries from its ranking, especially on low visited or low value pages. You have no control on it. Google needs to revisit each page to see the redirection you have implemented.
So DO NOT implement a disallow on the old website, because it will make the problem worse. Bots won't be able to crawls those pages and see the redirection you have implemented. So they will stay longer in the rankings.
You must also make sure you implement a proper 301 redirection (i.e. a permanent one, not a temporary) for all pages of the old website. Else, some pages may stay in the ranking for quite some time.
If some pages are obsolete and should be deleted rather than redirected, return a 404 for them. Google will remove them quickly from its index.
History/Context: I have a site, 'www.oldexample.com' built in 1998, HTML 4.01 transitional on Apache, cpanel server. Until last fall our main keywords got us to top 10. After mobile changes and Panda etc, Dropped to page 2 or 3 for all but one very specific keyword. The old site, 'www.oldexample.com' has many good back links and history in google and all main directories. I am rebuilding a test site now which is on 'mycompany.myshopify.com' as it addresses all my google errors issues on oldsite. I have set up my 'www.newexample.com' to redirect to the shopify site which is called up under 'www.newexample.com'.The myshopify.com URL does not show up at all.
Question: If I were to do cpanel 301 redirect of whole 'oldexample.com' to 'newexample.com' would I still benefit from the many links and history of oldsite?
When you say that the shopify URL doesn't show at all, do you mean it's not showing when you search for those keywords, or it's not indexed at all? If it's the latter, prompt Google to index it using Google Search Console. If it's the former, there are a number of things that could have affected this:
the authority of the new site - if you've just launched it, it naturally won't have the authority of the previous site and therefore is less likely to get visibility
you are correct that the backlinks would have played a major part in this. What you need to do is to redirect the old domain to the new one you want to appear in Google. For example, if you want to actually take people to newsite.shopify.com, you should redirect the old domain directly to that one. If you redirect the old one to newdomain.com, which you then redirect to newsite.shopify.com the result won't be the same. Link value is lost via redirects. Ideally, you should get in touch with as many 3rd party websites linking to your old domain and ask them to update the links to point to newsite.shopify.com
Even if you do that you might still not see those rankings because of various other factors. If you fancy posting the actual URLs and keywords in question, I can spare a few minutes to have a look.
Here'y the story: I have a website for a local company that publishes quality content to an on-site blog. We're expanding to a new geographic region, and I'm in the process of building another website targeting the new region.
I'd like to include a blog on the new website, which will pull in any content/posts from our existing blog. I primarily want to do this for the added SEO benefit of having fresh, relevant content that's frequently updated on your website. However, I would of course need to add a rel=canonical link back to the original blog in order to ensure I don't get any duplicate content penalties from posting the same content across two separate domains.
My question is whether adding that rel=canonical link will eliminate the SEO value of that content being posted to the new website?
I'm not really talking about which blog post would show up in SERPs, as I understand that the point of the rel=canonical tag is to provide attribution to the primary source of the content. I'm more concerned about whether using a rel=canonical on the content would eliminate the secondary SEO benefit of having relevant, frequently updated content on your website, due to Google being essentially "blind" to the duplicate content.
In most cases the answer on your question is "yes". With regard to Google - GoogleAnswers (see the last question).
Other search engines can not maintain this attribute.
Regards.
If you pull content from somewhere else to post, it isn't "fresh". Fresh content is newly written. You won't get any credit for fresh content whether or not you use rel=canonical
The canonical tag behaves in a similar way to a 301 redirect. That is, ranking that the page with the canonical tag has will mostly get transferred to the page it points it.
i have a blog build in wordpress, And my domain name is like example.com (i can't give you the original name, because some times the editors will mark this question as SPAM :( , and if any one really want to check directly from my site will add at the end of the question.)
http://example.com and the blog name is http://example.com/articles/
and the sitemap.xml is available in http://example.com/sitemap.xml
Google daily visit my site and all my new articles were crawled, if i search the "articles title + example.com " will get the search result from the google , its my site. but the heading is not the actual one. its getting from another article's data.
(i think can give you a sample search query, please don't take this as a spam)
Installing Go Language in Ubuntu+tutorboy - But this will list with proper title after a long title :(, I think now you understood what i am facing ... please help me to find out why this happens.
Edit:
How can i improve my SEO with wordpress?
When I search that query I don't get the page "Installing Go...", I get the "PHP header types" article, which has the above text on the page (links at the right). So the titles showing in Google are correct.
Google has obviously not crawled that page yet since it's quite new. Give it time, especially if your site is new and/or unpopular.
Couple of things I need to make clear:
Google crawled your site on 24 Nov 2009 12:01:01 GMT, so needless to say Google actually does not visit your site(blog)everyday.
When I queried the phrase you provided, the results are right. There are two url relates to your site. One is home page of your blog, another is the page that is (more closely)related to your query. The reason is the query phrase is directly related to the page of tutorboy.com/articles/php/use-php-functions-in-javascript.html, however, in your home page there are still some related keywords. That is the reason why Google presents two pages on the result page.
Your second question is hard to answer since it needs a complicated answer. Still, the following steps are crucial to your SEO.
Unique and good content. Content is king, and it is the subject that remains consistent in the whole time while another elements are changing with the evolving of search engine technology. Also keep your site content fresh.
Back links. Part of the reason that Google does not visit your site after your updating your site is your site lacks enough back links.
Good structure. Properly use those tags like<t>, <description>,<alt>etc.
Using web analysts tools like Google Analysts. It free, and you can see lot of things that you missed.
Most importantly, grabbing some SEO books or spending couple of minutes everyday to read some SEO articles.
Good Luck,
i've been tasked with re-organizing a pure HTML site into a CMS. if all goes well, the new site will eventually become the main URL, and the old domain will be phased out. the old domain has a decent enough page rank, and the company wishes to mitigate any loss of page rank for that. in looking over the options available, i've discovered a few things:
it's better to use a 301 redirect when you're ready to make the switch (source).
the current site does not have a sitemap, so adding one and submitting it may help their future page rank.
i'll need to suggest to them that they contact people currently linking to them to update their links.
the process for regaining an old page rank takes awhile, so plan on rebuilding links while we see if the new site is flexible enough to warrant switching over completely.
my question is: as a result of a move to a CMS driven site, the links to various pages will change to accommodate the new structure. will this be an issue for trying to maintain (or improve) the current page rank? what sort of methods are available to mitigate the issue of changing individual page URL's? is there a preferable method beyond mapping individual pages to their new locations with 301 redirects? (the site has literally hundreds of pages, ugh...)
ex.
http://domain.com/Messy_HTML_page_with_little_categorization.html ->
http://newdomain.com/nice/structured/pages.php
i realize this isn't strictly a programming question, however i felt the information could be useful to developers who are tasked with handling this sort of thing in addition to development of the site.
edit: additions in italics
If you really truly want to ensure that page rank is not lost, you will want to replace the old content with something that performs a proper 301 redirect to the new location. With a 301 redirect the search spiders will know that the content is moved and the page rank typically carries over. It also helps external links.
However, the down side is that after a certain period of time you just have to get rid of the old domains.
You can make a handler for HTML files and map the old pages to the new structure with a 301 redirect.