I am doing some research on Canonical pages in our site.
Does Google create two indexes in this case:
http://www.foo.com/folder/index.html
http://www.foo.com/folder/
Or does it only index one of the above?
I am curious if I need to add a rel="canonical" or if I am just overthinking this simple idea.
After research it depends on the web server.
In our case it was a Sun One web server that you could hit both foo.com/ and foo.com/index.jsp
Even though these pulled up the same content, they are two different URLs and Google saw them as two sperate pages with duplicate content. This was bumping down our SEO.
The fix was to modify the web server to auotmatically redirect /index.jsp pages to the /.
So yes, google will index any page that you can browse to in your browser, unless its on you robots.txt or you are manually telling google not to index in some fashion.
Related
If i generate a site map at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/, for aromapersona.com, I get 9 pages, however there are a bunch more pages that should show up. For example, aromapersona.com/candle_holder is in the same "front" directory as the other 9 pages, but doesnt generate in sitemap. Is this because no other pages on my site link to it? Im trying to get these other URLs indexed, and I even edited the site map to include this URL as well as others and submitted to google via webmaster tools, and still nothing. Advice?
I'm not familiar with aromapersona.com but it will only be able to list pages that are linked to from the initial page you give it (or ones they link to) unless you provide the site with FTP access (which I presume you dont).
If you include the URL's in your sitemap for goggle it should eventually list them, but linking to them from other parts of your site is probably the most effective.
I have not checked the website, but do also take the cause is not because of noindex, nofollow, robots.txt, javascript links, mixing http/https etc.
In clear wording: There is no link pointing to the subpage "candle_holder", hence the XML site generator (which works by following links on your site) cannot detect it.
You can add it manually to the XML, but then again, it should be accessible from the site directly.
When I searching our web site on Google I found three sites with the same content show up. I always thought we were using only one site www.foo.com, but it turn out we have www.foo.net and www.foo.info with the same content as www.foo.com.
I know it is extremely bad to have the same content under different URL. And it seems we have being using three domains for years and I have not seen punitive blunt so far. What is going on? Is Google using new policy like this blog advocate?http://www.seodenver.com/duplicate-content-over-multiple-domains-seo-issues/ Or is it OK using DNS redirect? What should I do? Thanks
If you are managing the websites via Google Webmaster Tools, it is possible to specify the "primary domain".
However, the world of search engines doesn't stop with Google, so your best bet is to send a 301 redirect to your primary domain. For example.
www.foo.net should 301 redirect to www.foo.com
www.foo.net/bar should 301 redirect to www.foo.com/bar
and so on.
This will ensure that www.foo.com gets the entire score, rather than (potentially) a third of the score that you might get for link-backs (internal and external).
Look into canonical links, as documented by Google.
If your site has identical or vastly
similar content that's accessible
through multiple URLs, this format
provides you with more control over
the URL returned in search results. It
also helps to make sure that
properties such as link popularity are
consolidated to your preferred
version.
They explicitly state it will work cross-domain.
i have a site running on IIS that i have Canonical Issue with.
the error is:
The page with URL "http://www.site.org/images/join_forum.gif" can also be accessed by using URL "https://www.site.org/images/join_forum.gif".Search engines identify unique pages by using URLs. When a single page can be accessed by using any one of multiple URLs, a search engine assumes that there are multiple unique pages. Use a single URL to reference a page to prevent dilution of page relevance. You can prevent dilution by following a standard URL format.
how can i resolve this?
If the only difference is http vs https then don't worry about it. Search engines are smart enough to know they are the same file. And especially so for images.
We're doing a whitelabel site, which mustn't be google indexed.
Does anyone know a tool to check if the googlebot will index a given url ?
I've put <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> on all pages, so it shouldn't be indexed - however I'd rather be 110% certain by testing it.
I know I could use robots.txt, however the problem with robots.txt is as follows:
Our mainsite should be indexed, and it's the same application on the IIS (ASP.Net) as the whitelabel site - the only difference is the url.
I cannot modify the robots.txt depending on the incoming url, but I can add a meta tag to all pages from my code-behind.
You should add a Robots.txt to your site.
However, the only perfect way to prevent search engines from indexing a site is to require authentication. (Some spiders ignore Robots.txt)
EDIT: You need to add an handler for Robots.txt to serve different files depending on the Host header.
You'll need to configure IIS to send the Robots.txt request through ASP.Net; the exact instructions depend on the IIS version.
Google Webmasters Tools (google.com/webmasters/tools) will (other than permitting you to upload a sitemap) do a test crawl of your site and tell you what they crawled, how it rates for certain queries, and what they will crawl and what not.
The test crawl isn't automatically included in google results, anyway if you're trying to hide sensitive data from the prying eyes of Google you cannot count on that alone: put some authentication on the line of fire, no matter what.
A few days ago we replaced our web site with an updated version. The original site's content was migrated to http://backup.example.com. Search engines do not know about the old site, and I do not want them to know.
While we were in the process of updating our site, Google crawled the old version.
Now when using Google to search for our web site, we get results for both the new and old sites (e.g., http://www.example.com and http://backup.example.com).
Here are my questions:
Can I update the backup site content with the new content? Then we can get rid all of old content. My concern is that Google will lower our page ranking due to duplicate content.
If I prevent the old site from being accessed, how long will it take for the information to clear out of Google's search results?
Can I use google disallow to block Google from the old web site.
You should probably put a robots.txt file in your backup site and tell robots not to crawl it at all. Google will obey the restrictions though not all crawlers will. You might want to check out the options available to you at Google's WebMaster Central. Ask Google and see if they will remove the errant links for you from their data.
you can always use robot.txt on backup.* site to disallow google to index it.
More info here: link text
Are the URL formats consistent enough between the backup and current site that you could redirect a given page on the backup site to its equivalent on the current one? If so you could do so, having the backup site send 301 Permanent Redirects to each of the equivalent pages on the site you actually want indexed. The redirecting pages should drop out of the index (after how much time, I do not know).
If not, definitely look into robots.txt as Zepplock mentioned. After setting the robots.txt you can expedite removal from Google's index with their Webmaster Tools
Also you can make a rule in your scripts to redirect with header 301 each page to new one
Robots.txt is a good suggestion but...Google doesn't always listen. Yea, that's right, they don't always listen.
So, disallow all spiders but....also put this in your header
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive" />
It's better to be safe than sorry. Meta commands are like yelling at Google "I DONT WANT YOU TO DO THIS TO THIS PAGE". :)
Do both, save yourself some pain. :)
I suggest you to either add no index meta tag in all old page or just disallow by robots.txt. Best way to just blocked the by robots.txt. One thing more add the sitemap in new site and submit it in webmaster that improve your new website indexing.
Password protect your webpages or directories that you don't want web spiders to crawl/index by putting password protecting code in the .htaccess file (if present in your website's root directory on the server or create a new one and upload it).
The web spiders will never know that password and hence won't be able to index the protected directories or web pages.
you can block any particular urls in webmasters check once...even you can block using robots.txt....remove sitemap for your old backup site and put noindex no follow tag for all of your old backup pages...i too handled this situation for one of my client............