There are a number of technical problems that plague websites, causing problems for search engine optimisation. Digital marketing agencies will quickly identify these sorts of problems with your website's navigation structure. Luckily, most of the problems have a simple solution:
Multiple Homepage Versions It's common to see multiple versions of a homepage that a search bot can stumble upon via navigation or through XMA sitemaps. These pages can exist as '/default', '/index', or '/home'. A search engine can view these pages as duplicates. However, the solution is simple. Perform a site crawl, and export the crawl into a CSV. Filter by META title column and search for the homepage title. Once you have discovered the duplicates, it's simply a case of adding a 301 redirect to the duplicate page, which redirects the search bot to the correct page. You can also use 'rel=canonical' for the same effect. It's also worth using a site crawl tool, discovering the internal links to the duplicate page, and editing them so they direct to the correct one.
'Soft' 404 Errors 'Soft' 404s look like proper 404s but instead return an HTTP status code 200. These fool search engines into thinking that the page is fully functional. As such, Soft 404s are indexed along with all the other working pages. It also makes it difficult to hunt out broken links and pages. Google Webmaster Tools lets you find soft 404s so you can change them into proper 404s, instead of returning a code 200. You can even customise your 404s to give them a humorous or personal touch—to make the annoyance of visitors stumbling across a non-functioning page a little less annoying.
Query Parameters on URLs This is a problem most commonly encountered by sites with products. To help customers find their desired product, many e-commerce sites feature the ability to filter according to several product parameters. So, for instance, a clothing site may allow visitors to filter for colour, size, price, style, and material. This can cause problems when multiple URLs revealing the same page appear due to a search, for instance, filtering for 'white' in colour and 't-shirt' in style. The user may produce a URL that reverses the terms, looking different but being on the same page. This can result in a wasted crawl budget, so it's important to create a landing page for popular combinations. So, if you find a lot of people are searching for red t-shirts, create a landing page using 'red t-shirts' as a keyword phrase. It'll ensure it's indexed and crawled to maximum effect, improving your navigation for users and for search engine crawlers.
302 Redirects instead of 301 A 301 redirect denotes a permanent redirect, whereas 302 are only temporary, which is useful for website testing, amongst other things. To make sure you're not showing any temporary redirects that should be permanent, use a crawler and then filter for 302s. Then you can easily change the rule for the redirect to denote a 301 permanent redirect.
Broken/Outdated Sitemaps XML sitemaps are useful for search engines, and visitors alike to find all the URLs on your website. The problem arises in updating sitemaps. They can easily become outdated as you add new pages to your website, change URLs, or even erase pages. It's important, therefore, to constantly update XML sitemaps to reflect any changes to your site's navigation. It might even be worth hiring developers to develop a dynamic sitemap that automatically updates along with your website. These updates can be performed daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your program's limitations.
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