Tag Archive for: pagerank

How To Fix Common Technical SEO Problems

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Technical SEO can be interesting, but no one likes coming across the same problems time and time again. That’s why it’s shocking how many websites are struggling with the same issues.

Here are some of the most frequent issues that can found while doing a site audit. We also have the solutions, so you can be prepared if you come across any of these issues.

1) Uppercase vs. Lowercase URLs – This happens most often on sites that use .NET. The server is configured to respond to URLs with uppercase letters and doesn’t redirect or rewrite to lowercase versions. This issue is slowly disappearing because search engines are improving a lot at recognizing canonical versions and disregarding copies. Just because it is going away doesn’t mean this issue should be ignored. Search engines still make mistakes doing this, so don’t rely on them.

Luckily, there is a an easy fix for this issue in the form of a URL rewrite module, which solves the issue on IIS 7 servers. There is a convenient option inside the interface that allows you to enforce lowercase URLs. If you do this, a rule is added to the web config file and this problem is gone.

2) Multiple Versions of the Homepage – If you are auditing a .NET website, go check to see if www.example.com/default.aspx exists. Most likely, it does. The page is a duplicate that search engines often find via navigation or XML sitemaps. Other platforms will instead make URLs like www.example.com/index.html or www.example.com/home. Most contemporary search engines automatically fix the problem, but why not make sure there isn’t an issue to be fixed?

The best way to solve this problem begins with doing a crawl of the site and exporting it into a CSV filtered by META title column. Do a search for the homepage title and you’ll quickly spot duplicates of your homepage. An easy fix for these duplicates is to add a 301 redirect version of the page that directs to the correct version.

You can also do a crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog to find internal links that point to the duplicate pages. Then, you can edit the duplicate pages so they direct to the correct URL. Having internal links that go via 301 can cost you some link equity.

3) Query Parameters Added to the End of URLs – This issue is most common on database driven eCommerce websites because there are tons of attributes and filtering options. This means often you will find URLs like www.example.com/product-category?color=12. In that example, the product is filtered by color. Filtering like this can be good for users, but bad for searches. Unless your customers do not search for the specific product using color, the URL is probably not the best landing page to target with keywords.

Another issue that tends to show up on tons of crawls of sites is when these parameters are combined together. The worst is when the parameters can be combined in different orders but return the same content, such as:

www.example.com/product-category?color=12&size=5 

www.example.com/product-category?size=5&color=12

Because both of these have different paths but return the same content, they are seen as duplicate content. It is important to remember Google allocates crawl budget based on PageRank. Make sure your budget is being used efficiently.

To begin fixing this issue, you need to address which pages you want Google to crawl and index. Make this decision based on keyword research and cross reference all database attributes with your core target keywords. You need to figure out what attributes are keywords used to find products. In figuring this out, it is possible to find high search volume for certain keywords, for example “Nike” = “Running Shoes.” If you find this, you want a landing page for “Nike Running Shoes” to be crawlable and indexable. Make sure the database attribute has an SEO friendly URL and ensure that the URLs are part of the navigation structure of your site so that a good flow of PageRank users can find the pages easily.

The next step depends on whether you want the specific attribute indexed or not. If the URLs are not already indexed, add the URL structure to your robots.txt file and test your regex properly to make sure you don’t block anything accidentally. Also, make sure you use the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster tools. Remember, however, if the URLs are already indexed, adding them to your robots.txt file will not remove them.

If the URLs are indexed, unfortunately you are in need of the rel=canonical tag. If you inherit one of these situations and are not able to fix the core of the issue, the rel=canonical tag covers the issue in hope that it can be solved later. You’ll want to add this tag to the URLs you do not want indexed and point to the most relevant URL you do want indexed.

4) Soft URL Errors – A soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. If this happens, the user sees something resembling “Sorry the page you requested cannot be found”, but the code 200 tells search engines that the page is still working. This disconnect can be the source of the issue with pages being crawled and indexed when you don’t want them to be. A soft 404 also means real broken pages can’t be found.

Thankfully, this problem has a very easy fix for any developer who can set the page to return a 404 status code instead of a 200. You can use Google Webmaster tools to find any soft 404s Google has detected. You can also perform a manual check by going to a broken URL and seeing what status code is returned.

5) 302 Redirects Instead of 301 Redirects – Because users won’t be able to tell there is even a problem, this is a pretty easy problem for developers to make. A 301 redirect is permanent. Search engines recognize this and send link equity elsewhere. A 302 redirect is temporary and search engines will expect the original page to return soon, which leaves link equity where it is.

Find 302s by using a deep crawler like Screaming Frog. It allows you to filter by 302s, which you can then check individually. You can then ask your developers to change any that should be 301s.

6) Broken or Outdated Site Maps – XML sitemaps may not be essential, but they are very useful to search engines that make sure they can find all the URLs that matter. XML sitemaps help show the search engines what is important. Letting your sitemap become outdated causes them to contain broken links and miss any new content and URLs. Keeping sitemaps updated is especially important for big sites that add new pages frequently. Bing also penalizes sites with too many issues in their sitemaps.

Audit your current sitemap for broken links. After, speak to your developers about updating your XML sitemap and make it dynamic so that it updates frequently. How frequently depends on your resources, but doing this will save you a lot of trouble later.

It is very possible you will come across other issues while doing an audit, but, hopefully, if you come across any of these, you are now prepared to fix the problem.

 

For more Technical SEO Problems, read this article by Paddy Moogan at SEOmoz.

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Even Google Can Get Penalized

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Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had).  This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.

Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9).  That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).

The malady that Google Japan performed?  They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget.  This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.

It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

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A Major Element of SEO: PageRank Explained

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Most people view PageRank as that value from 0 to 10 that’s in your Google Toolbar, showing how much reputation your site has on the internet. There are some details that you should know if you really want to understand PageRank. Read more

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PageRank Sculpting, NoFollow Tag Updates

So last month Matt Cutts posted a blog entry giving away some startling news.  Apparently the “nofollow” tag makes a link still absorb PageRank, but not pass it on.

In the past, most (educated) SEOs used the nofollow tag to adjust PageRank flow.  This was done because using the tag would completely block the link from passing PageRank, and that PageRank was passed on to the other valid links on the page.  This is called PageRank Sculpting.

The way this works is like this: say I have 4 links from a page I run.  The page has 60 “points” of PageRank.  Well, by default, all 4 links each get 15 points.  Before, if I wanted to make some of these links get more points (PageRank Sculpting), I’d add the nofollow tag to links.  So if I nofollow’d one of my 4 links, then the resulting 3 links would now pass on 20 PageRank points, adding more “link juice” to the pages they were pointing to.

From the updates on Google (which, apparently, have been running for over a year), this now is a bit different.  The link that I added the nofollow tag for still absorbs the 15 points, but does not pass this “link juice” on.  So I now have a page with 60 points of PageRank, 3 links get 15 points, and 15 points are lost.

As you might believe, this made many SEOs rather unhappy.  I myself am not thrilled with this news, this now makes me have to rethink/redefine PageRank Sculpting for my own SEO projects.  I know this is going to affect how many SEO’s use their blog comments, as well.  Before, defaulting the blog comments to nofollow meant that all links stayed intact, PageRank points stayed in the places the web developer wanted them to be.  Now, any additional comment (even if they are nofollow) pulls PageRank away from the site page.

Because of this, I suspect many SEOs will now either make their comments in an iframe, or remove comments from their blogs entirely.  I’m of the opinion Google actually gives PageRank to some sites based on links they have going out, not just links coming in.  This is very hard to test thoroughly, but I’m starting to wonder if leaving comments in a blog as dofollow would be better than not.

Eh, I’m just trying to keep integrity and do white-hat SEO, so I’ll try to find the best way to do it all.  We’ll see what comes of it.

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How To Increase Page Rank

Page Rank is a vital part to any SEO done for a website.  Understanding how to increase Page Rank is a huge benefit to any SEOer, and can help make a difference between page 10 and page 1 on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

(For those that want to get picky, yes, Page Rank is actually spelled PageRank, but since a large number of people think of it as two separate words, I’ll refer to it that way in this post.)

To start – what is Page Rank?  Page Rank is not named because it’s associated with web pages, it’s actually named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page.  The true ranking structure is something that isn’t fully available to anyone outside of Google, although you can install the Google Toolbar (for IE or Firefox) to see the Page Rank Google has publicly posted for any given web page.

So what is Page Rank?  Basically, it’s a score Google has given to a web page, between 0 and 10.  Higher is better.  It’s affected by a variety of things, although knowing how to increase Page Rank for your site will help much.  This is because Google tends to post higher Page Ranked sites higher on the SERPs, for the keywords that they are optimized for.  To Google, Page Rank is equivalent with a level of quality.  If a site has a high Page Rank, it is likely a high quality page.

To get an idea of this – most pages when they start begin with PR (Page Rank) 0.  From here, initially most sites are around 1, 2, or 3.  To reach PR 4 or above requires some qualifications, which I’ll detail in a moment.  Anything above PR 6 takes quite a bit to get to, and these are very well known, popular sites.  For some examples, these are how the following sites are currently ranked:

How do you increase Page Rank?  The primary means of increasing PR is determined by how Google scores PR: it’s all about who links to you.  This ties heavily, very heavily into basic SEO.  Off-page linking is how PR is built.

The basics of Page Rank come down to links.  It’s like a popularity contest – the more links to a given page, the more votes that are cast to this page, the higher a Page Rank that page is given.  The weight of each link is affected by the PR of the linking page.  This is where things start getting a little trickier to understand, but we’ll start with the basic formula.

PR = 0.15 + (0.85 * (PR of linking page / number of links on page))

This starts with 0.15, which is the lowest possible PR any given page can have.  If your page is crawled and has no links to it at all, that’s where you are.  The next bit of math takes 0.85 and multiplies it times the PR of the page linking to you divided by the total links from that page.  This does mean that the more links on the linking page, the more “washed out” the quality of link from the site is.  Getting a link from a page that only has three links is far better than from a page with 230 links.

Adding up multiple links into the equation makes it get quite messy, but you can see pretty clearly how getting a high quality link from a high PR site will jump your PR rather quickly.  Also realize that this equation applies to on-site linking, as well.  So by simply linking to your own pages from within your site will help your page rank.  Keep in mind that the more links you put, the less PR (the less “link juice” as it’s often termed) will be given the page being linked to.

To get to something like a PR 7 means you have to have many links, and many high quality links.  Good SEO requires finding quality relevant links, and increasing Page Rank is one reason for this.

So to increase Page Rank, you can start with doing quality on-site linking, and then from there start getting links from other pages to jump your PR further.  The higher PR the page linking to you, the higher PR you’ll get, and the better you’ll do in the search listings.

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