Cleaning Up My Website
Well, after reading Nathaniell's excellent post on cleaning up and fixing old posts, I decided I should review some of my older website posts that have dropped of the Google radar.
Updating Old Content
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/nathaniell/blog/updating-old...
It was unsurprising my posts were not registering on Google anymore.
I dug deeper into Google Search, Bing Webmaster and Yandex Webmaster. Oh Dear! What did I find? 301 redirects, 404 not found! Eek! Not forgetting Duplicate pages - CANONICAL!
Canonical? What is that!? More digging! ???? Then I found Google Support response to Duplicate content.
Duplicate Content - Google
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359
"Be consistent with your linking"! What's that? If your web pages (URL Slug) are registered with a search engine (Google) with a trailing slash "/", as in https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/paulrevans57/ do not then have another internal link to the same page without the trailing slash. Google bot will not know which is the primary link and flag this a duplicate.
I haven't checked on All-In-One yet, but in Yoast if you leave the Canonical blank then by default the link registered with search engines will be the format shown in the "Permalink".
Thereafter, always use that same format throughout your website during your internal linking. This makes easier for the crawlers to navigate your website with flagging false duplicates.
I'm sorry, but if I have lost any you, and you are being shown errors on Google (or any other search engines) then it is worth reading Google's Support Answer above.
Canonical, What Can it Mean?
If you are use Yoast this document explains Canonical and what to do about it.
https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
If you find any helpful links for All-In-One-SEO plugin, I would be grateful.
Broken Links - 404 Not Found
Oops! That shouldn't happen. After a thorough investigation, I found my dead link! It was not in my content!
I found the dead link to a WA signup page in a reply to a comment and the very bottom of one of my posts. You never thought of looking there, Paul? I had pasted the slug into the anchor link instead of the full path.
I didn't spot it before because it's not obvious until you click the link. If you hover over the link, WordPress dutifully displays the domain name then the page slug followed by my Pretty Link slug.
It looks like a valid URL, but it is not. The correct link is my domain followed by the Pretty Link slug.
It was easily fixed, and perhaps that post will know get indexed. When a crawler hits a 404 page not found, that's it, you lost the crawler and that post will not get index, which means it won't get ranked!
I hope this has been helpful, I will follow this up with some training on my journey, when I get time. I must push on with my SAC writing.
~ Paul
Recent Comments
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Thanks Paul. My website is still very new (about 8 weeks old). How often do you think I would need to go through my older blogs and update or at least check them for errors?
Either when Google analytics tells or you just know they not up to scratch.
Check your URLs in SiteRanking. Any pages that are not ranking after a couple of weeks you need to investigate, why?
Good points for sure.. Especially about being consistent on the way you do things on your site. I'll need to go double check some of my posts now...
Hi Paul.
Great stuff, very useful. I'm hoping that I don't have to learn PHP to automate this stuff. I've been looking for a suitable plugin to do it, but I haven't found a good one yet. Annoying.
Regards,
It is a problem, but it's a matter of being aware of what needs to be looked and what to leave alone.
I’m guiding by what SiteRank tells me. If I am not ranking after a couple if weeks of posting, then it's probably something I have done, or not done.
I need to do the same. Do you use the dead link checker? I need to do that one again too. Good way to spot errors...then, unfortunately, you have to figure out what to do with them.
I found a great tool online for this but it was getting late. I will write about it in a mother post.
" Clean up on aisle 404 Wealthy Affiliate" Working on it! I try to look at least once a week, but I have gone 2 weeks. I will try to be more consistent though since every day counts.
Good job Paul, we all need to clean up old posts. Those 301 redirects and 404 Errors...arghhhh!!
I could not believe the 404 error I found. A complete newbie error! I linked to the Pretty Link slug instead of the full URL! Hidden in comments! Aargh!
This one error stop that post from being indexed, let alone ranked!
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Good stuff Paul and very helpful, thank for that.
I'm just going over the 8 posts I have written for my new site as after watching Jays 2019 SEO webinar I realise there are a few things I havn't done that I should
I then need to go over my niche site which has over 50 posts and is now 6 months old and revise and amend some of them.
Whats the best way of seeing how each post is performing without manually checking ecah one incognito in the search engines?
I will reply to this in a new blog post. :)
Thanks Paul, look forward to it