Google Cannot Crawl My Website
My ongoing saga with Google not ranking my posts is on going. With Bing and Yahoo, it isn't a problem. I can't hit page of those two search engines without any difficulty. But, Google? Sheesh!
I've been told there is nothing much wrong with my content. So, I ran an audit of my site, which revealed some critical errors. I thought you might like to make a note:
Pretty Links
I had 18 critical 307 (Temporary) redirects, that the audit recommend should be 301 (Permanent) redirects, with NoFollow!
The audit hopefully, lists all the links where this was the case. All 18 of the errors were my Pretty Links!
The default when you create a Pretty Link is 307 (Temporary) Redirect. I amended each one of these so that they are now 301 (Permanent) redirects.
In the Advanced setting I checked that they were 'NoFollow'. They all were set as recommended.
H1 Tag on Pages.
Every Page and Post should have an H1 tag. On the 'temporary' (I have yet to install premium theme I bought) theme I have, you can have either a Title on the 'Home' page or an Image. I can't have both.
So, either I have my beautiful branded header image and no header text, or I have no header image and plain old header text (H1 tag). I believe this is one thing I can correct by upgrading my theme!
Conclusion
Choosing the right theme at the beginning would be ideal.
I will update you all when I have finally got all these issues fixed and hopefully, google will start crawling my site correctly.
Recent Comments
14
How do you index at Yahoo, Alfredo? I use the Bing Console, but I didn't find anything to index at Yahoo.
Aloha, Jenna
You are not the only one, Paul! I know this cannot comfort you a lot.
I have issues too. Google is almost every time complaining about something, clickable elements too close, the fonts too small, too large ... and so on.
Four of my posts are not indexed with the rainbow G, even though Google says they are indexed. Yesterday I read other fellows have that issue too.
Well. We will find solutions! We have to.
I wish you much success!
Aloha, Jenna
Thanks, Jenna. It's nice to know I'm not alone.
I will be posting to my blog in the morning regarding my progress, titled; "Keep Climbing That Mountain."
I wish we knew more about themes when we chose them, because it seems to me our theme can often create problems.
There are so many details to learn on here. Wish there were a list we could study early on. Well, learn by doing is what we do, I guess.
Hi Paul.
As info, a 301 is permanent and passes SEO power to the target page. 307 will tell Google it is temporary and not to index it.
I use a plug-in called 301 Redirects to handle my pages/posts that have moved to a new location on my site.
I only use Pretty Links for my Affiliate links, to basically shorten the URL and serve as a single place to make any Affiliate link updates so I don't have to update Affiliate links across my whole site if something needs to change.
Hope that helps
Michael
Oops! My bad, Michael. I got the numbers the wrong way round.
I use Pretty Links the same as you, for my affiliate links.
My issues with redirects is now resolved. They defaulted to temporary in Pretty Links, which I have now made permanent.
I have too many plugins without needing anymore. I’ll stick with just my Pretty Link redirects.
Cheers,
Paul.
Think I should have read this when I was a bit further through the training! Best of luck though
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Hey Paul,
Thanks for your findings and advice.
Cheers