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#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
Christine Smith IBM Search Marketing Technical Lead
TALES OF AN SEO DETECTIVE
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
Case #1: Thousands of Missing Pages
Why were thousands of support pages
missing from Google SERPs?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ >1M technical documents
§ Self-support for server and software admins
§ Searchable by error codes, etc.
IBM’s self-support site
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21363866
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Normal traffic § 1.77M Google referrals per month
November 2013
December 2013 § Traffic dropping § 1.35M Google referrals per month
§ Down 24% in one month!
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
Google monthly referrals dropped 28% by April 2014
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ 30 example URLs missing from SERPs § The following were ok: ü Pages displayed correctly ü Redirects were working normally ü Canonical URLs were correct ü Robots.txt was not blocking anything
Assigned to the “case” in April 2014
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Only 10% of Sitemap URLs were indexed § Regenerated sitemaps
ü Corrected URLs to match canonical URLs ü Improved to 60% of Sitemap URLs indexed
ü Today, 88% are indexed
§ But, still no Google referral improvement
Sitemaps?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Opened Google Site Search support ticket § Google findings: § A sampling of the 30 URLs were:
1. Marked as a duplicates of the Support Registration page and
2. Last crawled Nov 2013
Engaged Google: April-May 2014
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ According to Google engineers: § No way to get a list of all URLs marked as
duplicates of the support registration page
§ Panda 4.0 and Data Refresh – May 19
May 2014 – Google
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Submitted a Manual Actions Reconsideration Request through GWT § Some technical docs were incorrectly flagged
§ Requested increased crawl rate for the domain § Hoping the pages would be revisited
May 2014 – IBM actions
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
Google referrals increased 22% May to June 2014
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Traffic bounced back.. Almost overnight. § GSS ticket was closed, but not resolved § Was it.. Ø Increase crawl rate? Ø Better sitemaps? Ø Panda and data refresh? Ø Normal re-crawl of the pages?
What was the fix?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Likely culprit: § Faulty redirect or § A bad site maintenance redirect
§ Typical “outage” responses (not recommended): § 500 or 504 HTTP response § Or 302 redirect to a maintenance page
Postmortem: What was the cause?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Right way to indicate site maintenance: ü Give a 503 Service Unavailable HTTP
response! ü Retry-after time in the header helpful § Tells Google to come back later.
§ Do not set all 5xx responses to 503 § Google will ignore and assume site is down
Lesson Learned
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Some web platforms automatically give 503 HTTP response during an upgrade § e.g. Wordpress
§ Others require workarounds, like § Apache, IHS (IBM), IIS (Microsoft) rewrite rules § Akamai logic § Details in backup slides for server admins!
How to indicate site maintenance
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
Case #2: Missing
Link Credit
Why was there no internal link credit from my landing page?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/
§ Started a new “card” system
§ But, the links on the cards gave no internal link credit
No credit for landing page links?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Robots.txt disallowed the JavaScript directory that rendered the cards
ü Once unblocked, Google gave internal link credit
§ Caution: Some search engines (e.g. Baidu and Yandex) do not support JS content!
The culprit?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
Case #3: Mistaken
URL Identity Why were my articles not
showing up in search?
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Smarter Risk Journal site moved existing content to a new dynamic platform
§ Articles were recreated and republished § https://www.ibm.com/web/portal/iris/smarter-risk/
Smarter-Risk-Journal
Smarter Risk Journal moved
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Problem: § The logic that created the canonical
URLs was flawed: § Same URL as landing page
§ Effectively indicated that all articles were duplicates of the Smarter Risk Journal landing page… and deindexed by Google.
Journal articles were missing from SERPs
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ The Fix: ü Correct the logic of the canonical URL
code to match the specific page URL ü Take special care with encoded
characters § Test canonical URLs by pasting into a browser § Encoded characters could give errors § e.g. replace a “%20” with a “+” for spaces
Journal articles were missing from SERPs
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
ü Always double check ü Canonical URLs ü Robots.txt ü Redirects
ü Verify sitemaps ü Use 503 Service Unavailable HTTP
responses during site maintenance
Lessons Learned
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
THANK YOU!
Join us @SMX East NEW YORK CITY
Sept. 29th – Oct. 1st 2015
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
Configuring 503 HTTP response
Backup slides
#SMX #XXa @SpeakerName #SMX #21A Christine Smith @websmithc
§ Apache: § https://gist.github.com/jjulian/1889874
§ IBM HTTP Server (IHS): § http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?
uid=swg21397422 § Microsoft IIS:
§ http://serverfault.com/questions/483145/how-to-add-a-site-wide-downtime-error-message-in-iis-with-a-custom-503-error-co
Web Server Rewrite Rules for 503 Response