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TECHNICAL SEOWHAT’S IMPORTANT?

“12 Popular, interesting & critical issues we’ve discovered in our most recent technical consulting

projects”

Richard Baxter – Founder / Director – SEOgadget LTD

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1) THIN INTERNAL PAGES / NO CONTENT / BOILERPLATE CONTENT

You’ve got to have unique text on a page – try persuasive, beautifully written content to inspire your customers to trust, be inspired and buy!

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2) POOR INTERNAL LINK ARCHITECTURE

Increased # links on homepage and improved internal nav elements with CSS styled drop downs and popular products

Sunday, August 1, 2010 Saturday, October 2, 2010 Friday, December 3, 2010 Thursday, February 3, 2011 Wednesday, April 6, 20110

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Internal links and links from the homepage to key internal category pages remains an important part of your SEO strategy – Google “SEOgadget Architecture” for a guide on internal

links and architecture best practices.

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3) EXCESSIVE DUPLICATION OF CONTENT VIA PAGINATED NAVIGATION / FACETED NAVIGATION

Check out this pagination guide: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience (SEOmoz), be careful with rel=“canonical” and use noindex, avoid robots.txt if you

can

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4) INDEXED STAGING SERVER

Cleaning up a leaky staging server is a pain – best way, user agent detect and 301 the staged urls to the public site. Use IP detection – anything that isn’t from a pre-approved range,

redirect it.

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5) CANONICALISATION – AND NOT JUST THE WWW

Domain level canonicalisation still a huge problem – most sites we review have a bunch of problems like this. Check that the trailing slash is added (or removed) and case is

handled correctly – check for https in the index too.

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6) SOFT 404 HEADERS / NO 404 RESPONSE

Don’t install Firefox 4 just yet – live HTTP headers doesn’t work. Redbot is one of many server header checkers

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7) IF-MODIFIED-SINCE PRODUCES 500 ERROR

Feed the Bots' IF-MODIFIED-SINCE server header checker is really useful – check it out: http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/if-modified/

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8) SITEMAP.XML FILE RESPONDED WITH A 404 SERVER HEADER RESPONSE EVEN THOUGH THE

FILE WAS DOWNLOADED

“Google webmaster tools reported no sitemap found at the sitemap URL – the file was loading in a browser, but the malformed server header response had everyone scratching their heads.”

Internal pages and 404 pages aren’t the only files you should check out – sometimes malformed server header responses can cause days of work to diagnose

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9) BINGBOT / MSNBOT CRAWL BLOCKED

It’s good to crawl like a search engine from time to time, use SEOmoz’s toolbar to change user agent – disable JavaScript and CSS for a new kind of awesome.

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10) 40,000+ INTERNAL 301 REDIRECTS

Learn to install IIS SEO Toolkit - http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-install-and-use-iis-seo-toolkit/ we think it’s awesome

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11) VERY EASY TO INJECT LINKS WITH HTML

Do Followed Link

Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped – particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search

results

...............................................................................................................................................................................................12) UGC CONTENT ON INTERNAL PAGES IN JAVASCRIPT

Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped – particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search

results

January February March April May June July August September0

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“Fantastic!..Excellent quality with a brilliant bag to keep all the items in...wonderful

present for a scooter crazy chick, with a pink scooter to match her pink car/scooter

wash kit! “

...............................................................................................................................................................................................12) TONS OF DATA / CONTENT? MAKE IT EMBEDDABLE

Be it content, data, images, video, charts – almost everything can be converted to an embeddable strategy – think: how can others use our data on their sites?

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THANK YOUrichard@seogadget.co.uk

@richardbaxter

Thanks for listening! Check out our blog at SEOgadget.co.uk for more actionable guides and tips – or hire us for SEO, Conversion Rate Optimisation and

bespoke technology consulting.