Errors preventing search engines to crawl and index website pages
Before Search Engines can list your site, they need to access your site’s content. Some site configuration issues and unintentional black hat practices can not only downgrade your site but even prevent it from being listed.
Here are few errors that may be preventing Search Engines from finding your website and reading its content.
Proper domain redirection
Higher your website traffic, greater your site’s worthiness in the eyes of Search Engines. But, there is a small glitch in the way it works. When some users do not type ‘www’ before your domain address, Search Engines do not count such visits for your main domain name. Seems like a simple problem but has a significant long-term impact on your Search traffic.
This problem can be solved by redirecting your domain name properly using a permanent 301 redirect htaccess method, so that you get full credit for all visits.
Show a friendly 404 error page to your visitors
When a visitor clicks on a broken link, your website should ideally show a friendly error message – called as a ‘404 page’. This lets the user know that the page they were looking for does not exist and offers to show them other pages. Having a 404 page also allows you to effectively communicate to the visitors that the page they wanted can’t be found – it could be mistaken as your site might be down, when it isn’t.
Search Engines downgrade your site’s ranking if you have missing page(s) and a 404 error page is not available.
It is advised therefore to create a custom 404 error page with a friendly ‘page-unavailable message’ instantly and configure your server settings using simple instructions.
XML Sitemap:
A Sitemap lists all your website pages for easy navigation for both Users and Search Engines. If your site does not have a Sitemap or your existing Sitemap is not updated with all your pages, Search Engines may not index your site pages completely and may not know which pages are important and which ones aren’t. This gets even worse especially for websites that publish new content frequently like News websites and Blogs.
Here are some other formats of Sitemap supported by most of the popular search engines:
- Sitemap.xml.gz
- Sitemap.txt
- News Sitemap
- Video Sitemap
About Author:
Clearspike, a website promotion software , helps bring more people to your website by keeping it optimized for Search and Social traffic. For more information on 301 redirect htaccess and content accessibility optimization tools, please visit www.clearspike.com.
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