Common Technical SEO Mistakes That People Overlook
Today I'm going to share with you all the most common SEO mistakes that we over look.
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These are the top SEO Technical mistakes to avoid, and if you don't, you're not going to rank.
Common Technical SEO Mistakes
1. 404 errors:
This is one of the most common SEO error that occurs and it’s a big-time issue when it comes to eCommerce sites. When you have 1000s of products missing out the one that has been removed or expired is very common and that straightway leads to a 404 Error.
404 errors
The 404 errors can consume your crawl budget, but it’s not necessary that they will kill your SEO. Google do understand that your website can have deleted pages sometimes.
2. Migrations Errors
When you launch a new website, you get to work with design changes and the addition of new pages from time to time. While doing so there is a number of technical things that needed to be taken care of.
Common Migration Errors:
Using 302 error instead of 301 redirects.
Incorrect setup of HTTPS.
leaving the past 301 redirects when migrating to a new website.
Dropping the legacy tags from the staging domain.
Creating a redirect chain when cleaning up the legacy website.
Not saving the www or non-www version of the website in the .htaccess file.
3. Loading Speed
Recently Google confirmed that the website speed is a major ranking factor and they expect a website to load under 2 seconds for better ranking. Or we can say, slow websites don’t make any money.
4. Optimizing Mobile UX
As per the latest mobile first algorithm, Google has made it very clear that they will index the mobile responsive websites firstly.
Optimizing Mobile UX
With that being specified, make sure that you don’t exclude the desktop experience or simplify the mobile experience as compared to the desktop.
5. XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is the one that lists out the URLs of a website into a directory which can be crawled and indexed with the help of search engines. While creating a sitemap you can put in the following information into it.
When it was last updated
How often the page tends to change.
How important is its relation to the other URLs In the Site
While Google does ignore a lot of information on your website. A sitemap is something they put the focus on, So that’s the area that you need to focus on optimizing.
Sitemaps are very beneficial on those websites where:
Some areas of the website are not available for browsing interface.
The webmaster is using rich Ajax, Silverlight and flash content that is not processed easily by search engines.
The website is huge and chances are high that the crawlers overlook some of your recently updated content.
Misusing the crawl budget on non-important pages.
6. URL Structure
As your website will grow further, It’s very easy to lose the tracks for URL structures and the hierarchies. A website with poor URL structure makes it very difficult for the users and bots to navigate through the website and this makes you lose your ranking.
URL Structure
Following are the things that impact your website ranking in a negative manner.
Website structure and hierarchy issues.
Non-peculiar folder and subfolder structure.
URL that Contains special character, or capital letters.
7. Robots.txt issue
A Robots.txt file is the one which controls how your the search engine access your website. It’s a very commonly misunderstood file that can simply crush your website indexing. Most of the problems with robots.txt arise because of not changing it when you move from the development environment to the live environment.
Robots.txt issue
Finding Robots.txt Errors:
To understand the Robots.txt errors you can either
Check your website stats with the help of Tools like Google Analytics, Woopra to check if there are any big drops in website traffic.
Or you can check the Google Search Console Reports
Crawl – Robots.txt tester
8. Irrelevant content
In addition to the “thin” pages, you need to make sure that your content is relevant to your audience. Those irrelevant pages that don’t help the user can also distract the bots from your website.
Irrelevant content
This is very important for small or low authoritative websites. Google crawls the smaller website a little less than more authoritative websites and we always want to make sure that the crawl budget is not spent on non-requirement content.
9. Misusing the canonical tags
A canonical tag (“rel=canonical”) is a piece of HTML tag that helps out the search engine to interpret the duplicate pages. If you have two pages that are similar.
Misusing the canonical tags
If you running a website on CMS like WordPress or Shopify, then you can easily set the canonical tag using a plugin like Yoast.