#the yearly urge to migrate is upon the people

[aalt-ctrl-del]

late to mention, but I take anyone with two braincells is gonna take precautions during the migration season.

Be sure to wear a mask and especially wear a mask if you're ready to update your vaccine status - influenza or covid/omicron. There's a bad flu bug flittering around, and you prolly wanna bring food to your families gathering, and not a nasty pathogen that could put someone high risk in the hospital.

ESPECIALLY IN TRANSIT TO FAMILY LOCATION. You can catch more than one strain, and stacking strains of pathogens leads you to the sick - stress of travel, harsh conditions, bad food, lack of rest, ETC. You might have resistance to a flu virus, but even picking that lil fuker up and then tangling with an Omicron variant will make you more likely to pass on a strain of covid to someone. Especially if they had a covid strain prior, and regardless of vaccine status.

Be responsible when traveling. Reach your destination and reach in in good health. I don't care how much you hate uncle mcFuck, or if you're assured some sweet cash from the family Will. That's kinda fuked up.

[babsajdx382]

Why You Should Focus On Improving Immigration History

How The History Of Immigration Policies Can Save You Time and Money

Table of ContentsWhat to do About Historical Overview Of Immigration Policies Before it's Too Late19 You Always Wondered About Immigration In American Economic HistoryWhat to do with History Of Immigration in 2021How to Learn About U.s. Immigration Before 1965 in Your Spare Time

All The Things The Real History Of American Immigration Has Changed

The majority of settlers consider on their own Britons, yet Paine makes the situation for a brand-new American. "Europe, as well as not England, is actually the moms and dad country of The United States. This brand-new planet have actually been actually the insane asylum for the persecuted fanatics of public and also spiritual right from every aspect of Europe," he writes. Our lawmakers passes the initial legislation concerning that must be given UNITED STATE (chart).

The Naturalization Action of 1790 allows any type of free of charge white individual of "really good figure," who has actually been residing in the USA for pair of years or even longer to request citizenship - chart. Without citizenship, nonwhite individuals are refused essential constitutional securities, featuring the right to recommend, own residential property, or demonstrate in judge.

demographics occurs. The English are actually the biggest indigenous group among the 3. 9 thousand people counted, though virtually one in 5 Americans are actually of www.immigrationhelpla.com/ African heritage. Unity is re-established between the USA and Britain after the War of 1812 - map. Immigration coming from Western Europe switches coming from a flow into an emerge, which creates a switch in the demographics of the USA. irish.

Between 1820 and also 1860, the Irishmany of them Catholicaccount for a predicted one-third of all immigrants to the United States. Some 5 million German immigrants additionally relate to the UNITED STATE, most of them creating their method to the Midwest to get ranches or clear up in areas including Milwaukee, St (brief). Louis and Cincinnati.

The migrants overwhelm major slot areas, including New york city, Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston. In action, the USA passes the Steering Action of 1819 needing much better conditions on ships arriving to the nation. The Act also requires ship leaders to send demographic relevant information on guests, developing the 1st federal government reports on the cultural arrangement of migrants to the USA - law.

What to do about Rise Of Industrial America in 2021

What to do about History Of U.s. Immigration Laws in 2021

Adhering to the Civil War, some conditions passed their personal migration rules. In 1875 the Supreme Courtroom declares that it is actually the responsibility of the federal government to make and also enforce migration laws - brief. As The United States begins a fast time period of industrialization and also urbanization, a 2nd immigration boom begins. In between 1880 and 1920, much more than twenty thousand immigrants arrive.

A number of all of them clear up in major USA areas and also job in factories (map). The Mandarin Exemption Show elapseds, which bans Mandarin immigrants from getting in the USA Beginning in the 1850s, a steady circulation of Mandarin workers had actually immigrated to The United States. They functioned in the gold mines, and also garment manufacturing plants, constructed railroads, as well as took agrarian tasks.

Although Chinese migrants comprise merely 0 (policy). 002 per-cent of the USA populace, white workers blame them for reduced wages. The 1882 Action is the very first in United States past to position vast regulations on specific immigrant groups. The Immigration Action of 1891 additional omits that can easily enter the USA, disallowing the migration of polygamists, people founded guilty of specific crimes, as well as the unwell or even diseased.

The very first immigrant processed is Annie Moore, an adolescent from Region Cork in Ireland. Much more than 12 million migrants would certainly enter the United States via Ellis Island in between 1892 and 1954.: USA immigration reaches the top, along with 1. 3 million people getting in the country with Ellis Isle alone. Amidst bias in The golden state that an inflow of Eastern workers would certainly set you back white workers cultivating work as well as sadden wages, the United States as well as Asia authorize the Gentlemen's Deal.

Review This Report on History Of U.s. Immigration Laws

In profits, Head of state Theodore Roosevelt urges San Francisco to finish the partition of Japanese students coming from white colored pupils in San Francisco institutions. An estimated three-quarters of The big apple Area's population contains new immigrants and first-generation Americans. Prejudice connects with brand new high up on the eve of American engagement in World war - law.

Why U.s. Immigration Trends is so Popular

The Migration Show of 1924 restrictions the variety of migrants permitted into the United States yearly via race allocations. Under the new quota unit, the USA problems migration visas to 2 per-cent of the complete variety of folks of each race in the United States at the 1890 poll - law.

Simply three countries, Great Britain, Ireland as well as Germany make up 70 percent of all available visas. Migration from Southern, Central and Eastern Europe was confined. The Action entirely excludes migrants from Asia, other than the Philippines, after that an American colony (chart).: Back the numerical limits set up through the 1924 legislation, illegal migration to the USA raises.

Border Watch is actually created to break down on unlawful immigrants going across the Mexican and Canadian perimeters right into the United States - policy. Most of these very early border crossers were actually Chinese and various other Eastern migrants, that had been barred coming from getting into officially. Labor deficiencies during the course of World War II cause the USA and also Mexico to develop the Bracero System, which permits Mexican agricultural laborers to get in the USA temporarily.

The USA passes the nation's very first refugee as well as resettlement law to handle the increase of Europeans finding permanent home in the USA after Globe War II.The McCarran-Walter Act formally ends the exemption of Eastern immigrants to the United States.: The USA accepts about 38,000 immigrants coming from Hungary after a fallen short uprising versus the Soviets.

The United States will confess over 3 thousand evacuees in the course of the Tension.: Around 14,000 unaccompanied children get away Fidel Castro's Cuba as well as relate to the United States as portion of a secret, anti-Communism program contacted Operation Peter Skillet. The Migration and also Nationality Action revamps the United States migration system. The Act ends the national source percentages performed in the 1920s which favored some genetic and also nationalities over others.

What to do about Usa Immigration History in 2021

Upon signing the brand-new costs, Head of state Lyndon B - brief. Johnson, phoned the old migration device "un-American," and mentioned the brand new expense will correct a "heartless and long-lasting inappropriate in the conduct of the United States Nation - map." Over the following five years, migration coming from war-torn areas of Asia, featuring Vietnam and also Cambodia, would greater than quadruple.

immigration (policy).: During the Mariel boatlift, about 125,000 Cuban evacuees create an unsafe sea crossing in jammed boats to arrive on the Florida coast seeking political asylum. Head Of State Ronald Reagan signs into law the Simpson-Mazzoli Action, which gives amnesty to much more than 3 million migrants residing unlawfully in the United States.: U.S..

[emilyfgreen-blog]

Covid-Hit Overseas Jobs: Workers abroad get little help

As opposed to their huge duty to the country's economy, an enormous number of transient experts living abroad have gotten basically no help from the Bangladesh government to fight their money related trouble during the pandemic.

There is a creating stress that couple of lakh out of more than one crore Bangladeshi transient masters may lose positions as a result of the fiscal downturn.

Overall Organization for Migration (IOM) Bangladesh in later a declaration expressed, "Due to the money related and work crisis made by the Covid-19 pandemic, an immense number of transient workers are depended upon to return before the year's finished."

Against this setting, transient rights activists have called for budgetary assistance truly from the organization coffers, for both returnees and those staying abroad.

They urged the governing body to show "obligation" by adequately keeping an eye on the pickle of transient workers, who are the country's one of three huge budgetary sections, near to the farmers and garment workers.

Reached, Ahmed Munirus Saleheen, secretary to the segregates' administration help and abroad business administration, said they were offering need to help the transient workers who needed to return in the wake of losing positions and now standing up to trouble on account of the pandemic.

"Since we trust, the people who got a kick out of the chance to stay abroad will have the alternative to get past."

Speaking with this paper on June 16, he said the administration offered snappy assistance of about Tk 11 crore to abroad masters by methods for different Bangladesh missions and will continue doing in that capacity.

Asked whether they have plans to help abroad pros for long stretch perseverance amidst the current money related crisis, Wage Earners' Welfare Board (WEWB) Director-General Hamidur Rahman said they were considering such a phase a helper decision.

Remote organizations and the councils of the individual countries have their commitments and obligations with respect to the transient masters. Also, no worker can be ended abstractly or left keeping in light of the fact that from the pandemic, he told this paper by means of phone.

The position concentrated on the necessity for more grounded appeasing effort to make sure about the transient pros abroad.

According to the Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training, more than 13 million Bangladeshis, including less-skilled, semi-capable, and talented transient pros and specialists headed out to another nation, for abroad work since 1976 till May this year.

After the pandemic began in the country, the organization proclaimed a bailout heap of Tk 500 crore while the shuns' administration help administration detailed an alternate Tk 200 crore advance arrangement for the transient pros.

Regardless, both the groups are most likely going to be administered as advances only for the budgetary reintegration of the returnees. The workers doing combating abroad to persevere through the pandemic are not getting anything from it.

Specialists said the Tk 200 crore credit will start from the WEWB sponsor, which is made with the money of transient workers.

As demonstrated by a BSS report, the Tk 500 crore pack was pronounced by the pioneer on May 14 for the shuns who got jobless during the coronavirus pandemic. The money will be given to Probashi Kalyan Bank so that the returnees "can achieve something here by assuming praise from the bank."

Chatting with this paper via phone, Prof Tasneem Siddiqui, the seat of Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), said transient experts have added to the country's pay age through sending settlement.

In any case, there is a little reflection for them in the proposed national budgetary arrangement of 2020-2021, she said.

"The state needs to show its devotion [towards transient workers]."

IT'S THEIR OWN MONEY

Consistently, resources from the WEWB have been apportioned for the administration help of transient pros and their family members, said transient rights activists and specialists.

WEWB DG Hamidur Rahman said the store didn't see expected climb during the pandemic taking into account a stalemate in the work enlistment process since the money is assembled from workers' selection.

As far back as a significant extended period of time, Tk 3,500 has been assembled from each worker during the enlistment.

WEWB spends nearly Tk 3.5 lakh from the store against each customary transient worker who fails horrendously abroad, he notwithstanding.

As showed by power there, WEWB has a store of over Tk 1,000 crore at present.

Wishing haziness, he said during the Covid-19 erupt, about Tk 9.44 crore was confirmed from the administration help hold to help transient experts abroad.

Also, about Tk 2.96 crore was flowed among the returnees for their transportation cost (Tk 5,000 to each authority) during the shutdown till May 30.

Also, about Tk 9.79 crore has been given from WEWB as a significant part of premium for workers' required security, he notwithstanding.

This total entirety was given near to the pronounced Tk 200 crore credit.

RMMRU Chair Prof Tasneem, insinuating the development plan, said this is from workers' money. "It should have begun from the organization's pay money related arrangement."

Shariful Hasan, top of the Brac Migration Program, said using workers' money from their store in such a way during the pandemic could risk the conventional government help activities and put their future insusceptibility.

There is the same part for abroad transient authorities from the organization's coffers in spite of the way that there is a movement to give account for various divisions, he notwithstanding.

Secretary Saleheen of the segregates' administration help administration affirmed that the providers' administration help sponsor is made with the money of transient experts.

"Besides, there is no vulnerability that this store will be spent for their administration help and for the same strategies," he said.

Shamsul Alam, boss general of Bureau of Manpower, Employment and Training, said at whatever point required, they can support planning of returnees for their money related reintegration.

According to WEWB's yearly report of 2017-18, Tk 359 crore was spent as "sponsorship, grants and outcasts government help" in the money related year.

In 2016-17 and 2015-16, such utilizations were Tk 198 crore and Tk 181 crore separately, said yearly reports for those money related years.

The wholes were spent generally as clinical honors (for the truly disabled, weakened, and hurt), fiscal compensation, passing on dead bodies and commemoration administrations, award, exceptional distribution, and for smart cards, said the reports.

In 2017-18 and 2016-17, WEWB contributed Tk 235 crore and Tk 50 crore to the Probashi Kalyan Bank. It furthermore avowed Tk 7,28,172 and Tk 11.38 lakh for missions abroad in those years.

These utilizations were consolidated as that for "support, grant, and outcasts government help".

[evaaguilaus]

Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands

As most of you know the aggregator market is a competitive one, with the popularity in comparison sites rising.

Comparison companies are some of the most well-known and commonly used brands today. With external marketing and advertising efforts at an all-time high, people turn to the world wide web for these services. So, who is championing the online market?

In an investigation, we carried out we found brands such as MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert are the kings of the organic market.

It’s hard to remember a world without comparison sites. It turns out that comparison websites have been around for quite some time. In fact, some of the most popular aggregator domain names have been available since 1999.

Yes 1999, two years after Google launched.

Think back to 1999 and how SEO has adapted. Now think about what websites have had to consider, keeping up with high customer demands, new functionality, site migrations, introduction to JavaScript, site speed, the list is endless.

The lifespan and longevity of these sites mean that over time issues start to build up, especially in the technical SEO department. Many of us SEOs are aware of the benefits that come with spending time on technical SEO issues — not to mention the great return on investment.

As comparison sites are so popular and relied upon by users, simple technical issues can result in a poor user experience damaging customer relationships. Or worse, users seeking assistance elsewhere.

Running comparison crawls have identified the common technical SEO issues across the market leaders. Find out what these issues are and how they will be harming their SEO — and see if they correlate with your own website.

1. Keyword cannibalization

When developing and creating new pages it is easy to forget about keyword cannibalization. Duplicating templates can easily leave metadata and headings unchanged, all confusing search engines on which page to rank for that keyword.

Here is an example from GoCompare.

The page on the left has the cannibalizing first heading. This is because the page’s h1 is situated in the top banner. This should target the long-tail opportunity “how to make your own electricity at home” which has been placed in an h2 tag directly under the banner.

The best course of action here would be to tweak the template, removing the banner and placing the call to action in the article body and placing the targeted keyword in a first heading tag.

Comparison sites are prime candidates for keyword cannibalization with the duplication of templates, services, and offers which results in cannibalization issues sitewide.

The fix

Run a crawl of your domain, gathering all the duplicated first headings tags, you can use tools such as Sitebulb for this. Decipher between which is the original page and which is the duplicate, then gather your keyword data to find a better keyword alternative for that duplicate page.

Top tip

Talk to your SEO expert when creating new pages, they will be able to provide recommendations on URL structure, first headings, and titles. It is worth having an SEO at the start of the planning process when rolling out new pages.

2. Internal redirects

Numerous changes can result in internal redirects, primary causes are redundant pages, upgrades to a site’s functionality, and furthermore, the dreaded site migration.

When Google urged sites to accelerate to HTTPs in January 2017, with the ideal methodology to 301 redirect HTTP pages to HTTPs, it’s painful to think about the mass number of internal redirects.

Here’s an example.

Comparison sites specifically need to be aware of this. Just like ecommerce sites, products and services become unavailable. The normal behavior seems to be to then to redirect that product either to an alternative page or, in most cases, back to the parent directory.

This can then cause internal redirects across the site that need immediate attention.

The fix

To tackle this issue, gather all the internal redirected URLs from your crawler.

Once you’ve done this find the link on the parent page by inspecting the page on Google Developer tools.

Find where the link is and recommend to your development team that it changes the href attribute target within the link anchor to the final destination of the redirect.

3. Cleaning up the sitemap

With loads of changes happening across aggregator sites all the time, it is likely that the sitemap gets neglected.

However, it’s imperative you don’t allow this to happen! Search engines such as Google might ignore sitemaps that return “invalid” URLs.

Here’s an example.

Usually, a site’s 400/500 status code pages are on the development teams’ radar to fix. However, it isn’t always best practice as that these pages still sit in the sitemap. As they might be set live, orphaned and no indexed, or redirected elsewhere, that leaves some less severe issues within the Sitemap file.

Aggregators currently have to deal with sites changing product ranges, releasing new and, even, discontinuing services on a regular basis. New pages, therefore, have to be set up, redirects are then applied and sometimes issues are missed.

The fix

First, you need to identify errors within the sitemap. Search Console is perfect for this. Go to the coverage section, and filter with the drop down. Select your sitemaps with “Filter to Sitemaps” to inspect the errors that are within these.

If your sitemap has 400 or 500 status code pages, then this is more of a priority, if it has the odd redirect or canonical issue, focus on sorting these out first.

Top tip

Check your sitemap weekly or even more frequently. It is also a great way of checking your broken pages across the site.

4. Subdomains are causing index bloat

Behind any great comparison site is a quotation functionality. This allows users to place personal information about a quote and being able to revisit previously saved data kind of like a shopping cart on most ecommerce websites.

However, these are usually hosted on subdomains and can get indexed, which you don’t really want. These are mostly thin content pages, a useless page in Google index equaling index bloat.

Here’s an example.

The fix

The solution is to add the “noindex” meta attribute to the quotation domains to stop them from being indexed. You can also include the subdomains in your robots.txt file to stop them from being crawled. Just make sure they aren’t in the search engines’ index before you place them in the file as they won’t drop out of the SERPs.

5. Spreading link equity to irrelevant pages

Internal linking is important. However, passing link equity thinly across pages can cause a loss in value. Think of a pyramid, and how the homepage spreads equity to the directory and then down to the subdirectories through keyword targeted anchor text.

These pages where equity is passed should hold the value and only link out to relevant pages that might be of relevance.

As comparison sites target a range of products and opportunities it is important to include them within the site architecture, but not spread the equity thinly.

How do we do this?

1. Consider the architecture of your site. For example:

“Fixed rate mortgages” has different yearly offerings, most sites sit these under a mortgage subdirectory, but this could easily have its own directory. This would benefit the site architecture as it lowers the click depth for those important pages and stops the thin spread of equity.

2. Only link to what is relevant.

Let’s take the below example. The targeted keyword here is “bad credit mortgages.” Money.co.uk then supplies a load of internal links at the bottom of the page that aren’t relevant to the keyword intent. Therefore, the equity is spread to these pages resulting in the page losing value.

  The fix

Review the internal linking structure. You can do this by running pages through Screaming Frog, which identifies pages that have a click depth greater than two and evaluates the outgoing links. If there are a lot, this could be a good indicator that pages might be spreading the equity thinly. Manually evaluate the pages to find there the links are going to and remove any that might be irrelevant spreading equity unnecessarily.

6. Orphaned pages

Following on from the above point, pages that are orphaned, or poorly linked to, will receive low equity. Comparison sites are prime candidates for this.

MoneySuperMarket has several orphaned pages, especially located in the blog section of the site.

The fix

Use Sitebulb to crawl the site and discover orphaned pages. Spend time evaluating these, it might be that these pages should be orphaned. However, if they are present in the sitemap that indicates either one of two problems given below.

The pages should be linked to through the internal architecture or

The page shouldn’t be indexable or in the sitemap

If the pages are redundant, make them “no indexable.” However, if they should be linked to, evaluate your site’s internal architecture to work out a perfect linking strategy for these pages.

Top tip

It is very easy for blog posts to get orphaned, using methods such as topic clustering can help benefit your content marketing efforts while making sure your pages aren’t being orphaned.

Last ditch tips

A lot of these issues occur across a range of different sites and many sectors, as comparison sites undergo a lot of changes and development work with a vast product range and loads to aggregate. It is very hard to keep up-to-date with SEO tech issues.

Be vigilant and delegate resources sensibly. SEO tech issues shouldn’t be ignored, actively monitor and run crawls and checks after any site development work has been rolled out, this can save your organic performance and keep your technical SEO game strong.

Tom Wilkinson is Search & Data Lead at Zazzle Media.

The post Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/04/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes-for-aggregators-and-finance-brands/

[oscarkruegerus]

Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands

As most of you know the aggregator market is a competitive one, with the popularity in comparison sites rising.

Comparison companies are some of the most well-known and commonly used brands today. With external marketing and advertising efforts at an all-time high, people turn to the world wide web for these services. So, who is championing the online market?

In an investigation, we carried out we found brands such as MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert are the kings of the organic market.

It’s hard to remember a world without comparison sites. It turns out that comparison websites have been around for quite some time. In fact, some of the most popular aggregator domain names have been available since 1999.

Yes 1999, two years after Google launched.

Think back to 1999 and how SEO has adapted. Now think about what websites have had to consider, keeping up with high customer demands, new functionality, site migrations, introduction to JavaScript, site speed, the list is endless.

The lifespan and longevity of these sites mean that over time issues start to build up, especially in the technical SEO department. Many of us SEOs are aware of the benefits that come with spending time on technical SEO issues — not to mention the great return on investment.

As comparison sites are so popular and relied upon by users, simple technical issues can result in a poor user experience damaging customer relationships. Or worse, users seeking assistance elsewhere.

Running comparison crawls have identified the common technical SEO issues across the market leaders. Find out what these issues are and how they will be harming their SEO — and see if they correlate with your own website.

1. Keyword cannibalization

When developing and creating new pages it is easy to forget about keyword cannibalization. Duplicating templates can easily leave metadata and headings unchanged, all confusing search engines on which page to rank for that keyword.

Here is an example from GoCompare.

The page on the left has the cannibalizing first heading. This is because the page’s h1 is situated in the top banner. This should target the long-tail opportunity “how to make your own electricity at home” which has been placed in an h2 tag directly under the banner.

The best course of action here would be to tweak the template, removing the banner and placing the call to action in the article body and placing the targeted keyword in a first heading tag.

Comparison sites are prime candidates for keyword cannibalization with the duplication of templates, services, and offers which results in cannibalization issues sitewide.

The fix

Run a crawl of your domain, gathering all the duplicated first headings tags, you can use tools such as Sitebulb for this. Decipher between which is the original page and which is the duplicate, then gather your keyword data to find a better keyword alternative for that duplicate page.

Top tip

Talk to your SEO expert when creating new pages, they will be able to provide recommendations on URL structure, first headings, and titles. It is worth having an SEO at the start of the planning process when rolling out new pages.

2. Internal redirects

Numerous changes can result in internal redirects, primary causes are redundant pages, upgrades to a site’s functionality, and furthermore, the dreaded site migration.

When Google urged sites to accelerate to HTTPs in January 2017, with the ideal methodology to 301 redirect HTTP pages to HTTPs, it’s painful to think about the mass number of internal redirects.

Here’s an example.

Comparison sites specifically need to be aware of this. Just like ecommerce sites, products and services become unavailable. The normal behavior seems to be to then to redirect that product either to an alternative page or, in most cases, back to the parent directory.

This can then cause internal redirects across the site that need immediate attention.

The fix

To tackle this issue, gather all the internal redirected URLs from your crawler.

Once you’ve done this find the link on the parent page by inspecting the page on Google Developer tools.

Find where the link is and recommend to your development team that it changes the href attribute target within the link anchor to the final destination of the redirect.

3. Cleaning up the sitemap

With loads of changes happening across aggregator sites all the time, it is likely that the sitemap gets neglected.

However, it’s imperative you don’t allow this to happen! Search engines such as Google might ignore sitemaps that return “invalid” URLs.

Here’s an example.

Usually, a site’s 400/500 status code pages are on the development teams’ radar to fix. However, it isn’t always best practice as that these pages still sit in the sitemap. As they might be set live, orphaned and no indexed, or redirected elsewhere, that leaves some less severe issues within the Sitemap file.

Aggregators currently have to deal with sites changing product ranges, releasing new and, even, discontinuing services on a regular basis. New pages, therefore, have to be set up, redirects are then applied and sometimes issues are missed.

The fix

First, you need to identify errors within the sitemap. Search Console is perfect for this. Go to the coverage section, and filter with the drop down. Select your sitemaps with “Filter to Sitemaps” to inspect the errors that are within these.

If your sitemap has 400 or 500 status code pages, then this is more of a priority, if it has the odd redirect or canonical issue, focus on sorting these out first.

Top tip

Check your sitemap weekly or even more frequently. It is also a great way of checking your broken pages across the site.

4. Subdomains are causing index bloat

Behind any great comparison site is a quotation functionality. This allows users to place personal information about a quote and being able to revisit previously saved data kind of like a shopping cart on most ecommerce websites.

However, these are usually hosted on subdomains and can get indexed, which you don’t really want. These are mostly thin content pages, a useless page in Google index equaling index bloat.

Here’s an example.

The fix

The solution is to add the “noindex” meta attribute to the quotation domains to stop them from being indexed. You can also include the subdomains in your robots.txt file to stop them from being crawled. Just make sure they aren’t in the search engines’ index before you place them in the file as they won’t drop out of the SERPs.

5. Spreading link equity to irrelevant pages

Internal linking is important. However, passing link equity thinly across pages can cause a loss in value. Think of a pyramid, and how the homepage spreads equity to the directory and then down to the subdirectories through keyword targeted anchor text.

These pages where equity is passed should hold the value and only link out to relevant pages that might be of relevance.

As comparison sites target a range of products and opportunities it is important to include them within the site architecture, but not spread the equity thinly.

How do we do this?

1. Consider the architecture of your site. For example:

“Fixed rate mortgages” has different yearly offerings, most sites sit these under a mortgage subdirectory, but this could easily have its own directory. This would benefit the site architecture as it lowers the click depth for those important pages and stops the thin spread of equity.

2. Only link to what is relevant.

Let’s take the below example. The targeted keyword here is “bad credit mortgages.” Money.co.uk then supplies a load of internal links at the bottom of the page that aren’t relevant to the keyword intent. Therefore, the equity is spread to these pages resulting in the page losing value.

  The fix

Review the internal linking structure. You can do this by running pages through Screaming Frog, which identifies pages that have a click depth greater than two and evaluates the outgoing links. If there are a lot, this could be a good indicator that pages might be spreading the equity thinly. Manually evaluate the pages to find there the links are going to and remove any that might be irrelevant spreading equity unnecessarily.

6. Orphaned pages

Following on from the above point, pages that are orphaned, or poorly linked to, will receive low equity. Comparison sites are prime candidates for this.

MoneySuperMarket has several orphaned pages, especially located in the blog section of the site.

The fix

Use Sitebulb to crawl the site and discover orphaned pages. Spend time evaluating these, it might be that these pages should be orphaned. However, if they are present in the sitemap that indicates either one of two problems given below.

The pages should be linked to through the internal architecture or

The page shouldn’t be indexable or in the sitemap

If the pages are redundant, make them “no indexable.” However, if they should be linked to, evaluate your site’s internal architecture to work out a perfect linking strategy for these pages.

Top tip

It is very easy for blog posts to get orphaned, using methods such as topic clustering can help benefit your content marketing efforts while making sure your pages aren’t being orphaned.

Last ditch tips

A lot of these issues occur across a range of different sites and many sectors, as comparison sites undergo a lot of changes and development work with a vast product range and loads to aggregate. It is very hard to keep up-to-date with SEO tech issues.

Be vigilant and delegate resources sensibly. SEO tech issues shouldn’t be ignored, actively monitor and run crawls and checks after any site development work has been rolled out, this can save your organic performance and keep your technical SEO game strong.

Tom Wilkinson is Search & Data Lead at Zazzle Media.

The post Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/04/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes-for-aggregators-and-finance-brands/

[bambiguertinus]

Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands

As most of you know the aggregator market is a competitive one, with the popularity in comparison sites rising.

Comparison companies are some of the most well-known and commonly used brands today. With external marketing and advertising efforts at an all-time high, people turn to the world wide web for these services. So, who is championing the online market?

In an investigation, we carried out we found brands such as MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert are the kings of the organic market.

It’s hard to remember a world without comparison sites. It turns out that comparison websites have been around for quite some time. In fact, some of the most popular aggregator domain names have been available since 1999.

Yes 1999, two years after Google launched.

Think back to 1999 and how SEO has adapted. Now think about what websites have had to consider, keeping up with high customer demands, new functionality, site migrations, introduction to JavaScript, site speed, the list is endless.

The lifespan and longevity of these sites mean that over time issues start to build up, especially in the technical SEO department. Many of us SEOs are aware of the benefits that come with spending time on technical SEO issues — not to mention the great return on investment.

As comparison sites are so popular and relied upon by users, simple technical issues can result in a poor user experience damaging customer relationships. Or worse, users seeking assistance elsewhere.

Running comparison crawls have identified the common technical SEO issues across the market leaders. Find out what these issues are and how they will be harming their SEO — and see if they correlate with your own website.

1. Keyword cannibalization

When developing and creating new pages it is easy to forget about keyword cannibalization. Duplicating templates can easily leave metadata and headings unchanged, all confusing search engines on which page to rank for that keyword.

Here is an example from GoCompare.

The page on the left has the cannibalizing first heading. This is because the page’s h1 is situated in the top banner. This should target the long-tail opportunity “how to make your own electricity at home” which has been placed in an h2 tag directly under the banner.

The best course of action here would be to tweak the template, removing the banner and placing the call to action in the article body and placing the targeted keyword in a first heading tag.

Comparison sites are prime candidates for keyword cannibalization with the duplication of templates, services, and offers which results in cannibalization issues sitewide.

The fix

Run a crawl of your domain, gathering all the duplicated first headings tags, you can use tools such as Sitebulb for this. Decipher between which is the original page and which is the duplicate, then gather your keyword data to find a better keyword alternative for that duplicate page.

Top tip

Talk to your SEO expert when creating new pages, they will be able to provide recommendations on URL structure, first headings, and titles. It is worth having an SEO at the start of the planning process when rolling out new pages.

2. Internal redirects

Numerous changes can result in internal redirects, primary causes are redundant pages, upgrades to a site’s functionality, and furthermore, the dreaded site migration.

When Google urged sites to accelerate to HTTPs in January 2017, with the ideal methodology to 301 redirect HTTP pages to HTTPs, it’s painful to think about the mass number of internal redirects.

Here’s an example.

Comparison sites specifically need to be aware of this. Just like ecommerce sites, products and services become unavailable. The normal behavior seems to be to then to redirect that product either to an alternative page or, in most cases, back to the parent directory.

This can then cause internal redirects across the site that need immediate attention.

The fix

To tackle this issue, gather all the internal redirected URLs from your crawler.

Once you’ve done this find the link on the parent page by inspecting the page on Google Developer tools.

Find where the link is and recommend to your development team that it changes the href attribute target within the link anchor to the final destination of the redirect.

3. Cleaning up the sitemap

With loads of changes happening across aggregator sites all the time, it is likely that the sitemap gets neglected.

However, it’s imperative you don’t allow this to happen! Search engines such as Google might ignore sitemaps that return “invalid” URLs.

Here’s an example.

Usually, a site’s 400/500 status code pages are on the development teams’ radar to fix. However, it isn’t always best practice as that these pages still sit in the sitemap. As they might be set live, orphaned and no indexed, or redirected elsewhere, that leaves some less severe issues within the Sitemap file.

Aggregators currently have to deal with sites changing product ranges, releasing new and, even, discontinuing services on a regular basis. New pages, therefore, have to be set up, redirects are then applied and sometimes issues are missed.

The fix

First, you need to identify errors within the sitemap. Search Console is perfect for this. Go to the coverage section, and filter with the drop down. Select your sitemaps with “Filter to Sitemaps” to inspect the errors that are within these.

If your sitemap has 400 or 500 status code pages, then this is more of a priority, if it has the odd redirect or canonical issue, focus on sorting these out first.

Top tip

Check your sitemap weekly or even more frequently. It is also a great way of checking your broken pages across the site.

4. Subdomains are causing index bloat

Behind any great comparison site is a quotation functionality. This allows users to place personal information about a quote and being able to revisit previously saved data kind of like a shopping cart on most ecommerce websites.

However, these are usually hosted on subdomains and can get indexed, which you don’t really want. These are mostly thin content pages, a useless page in Google index equaling index bloat.

Here’s an example.

The fix

The solution is to add the “noindex” meta attribute to the quotation domains to stop them from being indexed. You can also include the subdomains in your robots.txt file to stop them from being crawled. Just make sure they aren’t in the search engines’ index before you place them in the file as they won’t drop out of the SERPs.

5. Spreading link equity to irrelevant pages

Internal linking is important. However, passing link equity thinly across pages can cause a loss in value. Think of a pyramid, and how the homepage spreads equity to the directory and then down to the subdirectories through keyword targeted anchor text.

These pages where equity is passed should hold the value and only link out to relevant pages that might be of relevance.

As comparison sites target a range of products and opportunities it is important to include them within the site architecture, but not spread the equity thinly.

How do we do this?

1. Consider the architecture of your site. For example:

“Fixed rate mortgages” has different yearly offerings, most sites sit these under a mortgage subdirectory, but this could easily have its own directory. This would benefit the site architecture as it lowers the click depth for those important pages and stops the thin spread of equity.

2. Only link to what is relevant.

Let’s take the below example. The targeted keyword here is “bad credit mortgages.” Money.co.uk then supplies a load of internal links at the bottom of the page that aren’t relevant to the keyword intent. Therefore, the equity is spread to these pages resulting in the page losing value.

  The fix

Review the internal linking structure. You can do this by running pages through Screaming Frog, which identifies pages that have a click depth greater than two and evaluates the outgoing links. If there are a lot, this could be a good indicator that pages might be spreading the equity thinly. Manually evaluate the pages to find there the links are going to and remove any that might be irrelevant spreading equity unnecessarily.

6. Orphaned pages

Following on from the above point, pages that are orphaned, or poorly linked to, will receive low equity. Comparison sites are prime candidates for this.

MoneySuperMarket has several orphaned pages, especially located in the blog section of the site.

The fix

Use Sitebulb to crawl the site and discover orphaned pages. Spend time evaluating these, it might be that these pages should be orphaned. However, if they are present in the sitemap that indicates either one of two problems given below.

The pages should be linked to through the internal architecture or

The page shouldn’t be indexable or in the sitemap

If the pages are redundant, make them “no indexable.” However, if they should be linked to, evaluate your site’s internal architecture to work out a perfect linking strategy for these pages.

Top tip

It is very easy for blog posts to get orphaned, using methods such as topic clustering can help benefit your content marketing efforts while making sure your pages aren’t being orphaned.

Last ditch tips

A lot of these issues occur across a range of different sites and many sectors, as comparison sites undergo a lot of changes and development work with a vast product range and loads to aggregate. It is very hard to keep up-to-date with SEO tech issues.

Be vigilant and delegate resources sensibly. SEO tech issues shouldn’t be ignored, actively monitor and run crawls and checks after any site development work has been rolled out, this can save your organic performance and keep your technical SEO game strong.

Tom Wilkinson is Search & Data Lead at Zazzle Media.

The post Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/04/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes-for-aggregators-and-finance-brands/

[srasamua]

Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands

As most of you know the aggregator market is a competitive one, with the popularity in comparison sites rising.

Comparison companies are some of the most well-known and commonly used brands today. With external marketing and advertising efforts at an all-time high, people turn to the world wide web for these services. So, who is championing the online market?

In an investigation, we carried out we found brands such as MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert are the kings of the organic market.

It’s hard to remember a world without comparison sites. It turns out that comparison websites have been around for quite some time. In fact, some of the most popular aggregator domain names have been available since 1999.

Yes 1999, two years after Google launched.

Think back to 1999 and how SEO has adapted. Now think about what websites have had to consider, keeping up with high customer demands, new functionality, site migrations, introduction to JavaScript, site speed, the list is endless.

The lifespan and longevity of these sites mean that over time issues start to build up, especially in the technical SEO department. Many of us SEOs are aware of the benefits that come with spending time on technical SEO issues — not to mention the great return on investment.

As comparison sites are so popular and relied upon by users, simple technical issues can result in a poor user experience damaging customer relationships. Or worse, users seeking assistance elsewhere.

Running comparison crawls have identified the common technical SEO issues across the market leaders. Find out what these issues are and how they will be harming their SEO — and see if they correlate with your own website.

1. Keyword cannibalization

When developing and creating new pages it is easy to forget about keyword cannibalization. Duplicating templates can easily leave metadata and headings unchanged, all confusing search engines on which page to rank for that keyword.

Here is an example from GoCompare.

The page on the left has the cannibalizing first heading. This is because the page’s h1 is situated in the top banner. This should target the long-tail opportunity “how to make your own electricity at home” which has been placed in an h2 tag directly under the banner.

The best course of action here would be to tweak the template, removing the banner and placing the call to action in the article body and placing the targeted keyword in a first heading tag.

Comparison sites are prime candidates for keyword cannibalization with the duplication of templates, services, and offers which results in cannibalization issues sitewide.

The fix

Run a crawl of your domain, gathering all the duplicated first headings tags, you can use tools such as Sitebulb for this. Decipher between which is the original page and which is the duplicate, then gather your keyword data to find a better keyword alternative for that duplicate page.

Top tip

Talk to your SEO expert when creating new pages, they will be able to provide recommendations on URL structure, first headings, and titles. It is worth having an SEO at the start of the planning process when rolling out new pages.

2. Internal redirects

Numerous changes can result in internal redirects, primary causes are redundant pages, upgrades to a site’s functionality, and furthermore, the dreaded site migration.

When Google urged sites to accelerate to HTTPs in January 2017, with the ideal methodology to 301 redirect HTTP pages to HTTPs, it’s painful to think about the mass number of internal redirects.

Here’s an example.

Comparison sites specifically need to be aware of this. Just like ecommerce sites, products and services become unavailable. The normal behavior seems to be to then to redirect that product either to an alternative page or, in most cases, back to the parent directory.

This can then cause internal redirects across the site that need immediate attention.

The fix

To tackle this issue, gather all the internal redirected URLs from your crawler.

Once you’ve done this find the link on the parent page by inspecting the page on Google Developer tools.

Find where the link is and recommend to your development team that it changes the href attribute target within the link anchor to the final destination of the redirect.

3. Cleaning up the sitemap

With loads of changes happening across aggregator sites all the time, it is likely that the sitemap gets neglected.

However, it’s imperative you don’t allow this to happen! Search engines such as Google might ignore sitemaps that return “invalid” URLs.

Here’s an example.

Usually, a site’s 400/500 status code pages are on the development teams’ radar to fix. However, it isn’t always best practice as that these pages still sit in the sitemap. As they might be set live, orphaned and no indexed, or redirected elsewhere, that leaves some less severe issues within the Sitemap file.

Aggregators currently have to deal with sites changing product ranges, releasing new and, even, discontinuing services on a regular basis. New pages, therefore, have to be set up, redirects are then applied and sometimes issues are missed.

The fix

First, you need to identify errors within the sitemap. Search Console is perfect for this. Go to the coverage section, and filter with the drop down. Select your sitemaps with “Filter to Sitemaps” to inspect the errors that are within these.

If your sitemap has 400 or 500 status code pages, then this is more of a priority, if it has the odd redirect or canonical issue, focus on sorting these out first.

Top tip

Check your sitemap weekly or even more frequently. It is also a great way of checking your broken pages across the site.

4. Subdomains are causing index bloat

Behind any great comparison site is a quotation functionality. This allows users to place personal information about a quote and being able to revisit previously saved data kind of like a shopping cart on most ecommerce websites.

However, these are usually hosted on subdomains and can get indexed, which you don’t really want. These are mostly thin content pages, a useless page in Google index equaling index bloat.

Here’s an example.

The fix

The solution is to add the “noindex” meta attribute to the quotation domains to stop them from being indexed. You can also include the subdomains in your robots.txt file to stop them from being crawled. Just make sure they aren’t in the search engines’ index before you place them in the file as they won’t drop out of the SERPs.

5. Spreading link equity to irrelevant pages

Internal linking is important. However, passing link equity thinly across pages can cause a loss in value. Think of a pyramid, and how the homepage spreads equity to the directory and then down to the subdirectories through keyword targeted anchor text.

These pages where equity is passed should hold the value and only link out to relevant pages that might be of relevance.

As comparison sites target a range of products and opportunities it is important to include them within the site architecture, but not spread the equity thinly.

How do we do this?

1. Consider the architecture of your site. For example:

“Fixed rate mortgages” has different yearly offerings, most sites sit these under a mortgage subdirectory, but this could easily have its own directory. This would benefit the site architecture as it lowers the click depth for those important pages and stops the thin spread of equity.

2. Only link to what is relevant.

Let’s take the below example. The targeted keyword here is “bad credit mortgages.” Money.co.uk then supplies a load of internal links at the bottom of the page that aren’t relevant to the keyword intent. Therefore, the equity is spread to these pages resulting in the page losing value.

  The fix

Review the internal linking structure. You can do this by running pages through Screaming Frog, which identifies pages that have a click depth greater than two and evaluates the outgoing links. If there are a lot, this could be a good indicator that pages might be spreading the equity thinly. Manually evaluate the pages to find there the links are going to and remove any that might be irrelevant spreading equity unnecessarily.

6. Orphaned pages

Following on from the above point, pages that are orphaned, or poorly linked to, will receive low equity. Comparison sites are prime candidates for this.

MoneySuperMarket has several orphaned pages, especially located in the blog section of the site.

The fix

Use Sitebulb to crawl the site and discover orphaned pages. Spend time evaluating these, it might be that these pages should be orphaned. However, if they are present in the sitemap that indicates either one of two problems given below.

The pages should be linked to through the internal architecture or

The page shouldn’t be indexable or in the sitemap

If the pages are redundant, make them “no indexable.” However, if they should be linked to, evaluate your site’s internal architecture to work out a perfect linking strategy for these pages.

Top tip

It is very easy for blog posts to get orphaned, using methods such as topic clustering can help benefit your content marketing efforts while making sure your pages aren’t being orphaned.

Last ditch tips

A lot of these issues occur across a range of different sites and many sectors, as comparison sites undergo a lot of changes and development work with a vast product range and loads to aggregate. It is very hard to keep up-to-date with SEO tech issues.

Be vigilant and delegate resources sensibly. SEO tech issues shouldn’t be ignored, actively monitor and run crawls and checks after any site development work has been rolled out, this can save your organic performance and keep your technical SEO game strong.

Tom Wilkinson is Search & Data Lead at Zazzle Media.

The post Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/04/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes-for-aggregators-and-finance-brands/

[kellykperez]

Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands

As most of you know the aggregator market is a competitive one, with the popularity in comparison sites rising.

Comparison companies are some of the most well-known and commonly used brands today. With external marketing and advertising efforts at an all-time high, people turn to the world wide web for these services. So, who is championing the online market?

In an investigation, we carried out we found brands such as MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert are the kings of the organic market.

It’s hard to remember a world without comparison sites. It turns out that comparison websites have been around for quite some time. In fact, some of the most popular aggregator domain names have been available since 1999.

Yes 1999, two years after Google launched.

Think back to 1999 and how SEO has adapted. Now think about what websites have had to consider, keeping up with high customer demands, new functionality, site migrations, introduction to JavaScript, site speed, the list is endless.

The lifespan and longevity of these sites mean that over time issues start to build up, especially in the technical SEO department. Many of us SEOs are aware of the benefits that come with spending time on technical SEO issues — not to mention the great return on investment.

As comparison sites are so popular and relied upon by users, simple technical issues can result in a poor user experience damaging customer relationships. Or worse, users seeking assistance elsewhere.

Running comparison crawls have identified the common technical SEO issues across the market leaders. Find out what these issues are and how they will be harming their SEO — and see if they correlate with your own website.

1. Keyword cannibalization

When developing and creating new pages it is easy to forget about keyword cannibalization. Duplicating templates can easily leave metadata and headings unchanged, all confusing search engines on which page to rank for that keyword.

Here is an example from GoCompare.

The page on the left has the cannibalizing first heading. This is because the page’s h1 is situated in the top banner. This should target the long-tail opportunity “how to make your own electricity at home” which has been placed in an h2 tag directly under the banner.

The best course of action here would be to tweak the template, removing the banner and placing the call to action in the article body and placing the targeted keyword in a first heading tag.

Comparison sites are prime candidates for keyword cannibalization with the duplication of templates, services, and offers which results in cannibalization issues sitewide.

The fix

Run a crawl of your domain, gathering all the duplicated first headings tags, you can use tools such as Sitebulb for this. Decipher between which is the original page and which is the duplicate, then gather your keyword data to find a better keyword alternative for that duplicate page.

Top tip

Talk to your SEO expert when creating new pages, they will be able to provide recommendations on URL structure, first headings, and titles. It is worth having an SEO at the start of the planning process when rolling out new pages.

2. Internal redirects

Numerous changes can result in internal redirects, primary causes are redundant pages, upgrades to a site’s functionality, and furthermore, the dreaded site migration.

When Google urged sites to accelerate to HTTPs in January 2017, with the ideal methodology to 301 redirect HTTP pages to HTTPs, it’s painful to think about the mass number of internal redirects.

Here’s an example.

Comparison sites specifically need to be aware of this. Just like ecommerce sites, products and services become unavailable. The normal behavior seems to be to then to redirect that product either to an alternative page or, in most cases, back to the parent directory.

This can then cause internal redirects across the site that need immediate attention.

The fix

To tackle this issue, gather all the internal redirected URLs from your crawler.

Once you’ve done this find the link on the parent page by inspecting the page on Google Developer tools.

Find where the link is and recommend to your development team that it changes the href attribute target within the link anchor to the final destination of the redirect.

3. Cleaning up the sitemap

With loads of changes happening across aggregator sites all the time, it is likely that the sitemap gets neglected.

However, it’s imperative you don’t allow this to happen! Search engines such as Google might ignore sitemaps that return “invalid” URLs.

Here’s an example.

Usually, a site’s 400/500 status code pages are on the development teams’ radar to fix. However, it isn’t always best practice as that these pages still sit in the sitemap. As they might be set live, orphaned and no indexed, or redirected elsewhere, that leaves some less severe issues within the Sitemap file.

Aggregators currently have to deal with sites changing product ranges, releasing new and, even, discontinuing services on a regular basis. New pages, therefore, have to be set up, redirects are then applied and sometimes issues are missed.

The fix

First, you need to identify errors within the sitemap. Search Console is perfect for this. Go to the coverage section, and filter with the drop down. Select your sitemaps with “Filter to Sitemaps” to inspect the errors that are within these.

If your sitemap has 400 or 500 status code pages, then this is more of a priority, if it has the odd redirect or canonical issue, focus on sorting these out first.

Top tip

Check your sitemap weekly or even more frequently. It is also a great way of checking your broken pages across the site.

4. Subdomains are causing index bloat

Behind any great comparison site is a quotation functionality. This allows users to place personal information about a quote and being able to revisit previously saved data kind of like a shopping cart on most ecommerce websites.

However, these are usually hosted on subdomains and can get indexed, which you don’t really want. These are mostly thin content pages, a useless page in Google index equaling index bloat.

Here’s an example.

The fix

The solution is to add the “noindex” meta attribute to the quotation domains to stop them from being indexed. You can also include the subdomains in your robots.txt file to stop them from being crawled. Just make sure they aren’t in the search engines’ index before you place them in the file as they won’t drop out of the SERPs.

5. Spreading link equity to irrelevant pages

Internal linking is important. However, passing link equity thinly across pages can cause a loss in value. Think of a pyramid, and how the homepage spreads equity to the directory and then down to the subdirectories through keyword targeted anchor text.

These pages where equity is passed should hold the value and only link out to relevant pages that might be of relevance.

As comparison sites target a range of products and opportunities it is important to include them within the site architecture, but not spread the equity thinly.

How do we do this?

1. Consider the architecture of your site. For example:

“Fixed rate mortgages” has different yearly offerings, most sites sit these under a mortgage subdirectory, but this could easily have its own directory. This would benefit the site architecture as it lowers the click depth for those important pages and stops the thin spread of equity.

2. Only link to what is relevant.

Let’s take the below example. The targeted keyword here is “bad credit mortgages.” Money.co.uk then supplies a load of internal links at the bottom of the page that aren’t relevant to the keyword intent. Therefore, the equity is spread to these pages resulting in the page losing value.

 The fix

Review the internal linking structure. You can do this by running pages through Screaming Frog, which identifies pages that have a click depth greater than two and evaluates the outgoing links. If there are a lot, this could be a good indicator that pages might be spreading the equity thinly. Manually evaluate the pages to find there the links are going to and remove any that might be irrelevant spreading equity unnecessarily.

6. Orphaned pages

Following on from the above point, pages that are orphaned, or poorly linked to, will receive low equity. Comparison sites are prime candidates for this.

MoneySuperMarket has several orphaned pages, especially located in the blog section of the site.

The fix

Use Sitebulb to crawl the site and discover orphaned pages. Spend time evaluating these, it might be that these pages should be orphaned. However, if they are present in the sitemap that indicates either one of two problems given below.

The pages should be linked to through the internal architecture or

The page shouldn’t be indexable or in the sitemap

If the pages are redundant, make them “no indexable.” However, if they should be linked to, evaluate your site’s internal architecture to work out a perfect linking strategy for these pages.

Top tip

It is very easy for blog posts to get orphaned, using methods such as topic clustering can help benefit your content marketing efforts while making sure your pages aren’t being orphaned.

Last ditch tips

A lot of these issues occur across a range of different sites and many sectors, as comparison sites undergo a lot of changes and development work with a vast product range and loads to aggregate. It is very hard to keep up-to-date with SEO tech issues.

Be vigilant and delegate resources sensibly. SEO tech issues shouldn’t be ignored, actively monitor and run crawls and checks after any site development work has been rolled out, this can save your organic performance and keep your technical SEO game strong.

Tom Wilkinson is Search & Data Lead at Zazzle Media.

The post Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/04/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes-for-aggregators-and-finance-brands/ from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2019/03/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes.html

[alanajacksontx]

Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands

As most of you know the aggregator market is a competitive one, with the popularity in comparison sites rising.

Comparison companies are some of the most well-known and commonly used brands today. With external marketing and advertising efforts at an all-time high, people turn to the world wide web for these services. So, who is championing the online market?

In an investigation, we carried out we found brands such as MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert are the kings of the organic market.

It’s hard to remember a world without comparison sites. It turns out that comparison websites have been around for quite some time. In fact, some of the most popular aggregator domain names have been available since 1999.

Yes 1999, two years after Google launched.

Think back to 1999 and how SEO has adapted. Now think about what websites have had to consider, keeping up with high customer demands, new functionality, site migrations, introduction to JavaScript, site speed, the list is endless.

The lifespan and longevity of these sites mean that over time issues start to build up, especially in the technical SEO department. Many of us SEOs are aware of the benefits that come with spending time on technical SEO issues — not to mention the great return on investment.

As comparison sites are so popular and relied upon by users, simple technical issues can result in a poor user experience damaging customer relationships. Or worse, users seeking assistance elsewhere.

Running comparison crawls have identified the common technical SEO issues across the market leaders. Find out what these issues are and how they will be harming their SEO — and see if they correlate with your own website.

1. Keyword cannibalization

When developing and creating new pages it is easy to forget about keyword cannibalization. Duplicating templates can easily leave metadata and headings unchanged, all confusing search engines on which page to rank for that keyword.

Here is an example from GoCompare.

The page on the left has the cannibalizing first heading. This is because the page’s h1 is situated in the top banner. This should target the long-tail opportunity “how to make your own electricity at home” which has been placed in an h2 tag directly under the banner.

The best course of action here would be to tweak the template, removing the banner and placing the call to action in the article body and placing the targeted keyword in a first heading tag.

Comparison sites are prime candidates for keyword cannibalization with the duplication of templates, services, and offers which results in cannibalization issues sitewide.

The fix

Run a crawl of your domain, gathering all the duplicated first headings tags, you can use tools such as Sitebulb for this. Decipher between which is the original page and which is the duplicate, then gather your keyword data to find a better keyword alternative for that duplicate page.

Top tip

Talk to your SEO expert when creating new pages, they will be able to provide recommendations on URL structure, first headings, and titles. It is worth having an SEO at the start of the planning process when rolling out new pages.

2. Internal redirects

Numerous changes can result in internal redirects, primary causes are redundant pages, upgrades to a site’s functionality, and furthermore, the dreaded site migration.

When Google urged sites to accelerate to HTTPs in January 2017, with the ideal methodology to 301 redirect HTTP pages to HTTPs, it’s painful to think about the mass number of internal redirects.

Here’s an example.

Comparison sites specifically need to be aware of this. Just like ecommerce sites, products and services become unavailable. The normal behavior seems to be to then to redirect that product either to an alternative page or, in most cases, back to the parent directory.

This can then cause internal redirects across the site that need immediate attention.

The fix

To tackle this issue, gather all the internal redirected URLs from your crawler.

Once you’ve done this find the link on the parent page by inspecting the page on Google Developer tools.

Find where the link is and recommend to your development team that it changes the href attribute target within the link anchor to the final destination of the redirect.

3. Cleaning up the sitemap

With loads of changes happening across aggregator sites all the time, it is likely that the sitemap gets neglected.

However, it’s imperative you don’t allow this to happen! Search engines such as Google might ignore sitemaps that return “invalid” URLs.

Here’s an example.

Usually, a site’s 400/500 status code pages are on the development teams’ radar to fix. However, it isn’t always best practice as that these pages still sit in the sitemap. As they might be set live, orphaned and no indexed, or redirected elsewhere, that leaves some less severe issues within the Sitemap file.

Aggregators currently have to deal with sites changing product ranges, releasing new and, even, discontinuing services on a regular basis. New pages, therefore, have to be set up, redirects are then applied and sometimes issues are missed.

The fix

First, you need to identify errors within the sitemap. Search Console is perfect for this. Go to the coverage section, and filter with the drop down. Select your sitemaps with “Filter to Sitemaps” to inspect the errors that are within these.

If your sitemap has 400 or 500 status code pages, then this is more of a priority, if it has the odd redirect or canonical issue, focus on sorting these out first.

Top tip

Check your sitemap weekly or even more frequently. It is also a great way of checking your broken pages across the site.

4. Subdomains are causing index bloat

Behind any great comparison site is a quotation functionality. This allows users to place personal information about a quote and being able to revisit previously saved data kind of like a shopping cart on most ecommerce websites.

However, these are usually hosted on subdomains and can get indexed, which you don’t really want. These are mostly thin content pages, a useless page in Google index equaling index bloat.

Here’s an example.

The fix

The solution is to add the “noindex” meta attribute to the quotation domains to stop them from being indexed. You can also include the subdomains in your robots.txt file to stop them from being crawled. Just make sure they aren’t in the search engines’ index before you place them in the file as they won’t drop out of the SERPs.

5. Spreading link equity to irrelevant pages

Internal linking is important. However, passing link equity thinly across pages can cause a loss in value. Think of a pyramid, and how the homepage spreads equity to the directory and then down to the subdirectories through keyword targeted anchor text.

These pages where equity is passed should hold the value and only link out to relevant pages that might be of relevance.

As comparison sites target a range of products and opportunities it is important to include them within the site architecture, but not spread the equity thinly.

How do we do this?

1. Consider the architecture of your site. For example:

“Fixed rate mortgages” has different yearly offerings, most sites sit these under a mortgage subdirectory, but this could easily have its own directory. This would benefit the site architecture as it lowers the click depth for those important pages and stops the thin spread of equity.

2. Only link to what is relevant.

Let’s take the below example. The targeted keyword here is “bad credit mortgages.” Money.co.uk then supplies a load of internal links at the bottom of the page that aren’t relevant to the keyword intent. Therefore, the equity is spread to these pages resulting in the page losing value.

The fix

Review the internal linking structure. You can do this by running pages through Screaming Frog, which identifies pages that have a click depth greater than two and evaluates the outgoing links. If there are a lot, this could be a good indicator that pages might be spreading the equity thinly. Manually evaluate the pages to find there the links are going to and remove any that might be irrelevant spreading equity unnecessarily.

6. Orphaned pages

Following on from the above point, pages that are orphaned, or poorly linked to, will receive low equity. Comparison sites are prime candidates for this.

MoneySuperMarket has several orphaned pages, especially located in the blog section of the site.

The fix

Use Sitebulb to crawl the site and discover orphaned pages. Spend time evaluating these, it might be that these pages should be orphaned. However, if they are present in the sitemap that indicates either one of two problems given below.

The pages should be linked to through the internal architecture or

The page shouldn’t be indexable or in the sitemap

If the pages are redundant, make them “no indexable.” However, if they should be linked to, evaluate your site’s internal architecture to work out a perfect linking strategy for these pages.

Top tip

It is very easy for blog posts to get orphaned, using methods such as topic clustering can help benefit your content marketing efforts while making sure your pages aren’t being orphaned.

Last ditch tips

A lot of these issues occur across a range of different sites and many sectors, as comparison sites undergo a lot of changes and development work with a vast product range and loads to aggregate. It is very hard to keep up-to-date with SEO tech issues.

Be vigilant and delegate resources sensibly. SEO tech issues shouldn’t be ignored, actively monitor and run crawls and checks after any site development work has been rolled out, this can save your organic performance and keep your technical SEO game strong.

Tom Wilkinson is Search & Data Lead at Zazzle Media.

The post Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/04/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes-for-aggregators-and-finance-brands/ from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/183449741395

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Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands

As most of you know the aggregator market is a competitive one, with the popularity in comparison sites rising.

Comparison companies are some of the most well-known and commonly used brands today. With external marketing and advertising efforts at an all-time high, people turn to the world wide web for these services. So, who is championing the online market?

In an investigation, we carried out we found brands such as MoneySuperMarket and MoneySavingExpert are the kings of the organic market.

It’s hard to remember a world without comparison sites. It turns out that comparison websites have been around for quite some time. In fact, some of the most popular aggregator domain names have been available since 1999.

Yes 1999, two years after Google launched.

Think back to 1999 and how SEO has adapted. Now think about what websites have had to consider, keeping up with high customer demands, new functionality, site migrations, introduction to JavaScript, site speed, the list is endless.

The lifespan and longevity of these sites mean that over time issues start to build up, especially in the technical SEO department. Many of us SEOs are aware of the benefits that come with spending time on technical SEO issues — not to mention the great return on investment.

As comparison sites are so popular and relied upon by users, simple technical issues can result in a poor user experience damaging customer relationships. Or worse, users seeking assistance elsewhere.

Running comparison crawls have identified the common technical SEO issues across the market leaders. Find out what these issues are and how they will be harming their SEO — and see if they correlate with your own website.

1. Keyword cannibalization

When developing and creating new pages it is easy to forget about keyword cannibalization. Duplicating templates can easily leave metadata and headings unchanged, all confusing search engines on which page to rank for that keyword.

Here is an example from GoCompare.

The page on the left has the cannibalizing first heading. This is because the page’s h1 is situated in the top banner. This should target the long-tail opportunity “how to make your own electricity at home” which has been placed in an h2 tag directly under the banner.

The best course of action here would be to tweak the template, removing the banner and placing the call to action in the article body and placing the targeted keyword in a first heading tag.

Comparison sites are prime candidates for keyword cannibalization with the duplication of templates, services, and offers which results in cannibalization issues sitewide.

The fix

Run a crawl of your domain, gathering all the duplicated first headings tags, you can use tools such as Sitebulb for this. Decipher between which is the original page and which is the duplicate, then gather your keyword data to find a better keyword alternative for that duplicate page.

Top tip

Talk to your SEO expert when creating new pages, they will be able to provide recommendations on URL structure, first headings, and titles. It is worth having an SEO at the start of the planning process when rolling out new pages.

2. Internal redirects

Numerous changes can result in internal redirects, primary causes are redundant pages, upgrades to a site’s functionality, and furthermore, the dreaded site migration.

When Google urged sites to accelerate to HTTPs in January 2017, with the ideal methodology to 301 redirect HTTP pages to HTTPs, it’s painful to think about the mass number of internal redirects.

Here’s an example.

Comparison sites specifically need to be aware of this. Just like ecommerce sites, products and services become unavailable. The normal behavior seems to be to then to redirect that product either to an alternative page or, in most cases, back to the parent directory.

This can then cause internal redirects across the site that need immediate attention.

The fix

To tackle this issue, gather all the internal redirected URLs from your crawler.

Once you’ve done this find the link on the parent page by inspecting the page on Google Developer tools.

Find where the link is and recommend to your development team that it changes the href attribute target within the link anchor to the final destination of the redirect.

3. Cleaning up the sitemap

With loads of changes happening across aggregator sites all the time, it is likely that the sitemap gets neglected.

However, it’s imperative you don’t allow this to happen! Search engines such as Google might ignore sitemaps that return “invalid” URLs.

Here’s an example.

Usually, a site’s 400/500 status code pages are on the development teams’ radar to fix. However, it isn’t always best practice as that these pages still sit in the sitemap. As they might be set live, orphaned and no indexed, or redirected elsewhere, that leaves some less severe issues within the Sitemap file.

Aggregators currently have to deal with sites changing product ranges, releasing new and, even, discontinuing services on a regular basis. New pages, therefore, have to be set up, redirects are then applied and sometimes issues are missed.

The fix

First, you need to identify errors within the sitemap. Search Console is perfect for this. Go to the coverage section, and filter with the drop down. Select your sitemaps with “Filter to Sitemaps” to inspect the errors that are within these.

If your sitemap has 400 or 500 status code pages, then this is more of a priority, if it has the odd redirect or canonical issue, focus on sorting these out first.

Top tip

Check your sitemap weekly or even more frequently. It is also a great way of checking your broken pages across the site.

4. Subdomains are causing index bloat

Behind any great comparison site is a quotation functionality. This allows users to place personal information about a quote and being able to revisit previously saved data kind of like a shopping cart on most ecommerce websites.

However, these are usually hosted on subdomains and can get indexed, which you don’t really want. These are mostly thin content pages, a useless page in Google index equaling index bloat.

Here’s an example.

The fix

The solution is to add the “noindex” meta attribute to the quotation domains to stop them from being indexed. You can also include the subdomains in your robots.txt file to stop them from being crawled. Just make sure they aren’t in the search engines’ index before you place them in the file as they won’t drop out of the SERPs.

5. Spreading link equity to irrelevant pages

Internal linking is important. However, passing link equity thinly across pages can cause a loss in value. Think of a pyramid, and how the homepage spreads equity to the directory and then down to the subdirectories through keyword targeted anchor text.

These pages where equity is passed should hold the value and only link out to relevant pages that might be of relevance.

As comparison sites target a range of products and opportunities it is important to include them within the site architecture, but not spread the equity thinly.

How do we do this?

1. Consider the architecture of your site. For example:

“Fixed rate mortgages” has different yearly offerings, most sites sit these under a mortgage subdirectory, but this could easily have its own directory. This would benefit the site architecture as it lowers the click depth for those important pages and stops the thin spread of equity.

2. Only link to what is relevant.

Let’s take the below example. The targeted keyword here is “bad credit mortgages.” Money.co.uk then supplies a load of internal links at the bottom of the page that aren’t relevant to the keyword intent. Therefore, the equity is spread to these pages resulting in the page losing value.

  The fix

Review the internal linking structure. You can do this by running pages through Screaming Frog, which identifies pages that have a click depth greater than two and evaluates the outgoing links. If there are a lot, this could be a good indicator that pages might be spreading the equity thinly. Manually evaluate the pages to find there the links are going to and remove any that might be irrelevant spreading equity unnecessarily.

6. Orphaned pages

Following on from the above point, pages that are orphaned, or poorly linked to, will receive low equity. Comparison sites are prime candidates for this.

MoneySuperMarket has several orphaned pages, especially located in the blog section of the site.

The fix

Use Sitebulb to crawl the site and discover orphaned pages. Spend time evaluating these, it might be that these pages should be orphaned. However, if they are present in the sitemap that indicates either one of two problems given below.

The pages should be linked to through the internal architecture or

The page shouldn’t be indexable or in the sitemap

If the pages are redundant, make them “no indexable.” However, if they should be linked to, evaluate your site’s internal architecture to work out a perfect linking strategy for these pages.

Top tip

It is very easy for blog posts to get orphaned, using methods such as topic clustering can help benefit your content marketing efforts while making sure your pages aren’t being orphaned.

Last ditch tips

A lot of these issues occur across a range of different sites and many sectors, as comparison sites undergo a lot of changes and development work with a vast product range and loads to aggregate. It is very hard to keep up-to-date with SEO tech issues.

Be vigilant and delegate resources sensibly. SEO tech issues shouldn’t be ignored, actively monitor and run crawls and checks after any site development work has been rolled out, this can save your organic performance and keep your technical SEO game strong.

Tom Wilkinson is Search & Data Lead at Zazzle Media.

The post Common technical SEO issues and fixes for aggregators and finance brands appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/03/04/common-technical-seo-issues-and-fixes-for-aggregators-and-finance-brands/