10 Steps To Boost Your Site’s Crawlability And Indexability Ep. 557
If search engines can’t find your web pages, all the optimization in the world will do no good. Boost your site’s crawl ability and indexability to…
Technical SEO
How to Find and Fix 14 Technical SEO Problems That Can Be Damaging Your Site Now by Joe Robison #371
Technical SEO problems like misconfigured robots.txt, missing HTTPS, broken backlinks, and poor internal linking can silently damage rankings and are often overlooked by average marketers in favor of content work.
Key takeaways
- Check Google Search Console Index Status to confirm your pages are actually indexed and catch unexpected drops or spikes.
- A misplaced disallow in robots.txt or a meta robots no-index tag can block or remove pages from Google's index entirely.
- HTTPS is becoming mandatory: Google marks non-secure sites collecting any user input as non-secure, and ranking benefits are growing.
- 301 redirects remain the gold standard for permanently moved pages; avoid meta refresh redirects, which are an outdated tactic.
- Internal links from menus, content, and footers to key pages help search spiders find and crawl your most important content.
perhaps the single most damaging character in all of SEO is a simple backslash improperly placed in the robot's TXT file
About this episode
Need some easy solutions for ranking problems? Check out these technical issues that are killing your SEO! Chris and Charles cover indexing, Robots.txt files, Canonicalization, backlinks, redirects and more. If you don't know what all of that means, you should listen to the podcast, and if you do, you should still listen to the podcast!
Questions this episode answers
What is the difference between a robots.txt disallow and a meta robots no-index tag?
A misconfigured robots.txt prevents new pages from being indexed but will not remove pages already in Google's index. A meta robots no-index directive actively removes all pages carrying that tag from the index, making it a more damaging mistake if applied unintentionally.
Why does URL canonicalization matter for SEO?
Search engines treat different URL versions of the same page, such as www versus non-www or URLs with and without trailing slashes, as separate pages. This creates duplicate content problems. Picking one version and setting it as the default in Search Console avoids those issues.
How does hidden text cause technical SEO problems?
Text hidden with CSS such as display none is still read by Google bots. A page that appears to have a few hundred words but contains thousands of hidden words can trigger penalty concerns for possible cloaking, even if the intent was accidental rather than manipulative.
In their words
across all businesses and industries, the low effort and high rewards projects should jump to the top of the list of things to implement. And it's nowhere more relevant than tackling technical SEO issues on your site.
Host
a mistakenly configured robots TXT won't pull your pages out of Google's index if they're already there, but a no index directive will remove all pages with this configuration.
Host
Google has clearly stated that speed is a small part of the algorithm.
Host
Terms defined in this episode
- Indexation
- Whether a site's pages have been included in Google's index and can appear in search results, verified through Google Search Console under Google Index Status.
- rel=canonical
- An HTML link tag that tells search engines which URL is the preferred version of a page, used to prevent duplicate content issues common on e-commerce sites with filtered URLs.
- XML Sitemap
- A file that helps Google and other search engine spiders understand and crawl a site's structure; must be correctly configured and submitted in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Meta Refresh
- A client-side redirect that automatically sends users to another page without a server-side redirect; considered an outdated tactic not recommended by Google or professional SEOs.
Full transcript is being added.
This episode answers
Matthew Bertram
AI keynote speaker · Owner & CEO, EWR Digital · President, ModalPoint
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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