How to Find and Fix 14 Technical SEO Problems That Can Be Damaging Your Site Now by Joe Robison #371

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-Web Results. I am Charles Lewis, your client results strategist. Welcome back. Strategist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number... 371. 371. Yeah, and just cranking on through these. Boom. I'm going to say 400. I don't know what we're going to do at 400. Something. Something. Yeah. All right. So, as always, we have a tip from our previous podcast, and this tip is, use responsive design to eliminate redirect issues between desktop and mobile sites. Yeah, if you had a desktop version and then a mobile version, right, like M. whatever your domain name is, then you probably have some redirect issues going on. Convert to a responsive site. So, who's on a desktop device or a mobile device or even a tablet, all through the same version of your website. No redirect issues. Boom. All right. Please remember, we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas, and Charles and I, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is... Do not be a douche. Don't be a douche. We got a... Not a good look. Shout out to our mantra. We got a patiff about our mantra. About our mantra? Yeah. Excellent. We saw... Hello, Brad. Thanks for tuning in on Facebook Live. There's a question in there, isn't there? Love the podcast. Oh, now... Boom. That's a... That's a review. That's a patiff. Thanks to you. All right. So, we've got a really long article today. We are talking about... Yeah, this article... Again, punch in the face to the good folks at Moz and Joe Robeson. He says, how to find and fix 14 technical SEO problems that could be damaging your site right now. Find and fix 14... 14 technical SEO problems. I really like it because we deal with a lot of tech SEO issues. And that's one of those areas where people tend to kind of go past... And skip it. Don't worry

about it. Yeah. And look, it's extremely important. So, we'll get into those issues in just a minute. All right. So, if you're in a position to have some sort of electronic device, we would ask you to tweet now. Yeah. Tweet us right now. Use the hashtag SEOpodcast. This is number 371. Tag us in it. At eWordResults. At BestSEOPodcast. That way, we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Hey, if this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy and welcome to the podcast. If you've listened to... Yeah. If you've listened to this podcast before, you know what section... I actually have to look because I did the numbers last night. There is a 10. Yeah. And you know what section we're going to skip today. The way this works is if we get... And this is kind of a little contest. If we get 10 shikos... A shiko is an eWebResults branded term for social engagement. It stands for shares, likes, and follows. If we get 10 shikos on one of our platforms... Or not our platforms. On our profile. On our platforms. Then... And a review. Then we skip the part where we tell you how to leave us a review. We're going to skip that today. What we will do, though, is tell you how you can shiko us. You can shiko us at facebook.com slash... eWebResults. YouTube.com slash... eWebResults. Twitter.com slash... eWebResults. Instagram.com slash... eWebResults. LinkedIn.com slash... eWebResults. eWebResults. All of those will take you to our profile on those platforms. And please shiko us when you're there. Did you say all of those platforms will take you to our portfolio? I think... No. All those links will take you to our portfolio on those platforms. We got a portfolio? Profiles. Profiles. It's all P's. It's just perfect. There we go. We got a portfolio for that? We've been working on that. Who'd you assign that to? Hey, if you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we are probably looking for you. Go ahead

and call us and submit your audio resume. 713-510-7846. If you would like a free, comprehensive website profit analysis, please go ahead and go to our website, eWebResults.com, and click that link. That's just getting more and more valuable as we go through, as we improve it. Next, it's time for the favorite segment of the program, the Algorithm Cataclysm. That was good. So, good Algo Cat today. Good Algo Cat today. And I kind of like today's Algo Cat because this has been a growing problem. Ever since our new 45s came in place and the whole campaign, the biggest thing we learned about or that the light was really shining was fake news. Right. And so, but how fake news is apparent in Google, how it's happening in Facebook, happening all over these places. Well, Google is already trying to address it. They've already put some stuff in place. And so, now they've launched what they call Google's Project Owl, O-W-L, as in the bird. Right. All seen bird, all wise bird. Yeah. And the owl. Right. I like it. I like it, too. And so, this is what they're calling a three-pronged. There's no such thing as a wise candy bar, right? Nah. A piece of candy. Oh, no. Unless it was called wise. Yeah. Yeah. Which is wise. But what they're doing is a three-pronged attack on fake news and what they're calling problematic content. And what they're really trying to address is, if you remember, you remember the Holocaust issue that happened? Yeah. So, remember when 45 talked? And so, that was the deal. And so, what happened was, if you went to Google and began typing, did the H-O, then it would suggest Holocaust even happened. Right. Or a Holy Bible even real. Right. Or all these other kind of, you know, interesting facts when, of course, Holocaust happened. Yeah. There's no doubt. Yeah. Exactly. Right. And so, they really. The Bible does exist. It does. And so, they're trying to address those things. Right. And so, what happens now, what should happen is,

if you were in a situation and you're searching for one of those phrases that may be construed as contradictory or challenging. Right. What's going to happen is, you're going to get a pop-up. You're logged into Google. You're going to get a pop-up. As soon as the search assist pops up, and if you choose one, before it returns that search result, you're going to get a pop-up that asks you, was this relevant? Do you believe it? Could it have been different? Oh, wow. There's like several questions that are on there, and they're looking for user feedback. That's part of the Project Hour. That's one of the three pronged approaches that they're looking to do. One of those prongs is using users to help make some filter if this is good or if it's bad. So, that's what's up. Yeah. I appreciate you leaning on SEO community and users to actually improve information versus writing a script for it. Yeah. Very cool. That is the algorithm. I'm going to face to you guys for trying to address the issue with news. The reason I really like it, because like I said, I teach a class with a youth, right? Right. And I've been telling them, every week I tell them, make it your business to watch the news at least once this week. Like, see something else. Right. And they just, you know, it's hard to expect a 13-year-old, 14-year-old to sit down and watch the news. Yep. But they spend the bulk of their time swiping through their phone, and so I'm like, follow the news. Yeah. Follow Fox. Follow ABC. Follow them and swipe and get your news that way. And so with Google understanding that they have a possibility to be swiping through some fake news, they're addressing it. And so I can dig it. Punch in the face to you guys. Very cool. All right. I've got a little bit of news here. Okay. Just something small. This is exciting to me. I played soccer for 25 years. I saw that. Love the

World Cup. Soccer may get video replay. And I know Javier can probably hear this. May get video replay in the World Cup. And he went by cheering in Russia. And so, you know, soccer is notoriously, I'm on the side. I'm on the traditional side, as usual. Not that surprising. Little conservative slow to change. Like, I get it. I don't want to just slow the game down because soccer's a really fast game. It just almost never stops. And it's hard to, yeah, replay is going totally, Well, it depends on how they use it, right? So, on shots, on goals, and things like that, when the ball goes out, you can replay those things. I think that makes sense. Maybe on kicks that are dangerous. But a lot of kicks can be dangerous that don't seem dangerous. Yeah. I'm just, there's a part of me that really likes the fact that the bad call goes into the record. And the winner is the winner. Part of the game. Because the refs are literally part of the game. Right. The refs are part of the game. And can dictate, not dictate, that sounds really strong, but can have a significant impact. And it's true in every sport, right? Exactly. That's why I love replay. Yeah, because it starts pulling them out of it. Hey, man, look. Shout out to the Rockets going to the next round. And in that last game, did you see, I almost gave the NBA blank stare later today. Right. But I didn't because of my beloved Rockets. Right. They were getting, the referees were so bad in game five versus the OKC Thunder that the owner of the Rockets left his seat. Walked over to the referee. I don't know what he said, but whatever he said earned him a $100,000 fine. And so, and he paid it, obviously. It probably had to do with, like, head and ass. Yeah. Exactly. And so, or ass and hole, man. Yeah. But, Either directing or

asking him to remove one or the other. Yeah. Exactly. But, yeah, refs. Yeah. Right. They play a huge role. And so, so that's what's up for soccer. Yeah. Maybe I'll learn more about it. Like, I don't understand offsides. Yeah. I read about it. I watched it. I watched ESPN talk about it. And when I watch live soccer and they flag it, I still don't know how. The only thing to really think about is you don't, you can't, you can imagine if you could camp a player next to the goalkeeper as an offensive team, you don't, you got to, if you kick it to them, there's just such an unfair advantage and you don't want that happening. So you've got to have that offender, that last offender has to be behind or, you know, not in front of the, which is behind, which is, in case you didn't know it behind, the last defender. Right? So when the balls play forward, so if I play back and we're both in front, you know, right next to the goalie and there's no defenders, it's not a side because I played away from the goal. Because there's no defender there. Right? Okay. Well, because I played away from the goal. Okay. But if I play towards the goal and there's no defender between me and the goal, right, on the line, then that's offsides. And the idea is don't, you know, you can see having somebody, So it's more about keeping it equal or not creating advantages per se. So you've, I'm sure you've played basketball games where somebody's camped out under the hoop. Yeah, illegal defense. Right. Or three seconds in the lane. There you go. So same kind of situation. Same kind of thing. That's just the rule to do that. And yeah, it gets convoluted, like when was the ball played? And if it bounces, what happens? Those are kind of fun. All right. Let's go replay for soccer. Yeah. I think that's

good. Next, Google to have servers in Cuba. And so they're, Yeah. Cuba's opening up, obviously. And at first it was like, how is that going to speed up the internet? And then they kind of, it was obvious. The regular content, they'll cache content. Right? So it doesn't go after, the only pipe into Cuba for internet is from Venezuela. Even though it's so close to us, there's no pipe for internet pipe between the U.S. and Cuba. Mm-hmm. It's only between Cuba and Venezuela. And Venezuela. And it's a much smaller pipe. Of course. And so really what Google will do is, hey, this is a really popular YouTube video, so they'll cache it on the island. Oh, so that way anybody who wants to see that video won't have to deal with the whole, the limited bandwidth and everything else. Going through Venezuela. So they're just going to cache all popular content over there? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you've still got to go out and get it. And Google already, I think already does that in a lot of situations. So that's kind of cool. Yep. And then you can ride in a Google self-driving car in Phoenix. Interesting. The little bubbles that they make. Mm-hmm. Is it just like a, I'm not ready yet. A couple of them are made without steering wheels and pedals. Definitely not. Definitely not. I can't even correct it. Yeah. I can't even say, wait, wait, no. You know what I mean? It's more like a roller coaster ride than a ride to the store. Yeah, you know, built in a strap-on and then some prayer. I got some news. All right. I was talking Google, and you were just talking about search, right? So Google reaffirms that 15% of searches are new and never been searched before. Daily. Wow. I thought that was a high number also. I would not have guessed. Well, and apparently that number's been declining. A few years ago, it was at 20%. Now, it's at 15%. But 15%

of searches daily have never been searched before. And then they went on to say Google still processes trillions of searches each year. And still, 15% of those queries have never been seen on Google before. Man, I thought that sounds like it would drop off, right? Yeah, but then at the same time, the fact that there's so much new stuff happening. I mean, like I searched the other day, it was a new search for me was, and this is after talking to one of our clients, what is polyagamy? Not polygamy. Right. Polyagamy. Okay. Same word as polygamy, except it got an O in the middle. Right. The only difference, polyagamy. And I was like, I have no idea. And the client was talking about it, so I got off the phone, I went and looked it up. And it is the practice of having multiple sexual partners that you're not married to. So it's not multiple spouses, like polygamy, this is no pimping. I was like, this is what this is. This is really. That's a fancy word. I know what that is. Yeah. Like, I was great at polyagamy in high school, you know what I'm saying? I would have put that on my hat. I got a cousin right now who's probably a mastered polyagamy. And so, but anyway, new word. I had no idea what it meant, and that was a new search for me. So I just thought of something with regard to new searches, dated searches. Dated searches? So 2017 playoffs. That's got to be a new search. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's easy to get to who made the playoffs in 2017. Yep. That's a new search, because more in 1930. There's lots of stuff to be interesting. This is really cool. So yeah, 15% new searches. More news along those Project Hour deals. So Google is adjusting the ranking signals. This could have been AlgoCat. Right. Because they're adjusting ranking signals. Right. Algorithm, right? To demote fake news, Google is making serious efforts to filter the news, which the company

says is the most high-profile issue when it comes to people trying to game the search ranking system. Dig this. It's about .25% of daily queries return content, which is either offensive, misleading, or not what the person was looking for. So we got 15% of searches brand new. Right. Right. And this is not really, that's not commenting on the results of those brand new searches. Right. But this is saying that .25% of most searches just come back with the wrong information or information that's offensive or misleading. And they're adjusting their ranking signals to demote that. So I'm sure that'll coincide with the Project Hour kind of data that they get back and that'll make adjustments. And the last piece of news I got is still Google-related. We made a change to HTTPS. They recommended it. They started favoring sites that are on SSL. And now, according to Moz, Moz reports that the number of HTTPS results on Google's first page has risen from 30% to 50% in nine months. Wow. I would have thought it'd be higher. I mean, we jumped on that pretty quickly. Pretty quickly. Yeah. But then at the same time, like, I haven't. We have here. But like. But some other little projects. Yeah. Well, Mo Serious is not. My church is not. I haven't done them yet. You know? So I'd imagine. This is another fee. Right? This is another fee. You got to upgrade. Another process. I got some redirects. And, you know. Time. Time. Yeah. And so I just haven't done it. But the fact that it jumped up 20% from 330 to 50 in less than a year, I think it's still pretty similar. That doesn't surprise me. It just surprises me that it's not. That that happened recently as opposed to, you know, back when they've been talking about it. Yeah. So that's my news, man. All right. So. Two patiffs. All right. I got two reviews. First review is from Chris Westergaard. And it is, of course, five stars. It says, the only regret that I

have is that I don't have more hands to give you both more punches in the face. That's what's up. Yeah. That's what's up. Appreciate it. That's a positive thing for anyone who doesn't listen to the podcast. Speaking of which, what great podcast and dynamic you both have. Good luck with everything and much success to you both. I love the podcast and your overall customer service model. Punch in the face to you. And his name. His name. He's just got such a great name. Yeah. What's the last name? It's Westergaard. Yeah. I like that. Chris Westergaard. Yeah. Punch in the face to you. Punch in the face to you. Westergaard. It's interesting. Excellent. And so next is from Steve Dale. And this one is also five stars. It says, as a long-time listener, without even knowing it, Chris and Charles helped me make a strategic turn in my agency business. I want to know. SEO is complicated and these guys make it at least understandable. After years of doing website slash SEO for over 80 customers, regular clients, I decided to hyper-focus on paid search and lead gen. Best decision ever. I can hear it like, best decision ever. Exactly. Thanks, guys. You helped me simplify my life and I increased my income by 45% in the first year. By switching to paid search and lead gen. Instant lead. Punch. In the face to you. Punch in the face to you. Wow. That's why we have instant lead campaigns for similar reasons. So, we're also punching the face to you, man. I'm curious to know what strategic turn, well, I guess that was a strategic turn. Switching from SEO to paid search. Very cool. Interesting. Yeah. Paid search is definitely easier to scale, easier to manage multiple accounts on, easier to make adjustments on the fly. And usually, you can time it and schedule it. And you can deliver results faster. Yeah. Versus SEO, yeah, you might get an algo cat that forces you to change everything. Yeah. And so, yeah. Punch in the face. So,

it's one of the reasons that we include, even in our smallest website marketing plan or internet marketing plan. Pay-per-click management. It's pay-per-click. Yeah. SEO and pay-per-click at a minimum because you need those instant results. You actually need the data that you get from a pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click that keyword data that you can no longer get from organic search. So, yeah, really good. You've got a couple more petiffs? A couple more petiffs. Really just one, but he tweeted us twice. Okay. And both tweets were pretty cool, so we'll give him that kind of love today. Punch in the face goes to Comics and SEO. Comics and SEO. Literally, that's what it says. Super-man. But dig this. He's at soup. S-O-U-P-H-E-R. Man. Like, soup-her-man. Yeah, I get it. So, comic dude. Superman. Right. If he does SEO, you probably would be a great employee here. Yeah. That's kind of how that works. But dig this. He says, at eRevResults, just found your podcast a few weeks ago. Love the motto. Glad to see other SEOs giving the field a good name. Hashtag don't be a douche. Boom. Actually, we probably haven't been doing don't be a douche enough. We do today? As a hashtag. Oh, as a hashtag. No, we don't hashtag. I would say we do it every week, but no, we don't hashtag it. And so, that was earlier this week. Then he came back the other day and he says, at eRevResults, your podcast. Definitely deserves hashtag five stars. I love to hear y'all discuss link building, specifically the good versus bad tactics. Dude, at Superman, comics, and SEO, punch in the face to you. Thank you for your tweets. Thank you for the love. Thank you for being a fan. And yeah, look out for link building. I'll put that top of my radar. And over the next couple weeks, I'll see if I can get some link building content to present. Absolutely. Bam. All right. Let's get a selfie here. Photo up. Awesome. And that is the potatoes of the podcast. It's

time to get into the meat. Because the meat is the part where we're all here for, right? The part where we actually learn something. So, I want to give a punch in the face to Joe Robinson and the good folks over at Moz. He posted this article, how to find and fix 14 technical SEO problems that can be damaging your site right now. And I didn't put it on there. My bad. All right. I'll search for him. So, it's on the spreadsheet if you have access to that. Okay. Yes. And so, he starts off by saying 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. He's absolutely right. Like, go after that low hanging fruit. Those things that you can adjust and fix that will have a high reward like links and other technical challenges. He's saying address those first. And he's absolutely right. One of the things we do, one of the reasons we tend to redesign on WordPress with our custom framework is because in our framework we've addressed a lot of technical issues that we can handle up front. And so, it's important that whether you're working on a new site, it's a redesign, whatever it is, address those technical issues. As a matter of fact, he goes on to say, the definition of technical SEO is a bit fuzzy. Does it include everything that happens on the site except for content production? What do you think? Everything that happens on the site except for content. The definition of technical SEO. It's wide. That's an open-ended question. So, it's not necessarily the content creation. Man. Like, okay, so maybe we could say it's the content concept, right? Because really keyword, often keyword focused or subject matter focused, right? That's technical. Could be, yeah. I mean, usually is. I'd say, what's the search volume, et cetera. Okay, the research involved with it and that kind

of stuff. So, great. Go flush out this article. So, you took it there. I didn't even think about from that level. Because that's the title. That can usually define the title and maybe a couple bullet points. And those could be technical SEO. Flushing out the article is more about less technical. Yeah, that's more about just content creation. Content creation. Still needs to be done really well with SEO in mind, right? And then, yeah, everything after that. When you're linking, cross-linking and making sure your images have the right name and alt tag. So, what he says is, Joe says, I'll define technical SEO here as aspects of a site comprising more technical problems that the average marketer wouldn't identify and take a bit of experience to uncover. Okay, I like that. Yeah, great, great, vague, but at the same time, direct answer, right? So, what I heard is stuff that we know and you don't. Exactly. That's technical SEO. That's technical SEO. Exactly. But he's right. At the end of the day, if it's not the content, as Chris was alluding to, right? You do your keyword research. You write this content. Technically, you don't even need to do that on your site. You can do that off-site, right? But the things that happen on your site that don't necessarily affect the content or aren't driven by the content, but yet affect the ranking and how your site is perceived by Google and other users is what I would consider your technical SEO. So, with that, he says, this isn't a complete SEO checklist for tech, but it is some problems you can fix right now. Let's jump right into it. Number one. Number one. He says, check indexation immediately. Check indexation. Indexation, like has your site been indexed? He says, can you get organic traffic to your site if it doesn't show up in a Google search? No, you can't. And that's what he's put. And he's right. You can't do that. So, you need to check and make sure your site has been indexed.

Now, I'll tell you, Joe, you probably want to go back and update because Joe recommended that you do a site search on Google. And Google came out the other day and said they're disabling that. It don't work. The index is not updated. Well, the functionality is there, but the index isn't updated. It's not accurate. It's not accurate. And the dude, Metho, came out and tweeted. He was like, yeah, I probably wouldn't do that. It's not accurate. We're going to remove it soon. It does give me some baseline information when I'm talking to a new prospect. Well, yeah. So, I know that's why he included here because you can still see some data. But the key here is if you're working on a new site, you should have Webmaster Search Console set up. Go to Search Console. Click on Google Index. You'll see that on the left side of the menu. After you click Google Index, click Index Status. And when you go to Google Index Status, then you will see how many pages was indexed, when they got indexed, if you had a drop in pages indexed, if you have an increase in pages indexed. All that is a good way to determine multiple things. One, that your site is indexed, that it's there. And so, now you can actually be found. What was the word he used? Indexation. Indexation. Mm-hmm. Indexation. It has been indexated. Yeah. Indexalized. Yeah. But you want to make sure that you've been included in Google's Index. And the best way to do that is to check Webmaster Tools and check the Google Index and see if your pages are listed there. Now, if you know that you've got 50 pages on your site and 100 pages on your site and Google Index only shows you 20, then great lesson learned. Yeah. You need to go and figure that out. Or maybe you only got 50 pages and Google shows you 100. You've probably been hacked. Right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Or something is going on that you're not aware of.

And so, either way it goes, check your indexation in Google Webmaster Tools, in Search Console, and make sure you've been indexed. Number two. Number two. Your robot's TXT file. He says, perhaps the single most damaging character in all of SEO is a simple backslash improperly placed in the robot's TXT file. He's absolutely right, Dyke. Like, if you disallow, right, if you disallow pages on your robot's TXT file, then those pages literally can't be indexed. Google will not index them. Google will not find them. Yeah. And so, you want to make sure that, especially if you're in a redesign process, then maybe your developer was blocking your production site for a reason on his robot's file because he didn't want it indexed, and then you approved it, and then y'all pushed into the site live. Not production, but your demo. Yeah, your demo site. Is that right? Production? Yeah. No, production and live, right? Something. Well, they're both online. The problem is you don't want one of them to be indexed. Indexed, right. So, it's like beta and production. Exactly. Usually production is the live one. So, beta. In the beta site. So, while you're working on beta, maybe it's even in a beta folder or something you may just have in that robot text file that really it should have had the beta folder, but anyway, if you're working on another location and you disallowed the root, you want to make sure you fix it. Or maybe you're in the beta and so you disallowed the root because that is the root of the beta. Yeah. And then you pushed it live. Now you have a robot's file that's still disallowing the root. The root. Yeah. And that's a problem because you've essentially told Google, don't index my pages. And so, you want to make sure that you're not doing that. One of the things we do, right, we'll disallow some pages, but the only pages we tend to disallow on a robot's file are our conversion pages. So, like your thank you for completing

this form or thank you for downloading this or thank you for subscribing to our newsletter or whatever your kind of conversion page is. Yeah. We disallow those because I don't want those ranking. I don't need no one to find that in the search. I don't even need that page in Google's index. Um, but all of our other pages, keep it open, allow your site to be indexed. Keep it moving. Number three. Number three. Your meta robots, no index. You got a little technical here, which makes sense. We're talking technical SEO problems. 14 of them. Number three is your meta robots, no index. He says no index can be even more damaging than the misconfigured robots TXT at times. 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. Oh my God, Joe. What does all that mean? What he's saying is, um, the meta in the no index is, is a meta feature, right? The robots TXT is your robots file. And what he's saying is that robots file. Yeah. If you slash and you disallow your route, you can prevent your site from being indexed. And that's the problem with the robots. But if your site's already indexed, it's already in Google's index. And then you apply that same robot error that won't pull your pages out of the index. Whereas if you use a meta robots, no index, this literally tells Google, Oh, remove my pages out of the index. That's a bigger problem than not just not having your pages indexed because at least they could already be in Google's index. And now you're just not having them recalled or updated, but at least they're still there. The no index inside your meta robots just removes any opportunity you did have of showing up in an organic search. And so you want to make sure you're not doing that. Frankly, do a control fine. This is how you figure out if you're doing

that or not. Go to your homepage, do like a control U that'll like open up your source in a new tab. And then do a control F, which is a control fine. And search no index, no spaces, no N-O-I-N-D-E-X. Look up that. Look up follow. You may want to look up just index directly. And see if they show up in your code in the meta section. And if they do, then you should probably use it. You have a problem to do that. Yeah. You got a problem to fix. Log in and adjust your coding accordingly. Yeah. Number four. Four. One version pro URL for URL canonicalization. This is a good one here because he says the average user don't really care. And they don't. Whether you show up www.example or just http colon slash example or example.com slash home or example.com slash index or example.com slash home.htm or .html or .php. They don't care. But Google does. Bing does. Search engines do. Right. And so the browser you're using does. And so you want to make sure that you that you really using one version for URL. We prefer the www version on the secure server with the hyphen. I mean with the slash at the end. That's it. Yeah. No index. No home. No .htm. None of that. And that's what works well for us. It's just a cleaner, better looking URL. Yeah. And so and we feel like since it's cleaner and better looking at perform better. So but my suggestion is just fine when it stick to it. Right. I'm not going to suggest you change CMSs or whatnot. But whatever you're doing. But you should. But you should. But you should. What's up? But whatever you're doing, just make sure you're consistent with it. Like don't have, you know, all these different versions out there being indexed because that's actually the duplicate content issue that you end up facing with the redirect issue and just other host of problems. So you want to use one version of your URL. And then

I'll tell you this too. After you decide on that one version, make that the default version in search console. So number five, number five, real equals canonical, right? We're still talking redirects. We're talking to 14 technical SEO problems that could be damaging your site right now. This is a Moz article posted by Joe Robeson. Number five is real equals canonical. He says useful for preventing page duplication when you have similar content across different pages. It's often an issue with e-commerce sites. And he's right. So let's say, for example, I like Jordan. So go to my Jordan example. You go to champsports.com and let's say I'm searching. Right. Right. And so I filter by my shoe size, which I've learned because every style that I like don't necessarily come in size 13. And so I'll filter by shoe size so that way I'll only see what's in my size. Right. Right. And so let's say I did that same query, but I didn't filter in shoe size. And so now my URL says champsports.com slash size 13 slash retro Jordan slash shoe name. Right. And then I did one without it. So we end up with champsports.com slash retro Jordans slash shoe name minus the size 13 minus the shoe size directory. And therefore we had the same page result, the same content with two different URLs. That's a duplicate content issue. And that's an issue that a real equals canonical link will fix. And so usually that's an issue you tend to find in most e-commerce solutions. I know that WooCommerce and Shopify, they do a great job of kind of automatically redirecting those deals. But you want to make sure that you're not having that kind of issue with duplicate content. Use real equals canonical to fix those. Number six, six, text in your images. He says, yes, Google can somewhat understand text on images, but it's not nearly as sophisticated as we would hope in 2017. The best practice for SEO is to keep important text not embedded in an image. Duh. At

the end of the day, put the important things as text. Don't put them as images. And if you need to use it in an image to present it a certain kind of way, then I'm going to suggest that you invest in probably some programming or some sort of code or some widget, some plug-in, something like that, where you can display this as text and not an image or do both. Because it's important that your important text not be in images. Now, pretty straightforward. Number seven, broken backlinks. He says, a website, number seven is broken backlinks. He says, a website migration or a relaunch project can spew out countless broken backlinks from other websites. This is a golden opportunity for recovering link equity. Matter of fact, some of the top pages on your website may have become 404s after migration. So the backlinks pointing back to these pages are effectively broken. He's absolutely right. No link juice. Look, broken backlinks just suck in general. Think about how hard you work to get the backlinks. To get those links. Not just that. You know what the worst experience on the internet is? Oh, that's the information I need. Click. Click and it's the 404 page. Oh my God. You've just lost all credibility. Even if you have that content just on a different URL. And I'm literally almost there. I've made it to your domain name. And I'm on your 404 page. You could have addressed that with a redirect. Yep. You know what I'm saying? Make sure you take advantage of your redirects. You don't want any broken backlinks. Backlinks. Like, I prefer Moz or Open Site Explorer, right, to check for backlinks. I prefer Search Console. What you should do, though, is use these tools and then compare the results, right? Because what I found out is Moz will report links that Google didn't necessarily report. And vice versa. But every now and then, you'll see the crossover. And when you see the crossover, you kind of check that link out. Is it good? Is

it bad? And you make an adjustment. You make a decision. And you move forward. But you can't move forward knowing you got broken backlinks and don't fix them. You just got to fix them. They help the users. And they help Google. Google is not going to rank you higher. Bing is not going to appreciate you if you got a page for the broken backlinks. Don't do it. Number eight, HTTPS is less optional. Less optional, meaning it's becoming more and more important. As of January 1 this year. Yeah. He says, Google just recently announced they would start marking any non-HTTPS site as non-secure if the site accepts passwords or credit cards. That was the first change. Then they came out and said, any site that's just accepting information. So you got a contact form like all of our sites do or a newsletter sign-up form. Anytime you're requesting information and the user has an option to input that data, Google wants to see it on a secure server. Going further, he said it's not out of the room to imagine that Google will start giving HTTPS sites even more of an algorithmic ranking benefit over the non-HTTPS. Yep. And I agree. I think it's the safe for internet. And so why not do that? And so it's just important to do it. At the end of the day, it's a credibility builder for the users as much as it's a ranking factor for Google, right? And making your site secure and knowing that they're valuing it. From a user perspective, just not seeing that sign in Chrome that says this site is not secure builds up tons of credibility. For that user who's debating on making this purchase, for them to see a green lock that this site's secure and it's safe builds credibility. So you've got to make that investment. I'm talking to myself now because I was just telling you that I hadn't done it. And so, so yeah, it's just something you have to go do HTTPS, HTTPS, just less optional meaning is

mandatory. Get it done. Yeah, just go and get it done. Number nine. Nine. 301 and 302 redirects. Did we skip? No, that was number eight. Really? Okay. Yeah, number seven was, look, I lost Chris. Number seven was broken backlinks. Okay. Text and images was number six. Got it. I broke through that one. Seven was broken backlinks. Number eight was HTTP is less optional. Number nine. Nine. 301 and 302 redirects. Right? We're talking how to find and fix 14 technical SEO problems that could be damaging your site now. This was posted on Mars by Joe Robeson. Number nine is 301 and 302 redirects. He says redirects are an amazing tool in an SEO's arsenal for managing and controlling dead pages. They are. Because sometimes you need to repurpose pages or redo pages or combine pages and all sorts of other stuff as algorithms change and things change. WordPress content management system. And then you need to do some stuff. And so you're going to need some redirects. Because if you have a whole bunch of .htm pages, for example, or .php pages, and then you upgrade to WordPress, you don't have that extension at the end of your URL no more. You need to redirect those pages. And so he goes on to say, 301 redirects are permanent and 302 redirects are temporary. The best practice is to always use 301 redirects when permanently redirecting a page. I did read an article. Google really treats 302s the same as 301s now. So he commented on that. And I was going to skip it. But since you brought it up, despite some of the statements released about 302 redirects being as efficient at passing authority as 301s, it's not advised to do so. He says, recent studies have tested this and shown that 301s are a gold standard. I would agree with that. I totally agree. When I saw the article you referenced, I saw that last week. And I was like, maybe. Why do I do a temporary redirect if it's permanent? Exactly. I think it's

probably just, probably that article noticed that it is passing Jews, right? And there is some documentation. I read some other articles about when you do 301 redirects, you end up with like a 10% loss in the value of the link equity. And so make sure you're not doing multiple redirects. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. At the end of the day, I wrote on here, be responsible. Like, like if you know, you got some broken links, you know that you've made some site migration, some changes. And some people are in a position where they don't really care because they don't get a lot of traffic. And so it's a new redesign. They're just trying to start over. But if your site's been up for a while and maybe, maybe it wasn't converting, but it's been up for a while, do not guarantee your pages are in Google's index. It's important to go ahead and 301 knows anyway, just because you'll be happy you did later. Number 10. 10. Hey, this is a good one here. I hadn't heard of this in a minute. A meta refresh, meta refresh, old tactic. Remember meta refresh? So he says the meta refresh is a client side as opposed to a server side redirect and is not recommended by Google or professional SEO. This is like you go to a site and then all of a sudden it refreshes and redirects you to another site. He's saying outdated tactic. Don't do it. Right. And he's absolutely right. Like if you're in a position where you only time that's kind of cool. Cause I've seen it is when you tell people it's going to happen and it's after the reason with the reason, 20 seconds, 15, 10. And it's counting down. It's like, this page is going to redirect you here after this. Okay, fine. But if I really just clicked on a broken link and you got a meta refresh instead of a 301 redirect, that's a problem. Because you essentially told Google that this old page is still okay

and it's not, right? That old page has never even been in the index. It should have just been totally omitted and a redirect should take them to the new page. So don't do it. Just don't do it. That's a very old kind of 2000, 2005 tactic. Yeah. Um, uh, just use a redirect and keep it pushing. Number 11. 11. Um, XML sitemaps. Good one, Joe. He says, XML sitemaps help Google and other search engine spiders crawling, understand your site. Um, and that's just it. That's exactly what those spiders do. And so you want to make sure that's exactly what the XML sitemaps do. And you want to make sure that you, that you even have it set up. Yeah. What I've noticed is with newer clients we get is I'm kind of auditing sites, you know, robots. TXT wasn't set up or was set up incorrectly, or they have an XML sitemap. That's just not configured. Not updated, not updated or updating correctly. And usually it's because it's like a new WordPress install and somebody has installed like XML sitemap plugin and Yoast and then something else. And all of those have an XML sitemap. Fighting over the XML. Exactly. And so your, your XML file isn't configured correctly. All right. So we, and then ironically, when you put that URL to the XML sitemap in, it becomes a 404 page because it's not configured correctly. Right, right. And so an inconfigured XML file effectively is a broken link. And so you want to make sure that this XML file, uh, works, right. That when you do it, it shows you an index of the pages that are on your site. And then once you've done that, uh, go ahead and manually submit it. Webmaster to search console, uh, being webmaster tools, manually submit it, and then configure your tool, whatever plugin you're using in your CRM. I mean, your CMS to do it as you add new posts and new pages. Number 12, 12 unnatural word count and page size. Again, we're talking to

14 technical SEO problems. That's damaging your site and what you had and how to fix them now. Number 12, unnatural word count and page size. He says this can slow down the load speed of your page and could possibly trigger some penalty issues if it's seen as intentional cloaking. Now what he was really referring to in this case was, um, he, he, he audited a site and from the view, it looked like the site only had a few hundred words, but then when he ran screaming frog and some other tools, this page just had, you know, 6,000 words and he's like, what's going on? Well, he found some hidden, uh, matter of fact, he said he found a terms and conditions text that was being hidden by a CSS style called display none. And so on the site that terms and conditions text wasn't being seen, but from a Google bot, it was indexing all of that, which is the problem. You don't ever want to display the user something totally different. You're displaying Google. Well, so, so, so the, the, the, the black hat part of that is, so technically they're not breaking any rules in terms of a black hat thing because they're showing the same thing to Google as they are to a user. The Google bot doesn't have the capability to open it, right? Or sees, or it's hidden. Maybe even the user doesn't. So it's literally the code is the same. When you really bump into black hat techniques and the cloaking that he's talking about is when I literally am doing, Hey, are you a Google bot? Oh, then here's. Yeah. He just showed us the Google bot and showed us to having, so that's kind of the technical aspect of, of cloaking, the black hat technique of cloaking. What this is just talking about is probably they didn't know they were doing it. Yeah. That's what I think he said. It was a bunch of crap, unrelated content that, you know, it's a technical error, right? Yeah. That's

what he said. He said it could possibly trigger some penalty issues. So he's not saying the scene is cloaking, but Google do got, you know, office buildings loaded with people who kind of figure this stuff out. Yeah. And if they come across your site, right? That's, uh, that only got 300 words, but you got 6,000 of them. Yeah. They'll, they'll probably give you a manual. Well, and also the, you know, we talk about keyword density, still an important factor of something that you should, should be aware of. Um, and, and you say, okay, well now I have six, you know, I have 5,000 words of my, uh, terms and conditions nowhere relevant to any page you have. I mean, how many people have terms and conditions that are actually relevant to the, you know, a couple of pages now, not really. Right. None at all. So what I said here was, was check your content and check your code, right? At the end of the day, look at the content. Is this looks like what's in the code? Is it about the same? Make sure that, that it is the same, frankly, that you're giving the same experience to both the user and to, to the, uh, to the spider and use a webmaster tools to, to view as a definitely a lot. Yeah, definitely. Number 13, 13 speed. He says, Google has clearly stated that speed is a small part of the algorithm. He, matter of fact, a quote from Google, like us, our users place a lot of value in speed. That's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites. Duh. At the end of the day, we all know page speed is, is, is, is important. Good experience to the Google user. Google will, uh, um, reflect that accordingly. At the end of the day, people want fast. And then when it's time for fast, they want faster. And, and,

and that's just what it is. So, so check, use the page speed test. It's kind of the fastest way to kind of at least get a brief understanding of what you could do on your site to make it faster. Go to the page speed test. They'll give you a lot of recommendations. Frankly, some that may or may not be irrelevant, but you know, you just, it is what it is. Kind of compression images, apply some cash plugin and keep it moving. Just be, just be wary of that page speed test because it really is, it's not a test of your speed. It's not, and that's the, the, the mission, the misunderstanding of it. It's something. It's what it is, is it's a go, no go, right? So a check or an X, um, on what are you using the technologies that you could use in order to have your site move faster. Yeah. So it's not saying, oh, your site is super slow. It's saying, Hey, you didn't compress. You didn't do this to your JavaScript. You didn't do this and you didn't do that. Your site could still, your site could be extremely fast. I've ran that tool. I've gotten like 0.3 second download time for, for the actual page. And then Google's given it like a less than 50 on mobile and desktop. And I'm like, you know, I have to explain cause it's part of our process. I have to explain like this. Don't worry about this. If your site were over three seconds, maybe even over 2.75, we're going to start digging into these things. And the last one, uh, uh, number 14, um, internal linking structure, right? He says, uh, your, your internal linking structure can have a huge impact on your site's callability from search spiders. If you're optimizing a mass site with isolated pages that don't fall within a clean site architecture, a few clicks from the homepage, you will need to put a lot of effort into it. Then today he's talking about how people navigate between

the pages on your website, right? And we all know that the pages that you want to rank, the pages that you've been optimized, they really need to be accessible, uh, pretty prominently within the main menu, main navigation, right? And so he's saying your internal linking structure needs to take that into consideration. If you have tons of pages that, that aren't accessible from the main menu, or you can't find them in a dropdown or not in the footer, um, then you need to address your internal linking strategy. What we want to do or what I'd encourage you to do, um, is actually a process we've been doing internally is making sure not only that our main menu items are in the main navigation, our kind of targeted pages, but then like all supporting blog posts and things like that, all within the content link to one of the main menu items that, that, that's relevant to that blog post. So that way our internal linking strategy has cross links from the menu, from the content, from the footer, all to these various pages on the website and Google can easily index and find our content. Your internal linking structure is important. So is the speed, the indexation, the HTTPS, 301s, and the other 14 tips that Joe said. Uh, punch in the face to you, Joe Robinson, man. Great detailed article. A lot of information in here. I suggest our followers, um, um, I tweeted it. Like go read the whole thing. He got some really great information in here. We'll have it posted, uh, how to find and fix 14 technical SEO problems that could be damaging your site right now. Like good article, though. Punch in the face. That's good stuff. Yeah. I can tell you put a lot of time into it. Yeah. You put a lot of time. We had some screenshots and some research. And so, uh, yeah, I appreciate it. Good stuff. Do we have any what news? Um, did I have some what? Oh, I do got some what

news. What news? Man, this one here, this what news, I actually got two of them. I'm going to do, uh, I'm going to do the BlackBerry one first. All right. BlackBerry. Okay. The fact that I said BlackBerry. Yeah. It's like, what? Exactly. So, so the BlackBerry KeyOne, remember they sold out, they got a new owner, TLC, TCL, to some Chinese companies, Chinese electronic manufacturer. They bought BlackBerry. So they're bringing it back out with the KeyOne. The KeyOne will be available next month. Next month, in addition to the physical keyboard, right, keeping the BlackBerry tradition, the KeyOne has a 4.5 inch touchscreen, 12 megapixel camera, and a 625 processor, whatever that means. Here's why they get blanks there. Here's why they get blanks there. Because it's running on Android. The BlackBerry is running on Android. Yeah. And so, you know. That's a decent strategy, right? I get it. I totally get it. Like, but at the same time, like. I know you're still shedding a little tear for when you gave up your BlackBerry. Come on, man. I used to be team BlackBerry, man. And, you know. And I was, I liked the BlackBerry OS. Well, it was until I had to go to Android because I was doing something. Yeah. And then it was like, ooh, marshmallow. Yeah. Yeah. This is. Delicious. Delicious. And easy to use. And sync with my Google. And I don't miss the keyboard that much. As much as I thought I would. Yeah, yeah. But the way the key one looks, looks like it's going to be easy to type on. Okay. Looks like I could probably get a lot accomplished. And so, I'm curious to see how it works. You may try it out. It was on Android. And it's on Android. Still team Android. Exactly. It's probably a really smart decision. Yeah, but like. Just the irony. The irony. Oh, the irony. And so, my other what news goes to, goes to, this is just. So, that one was BlackBerry. You dig this. Merriam-Webster. Okay. Dictionary company, right?

New word to the dictionary. They tweeted it. Guess what this new word is? Sheeple. Sheeple. Sheeple. Those people who just follow. Yeah, sheeple. Or people who are docile, complain, or easily influenced. But guess who they used as an example. This is why they get what news today. They used as an example. Of sheeple. Sheeple. Apple users. Man. Now. Oh, the irony. Right? Because the busting through Big Brother. Yeah. Sheeple. All of that. Wow. Yeah, so. And Webster included that. That's their example as for sheeple. Wow. In this position there. Man. He is rolling over. Team Android. In his grave, huh? Oh, man. I just thought that was hilarious. That is hilarious. Yeah, so. That's my what news, man. Man. You might need to save that screenshot and say like, hey, dude, I'm not a sheeple. I'm team Android. Like, I'm really not a sheeple. So you take the picture of the sheeple, right? When you're going head to head with your buddy who's got the iPhone. And you just take that screenshot and say, hey, here's why I don't use that. Our designers are sheeple. Yeah. According to Webster. We'll let him have it. Hey. Man. If you like this podcast, first, thanks for listening. And we're going to ask you to do one small favor. If you could, share this podcast with three different people. Share it right now. Like, if you're watching live on Facebook, shout out to y'all who are punching the face to y'all who are doing that right now. Go ahead and hit the share icon. Tag three people who are business owners. Somebody who could probably benefit from some internet marketing. Or maybe you watch this on YouTube or copy the link, share it, tweet it out, tag three people in it. We so appreciate it. Or if you're in your podcast app, I'm sure they'll be able to share that with the three-ponged icon at the top somewhere. Click that. If you're an Android user. If you're a sheeple, we appreciate you, too. I don't even know what

the share icon on iPhone looks like. Sheeple are people, too. That's just awesome. Hey, if you're looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet, call EO Results for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. We have a program called Instant Leads. Leads, leads, leads, leads. Guaranteed. T, T, T. By the way, it's really fun because we're getting people calling in like, well, let me talk about this program. Instant Leads. You've heard it on the podcast. Instant Leads, leads, leads. Everyone laughs. It's awesome. So that program is really actually about exactly what Steve is doing. We may be behind the curve because we've just brought this out recently. We've always, by the way, we've always done PPC. We've always been focused on leads. But to hyper-focus on it, now we've got one particular product that does that. It's basically driving PPC traffic to a highly optimized conversion landing page so that you get instant leads. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. So again, you can reach out to us, 713-592-6724. Or you can just go to our website, click the green button. If you have a referral, if that is somebody who's interested in internet marketing, yes, we do websites. Yes, we do social media. Yes, we do all internet marketing. Pay-per-click management, social media marketing, email marketing. Don't get them started. Yeah, custom website design. I'm missing one. I'm missing one. SEO technical correction. Exactly. Email, SEO, pay-per-click, social media marketing. And so, yeah, we do all of the above. Send us a referral. They pay that bill, we'll pay you. Yeah. Yeah, that's our referral program that's in place. Is that out? Please remember, we are filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas. Houston, Texas. 092. It's a great day to be a sports fan in Houston. Yes, it is. And it's a gorgeous day. I don't know. You kind of came in and had your head down. It was a gorgeous day outside, too. If you would like a transcript, video,

or audio of this podcast, you can get it on our website, ewebresults.com. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. You and the people who are in comics and SEO and the people who are always retweeting us and commenting. Chris. Steve. Yeah. It's for you guys. Thank you so much. Thank you. Go ahead and reach out with us, out to us, connect with us. We appreciate you. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Well, hold on a second. Are we doing a podcast next week? Maybe. Maybe. We may be skipping next week podcasts because I'm going to be out. On vacation. Or I may bring it to you myself, or I may convince him to Skype in. We'll figure it out. But until the next podcast, I'm Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Balance check. 371. SEO podcast 371. It's time to have some fun. Chris and Chuck getting it done. Today, we're talking about technical SEO problems. Shout out to Miles and Joe Robinson. Let's go. SEO podcast 371. Make sure you subscribe and follow. Boom.