Weekly SEO news: 24 April 2018
Welcome to the latest issue of our newsletter!

Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please forward this newsletter to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. SEO checklist part 1: find out if your website is ready for high rankings

Getting high rankings can be complicated if you do not have a clear plan. Our SEO checklist helps you to find out if you have done everything to make sure that your web pages can get high rankings on Google and other search engines.

SEO checklist - part 1

Step 1: Technical things that should be checked

Before you optimize your pages, there are several technical things that you have to check:

1. Check the uptime of your website

If your web host promises an uptime of 99.9%, your website can be down for more than 8 hours per year. It is important that you choose a reliable web host with an uptime that is higher than 99.9%. The uptime monitor tool in SEOprofiler helps you to monitor the uptime of your website.

2. Make sure that your web pages use HTTPS

HTTPS pages are no longer an option. They are a must-have for any website. HTTPS makes sure that your website visitors can enter their data securely. In addition, Google prefers secure web pages.

Make sure that your website uses HTTPS and that your HTTP pages redirect to the HTTPS version. The website audit tool in SEOprofiler checks the security settings of your website.

Also check if your website has been hacked with Google's safe browsing tool.

3. Check your web pages for duplicate content

Either use your website domain with www or without www. Do not use both versions. Use a single URL format so that Google can find the preferred version of your website. Use the rel=canonical tag

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler checks your web pages for duplicate content (full duplicates and partial duplicates).

4. Check your website for server errors

If your web pages return the wrong HTTP status code, Google and other search engines won't index your web pages correctly. Check your web pages to make sure that your website does not contain '404 not found', '403 forbidden', '500 internal server error' or other bad HTTP status codes. The website audit tool in SEOprofiler will do that for you. You can create your SEOprofiler account here to check your pages now.

You should also avoid links to redirected pages on your website. If the website audit tool shows redirects on your website, correct these links so that they point to the right page on your site.

5. Check the indexability of your web pages

Search engine won't index your web pages if there is an error in your robots.txt file, or if there are the wrong indexing tags on your pages.

The website audit tool checks the indexability of all pages of your website. Quickly find the pages that search engines cannot index and make sure that search engines can access them.

5. Check the link depth

Important pages of your website should not be available with a maximum of two clicks from your home page.

Pages that require more clicks often cannot be found by website visitors. The website audit tool shows you how many clicks people need to find particular pages on your website.

6. Avoid JavaScript navigation

Each page of your website should have its own URL. Otherwise, it is will be very difficult to get high rankings for the individual pages of your site.

Although Google can index JavaScript to some extent, JavaScript navigation can make indexation of your web pages very difficult (and impossible for some crawlers). In addition, your users won't be able to link to a particular page of your website.

Avoid JavaScript navigation and use regular HTML links for the navigational elements on your website.

Check your website now

These are the most important technical things that you should check to make sure that your web pages get high rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. Next week, we're taking a look at the on-page things that you have to check.

The tools in SEOprofiler help you to check your pages as efficiently as possible. You also get tools to optimize your pages. You can create your free SEOprofiler account here:

Optimize your links

2. Internet marketing news of the week

John MuellerGoogle's John Mueller: how to reverse a move to a new website URL structure

"In a webmaster hangout on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller explained how to reverse a move to a new website URL structure. He also said that this is not a simple task. [...]

In general, this is something that might might be a bit tricky on on our side."


New undetectable type of negative SEO attack uncovered

"This new, more sophisticated type of negative SEO doesn’t involve links per se–it involves canonical tags, and, more specifically, cross-domain canonical tags. So, the site doing the negative SEO isn’t linking to your web site. They’re using canonical tags. [...]

They take Site B, which is either a hacked site or a domain name that has bad links (a burned domain/spammed domain). On Site B they copy the 'head' of Site A’s pages (line by line) and put them on pages on Site B. Site B pages have canonical tags pointing back to the Victim/target site Site A."


GoogleGoogle may issue manual actions over job schema on expired job listings

"You'd better remove job listings from your website shortly after you fill those positions, or Google may penalize your website. [...]

If you are using job schema to mark up your job listings, and those jobs are not currently available, Google will remove the ability for your job schema to show up in the search results or in the Google jobs search results."


Google: do not link hreflang to redirecting URLs

"For sites that are using hreflang, especially those who are utilizing 301 and 302 redirects for any reason, it is a reminder that all hreflang URLs should not be linked to redirected URLs. [...]

if you are doing a site redesign, for example, or even just redirecting pages for any reason, you need to ensure your hreflang is still linking to the actual URL for each language and not to a URL that is also being redirected."

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