Weekly SEO news: 22 January 2019
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Here are the latest website promotion and Internet marketing tips for you.

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Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO

1. How to check if your pages have the right HTTP status codes (and other indexability issues)

If your web pages have the wrong HTTP status codes, Google and other search engines won't index your web pages. Unfortunately, many webmasters don't know that their pages deliver the wrong HTTP status codes. If search engines, do not list your pages, you should check their indexability.

How to check HTTP status codes

What are HTTP status codes?

HTTP status codes are issued by a server in response to a client's request made to the server. HTTP status codes are separated into five categories. Only status codes that start with 2 mean that the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted. In general, web pages should deliver a "200 OK" status code.

All other HTTP status codes mean that there was a problem with the requested page. For example, 3xx codes usually mean that the page redirects to another URL, 4xx codes mean that the page could not be found, or that there was another problem with the request. 5xx HTTP status codes mean that there was a problem with the server that delivers the page.

If you want to make sure that Google and other search engines list your web pages, your web pages should deliver a "200 OK" HTTP status code.

How to check the HTTP status code of your web pages

You should check the status codes of your web pages regularly. There can always be changes on your server that inadvertently change the HTTP status codes.

The easiest way to check the status codes of your web pages is to use the website audit tool in SEOprofiler. The audit tool automatically checks all pages of your site and it shows indexability issues on the page "Indexability":

View all HTTP status codes of your website

Click the "Show pages" button next to a status code to view the pages on your website that have the corresponding HTTP status code. It's as easy as that.

Other factors that influence the indexability of your web pages

In addition to the HTTP status code of your web pages, the website audit tool also checks other things that influence the indexability of your web pages, including canonical tags, robots.txt and noindex tags.

The website audit tool checks your web pages for many more signals that influence the position of your web pages on search engines: duplicate content, empty titles, click depth, body text, etc.

Check the HTTP status codes of your web pages now

Create your SEOprofiler account now to check the HTTP status codes and the indexability of your web pages. The website audit report will run immediately after creating your account:

Check HTTP status codes now

2. Internet marketing news of the week

GoogleGoogle algorithm update 2019: news sites and blogs impacted by the major algorithm update in January

"Google rolled out an incremental Algorithm update – the first in 2019. The impact of the Algorithm Update was hard on News websites and Blogs of various niches. This is why we named the latest Google Update as the 'Newsgate Algorithm Update.'"


DuckDuckGo debuts map search results using Apple Maps

"The privacy-focused search engine that promises to never track its users said Tuesday it’s now using data provided by Apple Maps to power its map-based search results. [...] Now, DuckDuckGo will return addresses, businesses, geographical locations and nearby places using Apple Maps by default."

GoogleNew study: links as a ranking factor – still going strong

"Links are a major ranking factor [...] The sample results shown here have been repeated hundreds of times by us. However, we don’t find that links can rescue poor quality content, or cause low relevance content to rank. Also, all of our efforts focus on getting recognition from, or content published on, very high authority sites."

Summary: Links are extremely important if you want to get high rankings. However, you need good content first. SEOprofiler helps you to optimize both.


Microsoft’s Bing Ads going to be the exclusive search adverting platform for Verizon Media properties, including Yahoo and AOL

"We estimate that our enhanced partnership could result in an increase in clicks across the Bing Ads marketplace for customers targeting the United States of up to 10-15%. [...] Microsoft and Verizon Media are working to complete the full transition of worldwide traffic by the end of March 2019."


+++ SEARCH +++ ENGINE +++ NEWS +++ TICKER +++

  • New in SEOprofiler: specify the number of audit pages when adding a new project.
  • New in SEOprofiler: Optimization scores on the audit overview page.
  • Google Japan hit with back taxes after failing to report ad income.
  • Announcing Newspack by WordPress.com — A new publishing solution for news organizations.
  • Russian regulator demands Google filters search results.
  • Google: Ways to succeed in Google News.
  • Google: you should keep your 301 redirects for years.

3. Previous articles

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