[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/fix-site-search-seo-issues\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/fix-site-search-seo-issues\/","headline":"How to Fix Site: Search SEO Issues","name":"How to Fix Site: Search SEO Issues","description":"Are you getting different results when you search “site:www.yourdomain.com” and “site:yourdomain.com”? Maybe you have 100K pages indexed, but only 18K that should be in Google or your www version has 50K and the non www has 200K. \u00a0Here is how to find, trouble shoot and fix these SEO issues with “site:” searches and a couple […]","datePublished":"2017-02-27","dateModified":"2017-02-27","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/author\/adamriemer\/#Person","name":"Adam Riemer","url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/author\/adamriemer\/","identifier":2,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/fda62f751f2a6c2ec2b079fedff69720852e4a65633212ffb11832454c29160a?s=96&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/fda62f751f2a6c2ec2b079fedff69720852e4a65633212ffb11832454c29160a?s=96&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Adam Riemer Marketing, LLC.","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/arm-logo-2.jpg","url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/arm-logo-2.jpg","width":600,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/howtofindandfixsitesearchissuesinGoogle.png","url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/howtofindandfixsitesearchissuesinGoogle.png","height":837,"width":1158},"url":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/fix-site-search-seo-issues\/","about":["SEO"],"wordCount":2616,"articleBody":"Are you getting different results when you search “site:www.yourdomain.com” and “site:yourdomain.com”? Maybe you have 100K pages indexed, but only 18K that should be in Google or your www version has 50K and the non www has 200K. \u00a0Here is how to find, trouble shoot and fix these SEO issues with “site:” searches and a couple of tools to make life easy.Which Issue Are You HavingDifferent amounts of pagesMore pages indexed than there should beDevalued content\/site visibilityFinding the issues:Use your keyword tracking toolsGoogle analyticsSearch\u00a0your CMSSolve the problems:Add www and non www to search consoleSet up redirects to your preferred version (extra bonus tips in this section)Canonical linksRobots.txtxrobotsNo index queriesFiguring out which pages should rank for what keywordsThese site: issues can result in numerous things from devaluing your site to thin content, duplicate content and an overall reduction in search engine visibility. \u00a0That’s why it’s important to fix them. \u00a0Although there is not a one way fixes all solution, here are some starting points. \u00a0The post is broken out by the three most common issues I see. \u00a0After I go into determining the cause of the issues and ways to help resolve them.As we’re jumping into this post, some of the links below are affiliate links (because duhhh) and I will earn a commission if you shop through them. \u00a0If any of them aren’t and a program opens in the future, I can assure you I will be joining and changing them out. \u00a0It won’t affect your prices at all. \u00a0Which Issue Are You Having?Different amounts of pages:The first thing to do here is to go to Google and type “site:yourdomain.com” and “site:www.yourdomain.com” into the search box. \u00a0If one is giving you more than the other, site:www.yourdomain.com gives 400K and site:yourdomain.com gives you 200K, then you have a page indexing issue. \u00a0These are extremely common so don’t worry. \u00a0I go into a lot of detail below to trouble shoot and resolve this.More pages indexed than there should be:The next thing to look at is how many pages are indexed on your preferred version (www or non www) compared to what should be indexed. \u00a0The important thing to know here is that MORE DOES NOT EQUAL BETTER. \u00a0In fact, in many cases, more indexed pages could actually be worse for you and your site.If you only have 18K pages with good content like blog posts, category\/product pages, how to guides, etc… but you have more pages indexed, your site can become “thin” and may not appear as well in the indexes. \u00a0You could also have pages competing for visibility which may reduce your ability to rank.The important thing here is that MORE DOES NOT EQUAL BETTER.Devalued content\/site visibility:If you had stable rankings, have not gotten a penalty, but have noticed your pages or specific categories start to slip, this could be something that you trouble shoot in a similar way to the “site:” SEO issues. \u00a0Some of the time when I see rankings slipping but there’s no explanation and the competitors aren’t doing anything new, it’s because of competing pages. \u00a0I’ll share a tool to find this and how to tackle it in the post.Finding the issues:Now that you’v determined your site has issues with site: searches, it’s time to find what is causing these issues. \u00a0There’s a few places to look. \u00a0The first thing to do is to figure out the issue, then start using the strategies and resources below.Here is how to trouble shoot why you have more pages or too many pages showing up on a site: search in Google:Figure out how many pages are indexedGet an estimate of how many pages should be indexed by\u00a0auditing your CMS and databases to include:product pagesblog postscategoriesimportant company info (press room, about us, homepage, etc…)compare that to what is showing up (and see if it is more or less)if its more, you need to start narrowing down the excess pagesif its less you need to begin finding out why you aren’t being crawled and indexed rightnow compare that to the alternate version (www vs. non www)read below to begin fixing the issuesUse your keyword tracking tools:I cannot stress how much I love this tool in particular. \u00a0They’re also going to be launching some new features which will help with even more of these issues as well as negative SEO in the hopefully near future. \u00a0(I link to it again at the bottom of the post so you don’t have to re-find it). \u00a0This one can be used as well, but the other one makes it a lot easier…if you don’t have either then I recommend you try them both out. \u00a0It isn’t as good for these solutions, but I do recommend it for many other things.When looking at the ranking reports in the first tool you want to see how many pages you have showing up for specific keywords. \u00a0If there is more than 1 page per keyword, you have an issue. \u00a0If they are duplicated pages, look at the xrobots and robots.txt sections below. \u00a0If they are unique but similar pages, look at the “figuring out which pages should rank for what terms” section.Google analyticsGo to Aquisition > Channels > Landing Page >\u00a0Source then sort by Google.Now click on the open in a new window box that is showing up and see if it is the right URL that should be indexed. \u00a0Sometimes you’ll discover that other versions have been created and could be causing anything from duplication issues and competing pages to thin content. \u00a0I come across this fairly often when doing site audits.Search\u00a0your CMS:You’re probably thinking what does my CMS have to do with this? \u00a0It only hosts the content. \u00a0That’s the exact issue. \u00a0From custom built systems to wordpress, your CMS spits out the URLs, uses tags and creates the pages that show up in the wild. \u00a0That is why it is important to know how and why it is producing pages.Tags for example could be creating duplicate or thin content if they aren’t blocked. User generated content (UGC) that is controlled or placed by a CMS within your website or blog (forums, guest blogging accounts, reviews, feedback, etc…) could be issues. \u00a0The excessive pages that aren’t being blocked could also be leftover from years ago or a previous person at your company.Want more potential indexing issues based on your CMS?You could have category copy being pulled over to new pages on search queries without canonical links. \u00a0If search queries ae indexable, this could create thin content as indexed pages (i.e. product mixes with ugly URLs that have no unique content or actual purpose to the site). \u00a0Allowing these to\u00a0be found and crawled at random may be wasting the amount of crawl time and bandwidth your site gets which could also lead to less indexing on your most important pages. \u00a0This could also be one of the reasons why not all of your pages are not showing up. \u00a0Although I’m not going to go into how to create a better crawl for your site to find the right pages (read this post on internal linking structures and other posts on this site), I am going to cover the rest of it to get you started on finding solutions to these issues.Solve the problems:Now is the fun part. \u00a0You hopefully now know what the issue is, so we need to create a solution that works specifically for this issue. \u00a0Below you are going to find multiple ways to either block pages from showing up, guide Google to finding the right version that should show up and also how to help prevent specific pages, categories and parameters from being crawled. \u00a0At the end of the post I’ll share a couple of tools I love that make life easy with this stuff.Add www and non www to search consoleThe first thing you need to do is see what Google sees for both the www and non www versions of your website. \u00a0Not only will search console give you different information for both, but you can find different backlinks, crawl rates, impressions and a lot of other things. \u00a0If you don’t have this, go do it now. \u00a0I’m repeating it multiple times for a reason.Set up redirects to your preferred versionNow go to your tech team and set up a 301 redirect to the preferred version of your website. \u00a0If your branding is YourDomain.com or www.YourDomain.com, choose the one that you prefer. \u00a0Everything else needs to automatically render to it. \u00a0This includes https vs http.Bonus: Make sure the redirects cover uppercase\/lower case on the main domain, trailing “\/” and other URL endings. \u00a0If your site has duplicate pages that can be indexed because one has a “\/” at the end or versions that use capital letters and lower case are inside Google’s indexes, set the redirects on these too. \u00a0They could cause duplicate content and competing page issues. \u00a0i.e. YourDomain.com should redirect to yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com\/Blog\/I-Loves-Me-Kitty should redirect to yourdomain.com\/blog\/i-loves-me-kitty if you prefer all lower case to caps.Canonical linksCanonical links are how you tell Google and other search engines which version of a page to index. \u00a0Go to your excess pages (tags, search queries, etc…) and look at the source code to see if canonical links are set.Bonus: Make sure that if you’re on a secure site that the canonical is also https. \u00a0If you’re on the mobile version and prefer the desktop as the main (until mobile first launches officially), then make sure it is pointing to the right place. \u00a0Canonicals can also\u00a0help to reduce the amount of excessive pages, especially if you have multiple versions of a product (same product with different sizes but not enough variation to justify a separate page…especially if you have size and variation options on the product page).Robots.txtIf you’re able to get your tech team to update your Robots.txt, you can disallow folders here like \/search\/ (replace search with the folder that is generated for search queries) to help block Google from crawling that folder and wasting your available crawl space. \u00a0You can also blog tags from blog posts, secure areas, thin content areas (if you have categories for UX but they are thin and shouldn’t be indexed), UGC, etc…If you want to see if a specific folder is indexed, look at your URL structure, go to Google and type in the base url up to the folder site:yourdomain.com\/blog\/folder\/xrobotsIf you can get your tech team to go one step futher, have them set xrobots on pages that are being indexed but shouldn’t be. \u00a0xrobots let you tell Google to do things like no index this page but follow the links to the important ones. \u00a0Important ones could be the proper version to show, they could be important pages within your site like high level categories and also help to increase your crawl efficiency.No index queriesOne thing I learned from Alan Bleiweiss a while back is a trick to no index parameters. \u00a0I’m linking to his site here so you can check with him (and contact him for an SEO audit if you don’t want to use me since he is amazing!). \u00a0It was also part of his State of Search presentation a couple of years back (slide 24).Figuring out which pages should rank for what termsNow we’re back to one of the tools my agency could not survive without. \u00a0Click here to go buy it…because its seriously worth it. \u00a0What I love about this tool in particular is that it not only gives you accurate ranking data (including when search boxes, answer boxes, local packs, etc… are included), but it also expands to show you which pages on your website are actually showing up. \u00a0Not many people realize how valuable this is.Here’s a common issue. \u00a0If you always ranked for “blue widgets” or another fictional term, but now started to slip, this could help resolve it. \u00a0Many marketers blame it on competitors or amazon, but the reality is it could be your own efforts. \u00a0Go into your rankings and see if other URLs are showing up and competing with your own site.Maybe your copy team decided to go after multiple version of blue widgets (travel size vs. family size) and created multiple pages with very similar content. \u00a0Sometimes you could be adding additional content or refreshing category content and accidentally created something that could compete with other pages. \u00a0Now Google thinks these pages are similar and is making them compete with each other. \u00a0All of these could cause rankings to slip or for you to fall off the first page.Once you know which pages are showing up for the queries, you can look at each and begin determining which should show up for what terms. \u00a0If they’re all similar (same shirt but one is in red and one is in blue), then my recommendation in most cases is to combine them and set the proper links for Google. \u00a0This also goes for sizes and other smaller variations, especially when you have them available or in a drop down\/select alternative options on the same page.Now you want to determine which page should be showing up for those queries and either use canonical, no index, etc… from above or figure out what the second pages should be showing up for.The original page should be showing up to buy the product and the new one\u00a0is better geared towards using the product (instead of selling a sub-pump for your basement, it’s how to install it). \u00a0Take that page and adjust it (title tag, content, code, etc…) so that it makes sense to show for different queries and so that it does not compete with the page that should be showing up for the original query. \u00a0Now go into search console and have Google fetch the page again.Before or while you’re changing the copy, etc… go into your keyword tracking tools and add the new queries so you can monitor what happens to the pages. \u00a0While Google and other search engines begin finding and indexing this new content, you should hopefully see it begin to drop off of the old queries so they can recover and hopefully start to climb for the new terms.Issues with site: searches seem tricky, but they’re actually fairly basic. \u00a0The thing to remember is a proper diagnosis. \u00a0More does not equal better or more opportunity and then determine what should be in the search engine indexes and what is excessive. \u00a0Now block the excess pages, set the proper redirects and everything else from above and watch to see them adjust to what should be there. \u00a0You can contact me if you’re having issues with this and don’t forget to buy the tools to help if you are able.Tool 1Tool 2Tool 3 (check your canonicals and .htaccess)"},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Seo","item":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"How to Fix Site: Search SEO Issues","item":"https:\/\/www.adamriemer.me\/seo\/fix-site-search-seo-issues\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]