Technical SEO: How to Identify & fix Google Search Console Issues Part - 2

This is part 2 of the Google Search Console Issues fixing. This series is written for beginner-level SEOs who are interested in getting introduced to Technical SEO. I hope this guide will help you start your journey to fix the GSC Issues. You can comment below if have any difficulties understanding anything on this post.

2. Canonical and Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate without Canonical Tag:?

A duplicate page is harmful to any website. But in some cases, you may need a duplicate page. But, you must set up a canonical tag for the primary page for the duplicate pages.?

In my experience, I’ve worked on some websites, where the canonical tag is set to its primary page, even if the duplicate page is indexed. So, it is also advised to set nofollow-noindex tags for the duplicate page or block them using the robots.txt file.

Duplicate, Google Chose Different Canonical than User:?

Google assigned a different canonical than the one selected by the user. This is a little bit of a crucial problem and sometimes can make you confused. These issues can happen in two situations: a) URLs that you want to index; and b) URLs you don’t want to index

?? The issues can happen for the following reasons:

i) Pages with Low-quality/ duplicate Content/ Keyword Cannibalization affected.

ii) If the canonical tag is not defined.

iii) URLs, you don’t want to index, but found in the XML sitemap or internally linked from your website or get a backlink from any external website.

iv) Check if the affected pages are using HTTPS protocol.

v) Check if the affected URLs return a 200 status code.?

vi) Check if the canonical tag is not set to a duplicate page.

? Fixing the issue:

a) Use a self-referencing canonical link on the canonical URL.

b) Find the page that Google has selected as the canonical tag. If it is a duplicate page, then it should not have self-referencing canonical links and link to the canonical URL instead.

c) Remove duplicate and non-canonical pages from the XML sitemap.

d) Check if you link internally to non-canonical versions of the page and make sure you link internally to the canonical URLs only.

e) Check if there are only HTTPS version pages linked internally instead of the HTTP version.

f) Make sure the canonical page returns the HTTP 200 status code.

Duplicate without User-selected Canonical:?

The page is recognized as a duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google has chosen the other page as the canonical for this page. So this page will not serve in the SERP. Inspect this URL to find which URL Google considers canonical for this page.

? If you find another URL with duplicate content by mistake, then remove the affected URL.

? You may find duplicate URLs with different URL patterns like “search/affected-URL”. It may be okay to keep both URLs based on the structure of your website. So, you can ignore this issue, or you can nofollow, or noindex the affected page.

? Set your preferred domain whether ‘www’ or ‘non-www’. It can also raise duplicate issues if not set.

3. Error Responses

Not Found (404): Standard 404 error indicating the page doesn’t exist.

This is not an actual issue all the time. You need to check the affected page manually to decide whether it is an actual or happened intentionally. But if you removed any page, make sure:

i) You update all the internal links for that page

ii) You can use 301 redirection to the relevant page.

Blocked due to Other 4xx Issues: Other client-side errors, generally in the 4xx range.

This happens due to an error on a browser or client’s side (search engine). There may be various reasons for this error. The best way to use the URL inspection tool is to check the live page status. It could be 403, 411, 429, 422, 429 etc. If you see everything is fine on the live test, then leave the page as it was. Sometimes it occurs for a temporary time. If you find any error code, then analyze it and take proper action.

Server Error (5xx): Server-side error while handling a redirect.

All the 5xx errors indicate server-side errors where your website's server has failed to perform a request. You need to contact the hosting provider to fix the issue.

Soft 404: The pages are perceived as low-value or empty, considered similar to a 404. This happens when the webpage does not have any content, and doesn't return a 404 response too. Google identifies those URLs as a soft 404.?

Check those URLs manually, if they do not provide any value, then you can i) set a 404 response, ii) Redirect to relevant pages, iii) If the pages are valuable, then properly return a 200 response.

3. Blocking and Access Restrictions

Excluded by "noindex" Tag: Page excluded from index by a "noindex" directive.

This could happen intentionally. Check the page manually. Remove the noindex tag if the page should be indexed.

Blocked by robots.txt: Blocked from crawling by robots.txt rules.

Check the page manually. Update robots.txt to allow crawling of the page (remove the disallow directive) if you want to index the page.

Blocked due to Unauthorized Request (401): Access requires authorization (401 Unauthorized).

Check the affected page manually. If you don’t want to index the affected page, check if you have linked this page unintentionally or added it to the XML sitemap. To index the page, update permissions, or provide proper authorization credentials.

Here is the part-1: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/technical-seo-how-identify-fix-google-search-console-issues-rahman-ehvlc

Like, Comment, Repost If you Love. I am Sohanoor???? Click my name + follow + ??

Talking regularly about #TechnicalSEO #ContentStrategy #LocalSEO #Branding #SEO