Basic SEO Troubleshooting - Being Seen
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If you keep in mind how search engine spiders work, all of the things I’m listing to check in this section will seem obvious. But they can also be missed inadvertently, which is why it’s always good to check them. Think of it as part of good site maintenance, or even "site hygiene," to coin a phrase.
A robots.txt file is a good thing; it tells the search engine spiders whether or not to crawl a particular page. That can be important if you have certain content set up to be seen by subscribers only. But if your robots.txt file is set up wrong, the spiders could be avoiding web pages you actually want them to see, thus preventing the pages from being indexed.
Likewise, a search engine spider can’t follow a broken link on your site. Neither can a human visitor. Make sure all of your links work perfectly.
Do you have any nofollow tags on your internal links? Google honors that tag, which means it doesn’t follow a link with that tag at all – not for awarding “link juice,” and not for indexing. Keep that in mind when you set up your site’s architecture and linking scheme.
Do you have any pages without content? While a site is always “under construction,” you never know when the search engine spiders will be paying a visit to index your site. You want to show them your best face. Keep those oddball pages to a minimum.
How good is your site navigation? It doesn’t have to be fancy, but for the sake of both your human visitors and the search engines, it should be consistent, with general categories leading to more specific topics within the categories. SEO Chat, for example, has a long list of navigation links on the left side. You can visit a variety of topics which we cover in our articles, such as “link trading,” “search optimization,” and others. Click on the category, and you get a list of articles; clicking on an article title will take you to the first page of that article. It’s very predictable.
Speaking of content, you’ll also want to check for duplicate content. You need to find out whether someone else is duplicating your site's content (in which case Google, who can’t really tell which site was there first, might be penalizing you by mistake). You also need to find out whether you have duplicate content on your own site – whether you’re duplicating someone else’s content, and whether some of your pages are so similar that Google sees the two pages as identical, and chooses to index just one. There are a variety of tools you can use to check this; just Google “duplicate content check.” Or you can just Google some key phrases from the content that you think has been copied, and see what comes up.
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