Closing a spider trap: fix crawl inefficiencies
We recently made some changes to how yoast.com is run as a shop and how it’s hosted. In that process, we accidentally removed our robots.txt file and caused a so-called spider trap to open. In this post, I’ll show you what a spider trap is, why it’s problematic and how you can find and fix […]
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SEO for a new website: the very first things to do
How does a new website start ranking? Does it just magically appear in Google after you’ve launched it? What things do you have to do to start ranking in Google and get traffic from the search engines? Here, I explain the first steps you’ll need to take right after the launch of your new website. […]
Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way
We’ve said it in 2009, and we’ll say it again: it keeps amazing us that there are still people using just a robots.txt files to prevent indexing of their site in Google or Bing. As a result their site shows up in the search engines anyway. You know why it keeps amazing us? Because robots.txt […]
Ask Yoast: Block your site’s search results pages?
Every website should have a decent internal search functionality that shows the visitors search results that fit their search query. However, those search results pages on your site don’t need to be shown in Google’s search results. In fact, Google advises against this too; it’s not a great user experience to click on a Google search result, […]
Block your site’s search result pages
Why should you block your internal search result pages for Google? Well, how would you feel if you are in dire need for the answer to your search query and end up on the internal search pages of a certain website? That’s one crappy experience. Google thinks so too. And prefers you not to have these internal […]
SEO basics: What is crawlability?
Ranking in the search engines requires a website with flawless technical SEO. Luckily, the Yoast SEO plugin takes care (of almost) everything on your WordPress site. Still, if you really want to get most out of your website and keep on outranking the competition, some basic knowledge of technical SEO is a must. In this post, […]
Ask Yoast: should I redirect my affiliate links?
There are several reasons for cloaking or redirecting affiliate links. For instance, it’s easier to work with affiliate links when you redirect them, plus you can make them look prettier. But do you know how to cloak affiliate links? We explained how the process works in one of our previous posts. This Ask Yoast is […]
Ask Yoast: nofollow layered navigation links?
If you have a big eCommerce site with lots of products, layered navigation can help your users to narrow down their search results. Layered or faceted navigation is an advanced way of filtering by providing groups of filters for (many) product attributes. In this filtering process, you might create a lot of URLs though, because the user […]
Playing with the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header
Traditionally, you will use a robots.txt file on your server to manage what pages, folders, subdomains or other content search engines will be allowed to crawl. But did you know that there’s also such a thing as the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header? In this post we’ll discuss what the possibilities are and how this might be […]
Don’t block CSS and JS files
In 2015, Google Search Console already started to warn webmasters actively not to block CSS and JS files. In 2014, we told you the same thing: don’t block CSS and JS files. We feel the need to repeat this message now. We’re currently working on the websites of our first Yoast SEO Care customers, and this […]
Crawl budget optimization
Google doesn’t always spider every page on a site instantly. In fact, sometimes it can take weeks. This might get in the way of your SEO efforts. Your newly optimized landing page might not get indexed. At that point, it becomes time to optimize your crawl budget. Crawl budget is the time Google has in a given […]
robots.txt: the ultimate guide
The robots.txt file is one of the primary ways of telling a search engine where it can and can’t go on your website. All major search engines support the basic functionality it offers. There are some extra rules that are used by a few search engines which can be useful too. This guide covers all […]
rel=canonical • What it is and how (not) to use it
In February 2009, six years to the day from when this is published, Google, Bing and Yahoo! introduced the rel=canonical link element (Matt’s post is probably the easiest reading). While the idea is simple, the specifics of how to use it turn out to be complex. The basic premise is: if you have several similar…
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