Tips to fix your technical SEO issues

Technical SEO seems difficult and complicated. However, following few tips can make the life a bit easier of an SEO expert while dealing with common technical SEO problems.

1. Info:search operator

This search operator can tell you a lot about a web page on your site such as:

If a web page is indexed by Google or not. If the page is indexed, how Google sees it. How the cache version looks like. This search operator will show you the list of all the pages on your site that are indexed.

Google folds the web pages if it considers them similar or duplicates to each other. This command will show you the original version of a webpage which Google considers canonical, not the one that has canonical tag.

This command will show you all the web pages on your site, which can appear for a search query.

2. &filter=0

Adding the appendix above to the end of a URL on your site will remove all the filters and will show you all the versions of a web page in Google indexing. Which might help you to identify duplicate web pages and fix them.

This appendix will also tell you about other web pages on your site ranking for the same search query. You can consolidate your efforts and internally link the web page you want to rank for that search query.

3. site:search operator

This command will show you all the web pages indexed on your site and the way in which they are indexed by Google.

4. Site:domain.com keyword

This command will show you all the relevant web pages on your site ranking for a keyword. You can use this opportunity to interlink rest of the web pages ranking to the web page you want to rank in Google for that keyword.

It will also show you if your site is eligible to appear for a featured snippet for a keyword or phrase.

Use phrase instead of a keyword to find out if the content is indexed by Google or not for a Java Script driven site.

5. Static vs Dynamic:

Javascript can rewrite the HTML of your web page. ‘View source’ of Google’s cache shows you unprocessed code. It might be different from the one rewritten by JS.

Always use ‘inspect’ instead of ‘view source’ to check what is loaded by DOM (Document Object Model) and use ‘fetch and render’ in Google Search Console to find out how Google sees your page.

6. Redirect & Header Responses:

It is very important to know how redirects are handled. Use Chrome Developer Tools or extensions such as Redirect Path or Link Redirect Trace to check the redirects.

Use ‘links to your site’ report in Google Search Console to check whether the links are going to the latest version of a web page on your site.

For header responses, canonical and hreflang tags can conflict with other tags on a web page. Also, redirects using HTTP header can be a bit problematic.

7. Check for multiple sets of tags:

Check for any inconsistencies between the tags on a web page. For example, web page template using the meta robots tag to index, while plugin using non-index meta tag.

8. Change UA to Googlebot:

Just check how Google sees your web pages and are there any issues associated such as related to cloaking, redirects or caching.

You can do this by changing your UA using Google Chrome Developer Tool or plugin like User Agent Switcher. You should do it in incognito mode.

9. Robots.txt:

Check robots.txt tags on the web pages of your site. If it’s there, Google will not be able to crawl the web page having this tag. So, make sure whether you need this robots.txt tag on a web page or not.

Hope the quick tips mentioned above will help you fix your technical SEO issues.

Good luck!