Need help boosting your SEO ranking? Call Results Digital at (281) 975-2086.
Your website is one of your most important marketing tools, so if it isn’t showing up in the search results, you could be missing out on traffic, new leads, and sales. Fixing these issues can improve your website’s indexing for SEO and boost your position in the search results. Below, learn about the most common crawlability problems and how to solve them.
1. Broken Links
If you have broken internal links, web crawlers can’t find them, meaning these pages won’t appear in search results. If you’ve recently changed your URL structure or performed a website migration, ensure you’re not linking to deleted or old URLs. Typos are another common cause of broken links, so check each URL to ensure you spelled it correctly.
2. NoFollow Links
Web crawlers will index links that you’ve set to “NoFollow,” but they won’t affect your search result rankings. Check your website’s code for the terms content=”nofollow” and rel=”nofollow.” Delete the “nofollow” part of the code. Google will recrawl your URLs and start following these links again.
3. Meta Tags
You may have accidentally blocked search bots from indexing your pages through the robot’s meta tag. To check, look for this line in your site’s code:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
Remove this from your code to stop the behavior. If you use a content management system (CMS) for your website, you may also be able to fix the problem without changing the code manually. Look for a setting labeled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” or similar, and disable the setting to turn indexing back on.
4. Server Problems
If your visitors are seeing a “Connection timed out” error message when using your website, your server may be struggling to keep up with traffic demand. Server errors that start with “5xx,” such as 502 errors, also cause crawlability problems. To fix both of these problems, you must talk to the person in charge of server maintenance for your site.
5. Mobile Usability
If Google determines that your site isn’t usable by mobile visitors, it could lose its place in the search result rankings. Google’s Mobile Friendly Tester Tool will alert you to problems you may need to fix, such as unclear navigation, low contrast, and font size that’s too difficult to read on small screens.
6. Outdated Technologies
Old technologies, such as HTML frames and Flash, make it difficult for crawlers to index your pages, and, in some cases, your website might not even show up in search results. Replace these technologies with a newer option like HTML5.
7. Content Issues
Duplicate content and thin writing provide little value to visitors. Check pages that aren’t receiving traffic and refresh content, so it’s engaging and useful for readers.
Let Results Digital Help with Your Crawlability Problems
If your website isn’t appearing in search results or doesn’t rank as highly as you’d like, our team at Results Digital can help. We can perform a website audit to discover and fix broken internal links, outdated technologies, poor mobile usability, and other crawlability problems. Call us at (281) 975-2086 for more information.
Need help with your SEO? Results Digital specializes in SEO services for small to medium size businesses.
