A few years ago, I wrote a post about how to surface your featured snippets via SEMrush’s powerful SERP features widget. I love using SEMrush to plug in any domain and view (many of) the featured snippets it has. It’s a quick an easy way to conduct competitive analysis from a featured snippets standpoint. Remember, GSC does not provide a way to filter for featured snippets. Therefore, you must rely on third party tools to surface them for you.

Now, SEMrush’s SERP features widget is awesome, but here’s the issue. SEMrush, and other tools, don’t surface ALL of your featured snippets automatically. And that’s especially true for smaller to medium-sized sites. Unfortunately, many site owners are left in the dark with how many featured snippets they have and which queries and landing pages are yielding featured snippets.

It’s important to understand the featured snippets you have attained so you can analyze the content, the snippets, and try to gain more. As I’ve covered in various posts, as well as in my SMX presentations, featured snippets can drive a boatload of traffic and gain near-instant credibility in the SERPs. Position 0 is powerful.

So, with GSC not providing a way to filter by featured snippets and competitive analysis tools not surfacing all of a site’s featured snippets automatically, what’s a site owner to do?

The answer is to USE THE TOOLS TOGETHER TO UNCOVER MORE OF YOUR FEATURED SNIPPETS!

That’s what I’ll cover below. It’s quick, easy, and you can continually use this process to hunt down your latest featured snippets. Let’s begin.

How To Use GSC, Analytics Edge, And SEMrush Position Tracking To Identify Featured Snippets
SEMrush provides a ton of functionality for SEOs and site owners. For our purposes today, we’ll be using its Position Tracking functionality based on GSC data to surface more of your wonderful featured snippets. The process involves:

• Exporting your top queries from Google Search Console for the past 28 days.
• Filtering them by average position and click through rate.
• Setting up position tracking for your domain in SEMrush and using the filtered queries from GSC as your keyword list.
• Letting SEMrush position tracking do its thing!
• Reviewing the reporting in SEMrush, which will surface any queries yielding featured snippets (along with the landing pages that are ranking for them).

Exporting Google Search Console Data
Analyzing your queries in Google Search Console is obviously extremely important. The problem is that you are limited to the top one thousand results per report. That’s severely limiting for most sites. In order to get around that limit, you can tap into the Search Console API to download ALL of your queries. There are several ways to accomplish this, but my favorite is using Analytics Edge in Excel. It’s a cost-effective solution that works incredibly well (and fast).

I’ve written several blog posts about how to use Analytics Edge, so go and check those posts out to learn how to download all of your queries. Once you have Analytics Edge installed, it should only take a minute or two to download all of your queries. You’ll end up having a spreadsheet full of glorious GSC keyword data. For example, I exported 66K queries in about thirty seconds. :)

Next, we want to gather our list of queries to use in SEMrush for position tracking. Featured snippets in GSC will be listed in position 1. Google will provide the ranking of the actual featured snippet here and NOT the organic listing. For example, you might have the featured snippet, but your organic listing might be #4. GSC would provide #1 for the query. You can read more about how Google determines clicks and impressions in this help center document to learn how GSC provides the position for featured snippets.

Therefore, you should first filter your spreadsheet by average position and use a number filter selecting “is less than 2”. This will give us any queries where you site is ranking between 1 and 2 over the past 28 days.

Next, layer on a second filter in your spreadsheet for click through rate. Featured snippets typically have a higher click through rate since they are given special SERP treatment and take up a lot of SERP real estate. So for the second filter, use “greater than 20%” for click through rate.

Quick Tip:
You can also filter out branded queries if you want for this exercise. Many branded queries will rank highly and also have a high click through rate, but won’t yield featured snippets. If you want to save some space in SEMrush for other queries (since there is a limit for position tracking based on your package), then feel free to filter them out. You can do that by adding a “does not contain” text filter on your queries column and enter your brand.

Now that you have a list of queries ranking highly (position 2 or less) that also have a high click through rate, then you are ready to hunt down featured snippets and uncover buried treasure in SEMrush. Let’s track some positions.

How To Set Up Position Tracking In SEMrush (And Find Featured Snippets)
First, you’ll want to create a project for the domain you are tracking. You can find the Projects link in the left-side navigation in SEMrush. Once you create a project, you’ll be presented with all of the different tools you can use in your project. We’re going to be focused on Position Tracking so we can identify which queries are yielding featured snippets.

Next, click Position Tracking and go through the process of adding your filtered keyword list. You can start by just selecting desktop tracking in the United States, or tailor that for your own needs. I typically add desktop tracking first, and then layer on mobile. It’s very easy to do since you can just use the desktop list by clicking a button in SEMrush when setting up mobile.

Quick Tip:
Depending on your package in SEMrush, there’s a limit for the number of keywords you can track. For example, a Pro account can track 500 keywords, a Guru account can track 1500 keywords, etc. For this specific project, you won’t be focused on long-term tracking, so you can always swap out keywords to simply check if they are yielding featured snippets. So just make sure your initial keyword list is under the limit you have in your package. You can always swap out one list for another to uncover more featured snippets.

The Easy Part – Let SEMrush Position Tracking Do Its Thing!
Once you enter your keywords and launch position tracking, you only have a to wait a few minutes for your featured snippet data to arrive (if you have any!) Once SEMrush tracks the keywords in your list, you’ll have a boatload of data for those queries, including if they are yielding featured snippets.

There are multiple ways to find your current featured snippets in the reporting based on the keyword list you just entered. From the Overview screen, you can view the entire list of keywords along with their position, the SERP features for that query, and if your site has any of those important SERP features (like featured snippets).

For example, you’ll see a crown icon if the SERP contains a featured snippet for the query at hand. And, you’ll see a second crown next to your ranking if you have won the featured snippet.  You will also see the landing page that’s yielding the featured snippet.

You can also click the featured snippet tab to see a full breakdown of your featured snippets reporting. That will include opportunities you have to gain featured snippets from the competition, as well as when your site is already featured. Clicking the button labeled “Already featured” will filter just the keywords where your site has the featured snippet.

And clicking the position and crown enables you view a snapshot of the SERP captured by SEMrush. Awesome, right?

Summary – Finding featured snippet buried treasure via GSC and SEMrush
SEMrush and other tools can automatically surface some of your featured snippets, which is great. But to gain a stronger view of your featured snippet coverage, it’s smart to combine Google Search Console data with SEMrush position tracking. You might be surprised when viewing all of the featured snippets you have right now. Now go dig up that buried treasure. :)

GG

 

So, how large is your site? No, how large is it really??

When speaking with companies about SEO, it’s not long before I ask that important question. And I often get some confused responses based on the “really” tag at the end. That’s because many site owners go by how many pages are indexed. i.e. We have 20K, 100K, or 1M pages indexed. Well, that’s obviously important, but what lies below the surface is also important. For example, Googlebot needs to crawl and process all of your crawlable urls, and not just what’s indexed.

Site owners can make it easy, or very hard, for Google to crawl, process, and index their pages based on a number of factors. For example, if you have one thousand pages indexed, but Google needs to crawl and process 600K pages, then you might have issues to smooth over from a technical SEO perspective. And when I say “process”, I mean understand what to do with your urls after crawling. For example, Google needs to process the meta robots tag, rel canonical, understand duplicate content, soft 404s, and more.

By the way, I’ll cover the reason I said you might need to smooth things over later in this post. There are times a site has many urls that need to be processed that are being properly handled. For example, noindexing many pages that are fine for users, but shouldn’t be indexed. That could be totally ok based on what the site is trying to accomplish. But on the flipside, there may be sites using a ton of parameters, session IDs, dynamically changing urls, or redirects that can cause all sorts of issues (like creating infinite spaces). Again, I’ll cover more about this soon.

And you definitely want to make Google’s job easier, and not harder. Google’s John Mueller has mentioned this a number of times over the past several years. Actually, here’s a video of John explaining this from last week’s webmaster hangout video. John explained that you don’t want to make Google’s job harder by having it churn through many urls. Google needs to crawl, and then process, all of those urls, even when rel canonical is used properly (since Google needs to first crawl each page to see rel canonical).

Here’s the clip from John (at 4:16 in the video):

John has also explained that you should make sure Google can focus on your highest quality content versus churning through many lower quality urls. That’s why it’s important to fully understand what’s indexed on your site. Google takes all pages into account when evaluating quality, so if you find a lot of urls that shouldn’t be indexed, take action on them.

Here’s another video from John about that (at 14:54 in the video):

Crawl Budget – Most don’t need to worry about this, but…
In addition, crawl budget might also be a consideration based on the true size of your site. For example, imagine you have 73K pages indexed and believe you don’t need to worry about crawl budget too much. Remember, only very large sites with millions of pages need to worry about crawl budget. But what if your 73K page site actually contains 29.5M pages that need to be crawled and processed? If that’s the case, then you actually do need to worry about crawl budget. This is just another reason to understand the true size of your site. See the screenshot below.

How Do You Find The True Size Of Your Site?
One of the easiest ways to determine the true size of your site is to use Google’s index coverage reporting, including the incredibly important Excluded category. Note, GSC’s index coverage reporting is by property… so make sure you check each property for your site (www, non-www, http, https, etc.)

Google’s Index Coverage
I wrote a post recently about juicing up your index coverage reporting using subdirectories where I explained the power of GSC’s new reporting. It replaces the index status report in the old GSC and contains extremely actionable data. There are multiple categories for each property in GSC in the reporting, including:

1. Errors
2. Valid with warnings
3. Valid and indexed
4. Excluded

By reviewing ALL of the categories, you can get a stronger feel for true size of your site. That true size might make total sense to you, but there are other times where the true size might scare you to death (and leave you scratching your head about why there are so many urls Google is crawling).

Below, I’ll run through some quick examples of what you can find in the index coverage reporting that could be increasing the size of your site from a crawling and processing standpoint. Note, there are many reasons you could be forcing Google to crawl and process many more pages than it should and I’ll provide just some quick examples in this post. I highly recommend going through your own reporting extensively to better understand your own situation.

Remember, you should make it easier on Googlebot, not harder. And you definitely want to have Google focus on your most important pages versus churning through loads of unimportant urls.

Errors
There are a number of errors that can show up in the reporting, including server errors (500s), redirect errors, urls submitted in sitemaps that are soft 404s, have crawl issues, are being blocked by robots.txt, and more. Since this post is about increasing the crawlable size of your site, I would definitely watch out for situations where Google is surfacing and crawling urls that should never be crawled (or urls that should resolve with 200s, but don’t for some reason).

There are also several reports in this category that flag urls being submitted in xml sitemaps that don’t resolve correctly. Definitely dig in there to see what’s going on.

Indexed and Valid
Although this report shows all urls that are properly indexed, you definitely want to dig into the report titled, “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap”. This report contains all urls that Google has indexed that weren’t submitted in xml sitemaps (so Google is coming across the urls via standard crawling without being supplied a list of urls). I’ve found this report can yield some very interesting findings.

For example, if you have 200K pages indexed, but only 4K are submitted in xml sitemaps, then what are the other 196K urls? How is Google discovering them? Are they canonical urls that you know about, and if so, should they be submitted in sitemaps? Or are they urls you didn’t even know existed, that contain low-quality content, or autogenerated content?

I’ve surfaced some nasty situations by checking this report. For example, hundreds of thousands of pages (or more) indexed that the site owner didn’t even know were being published on the site. Note, you can also fine some urls there that are fine, like pagination, but I would definitely analyze the reporting to gain a deeper understanding of all the valid and indexed urls that Google has found. Again, you should know all pages indexed on your site, especially ones that you haven’t added to xml sitemaps.

Excluded – The Mother Lode
I’ve mentioned the power of the Excluded category in GSC’s index coverage reporting before, and I’m not kidding. This category contains all of the urls that Google has crawled, but decided to exclude from indexing. You can often find glaring problems when digging into the various reports in this category.

I can’t cover everything you can find there, but I’ll provide a few examples of situations that could force Google to crawl and process many more urls than it should. And like John Mueller said in the videos I provided above, you should try and make it easy for Google, focus on your highest quality content, etc.

Infinite spaces
When I first fire up the index coverage reporting, I usually quickly check the total number of excluded urls. And there are times that number blows me away (especially knowing how large a site is supposed to be).

When checking the reporting, you definitely want to make sure there’s not an infinite spaces problem, which can cause an unlimited number of urls to be crawled by Google. I wrote a case study about an infinite spaces problem that was impacting up to ten million urls on a site. Yes, ten million.

Sometimes a site has functionality that can create an unlimited number of urls with content that’s not unique or doesn’t provide any value. And when that happens, Google can crawl forever… By analyzing the Excluded category, you can potentially find problems like this in the various reports.

For example, you might see many urls being excluded in a specific section of the site that contain parameters used by certain functionality. The classic example is a calendar script, which if left in its raw form (and unblocked), can cause Google to crawl infinitely. You also might find new urls being created on the fly based on users conducting on-site searches (that was the problem I surfaced in my case study about infinite spaces). There are many ways infinite spaces can be created and you want to make sure that’s not a problem on your site.

Parameters, parameters, parameters
Some sites employ a large number of url parameters, when those parameters might not be needed at all. And to make the situation worse, some sites might not be using rel canonical properly to canonicalize the urls with parameters to the correct urls (which might be the urls without parameters). And as John explained in the video from earlier, even if you are using rel canonical properly, it’s not optimal to force Google to crawl and process many unnecessary urls.

Or worse, maybe each of those urls with parameters (that are producing duplicate content) mistakenly contain self-referencing canonical tags. Then you are forcing Google to figure out that the urls are duplicates and then handle those urls properly. John explained that can take a long time when many urls are involved. Again, review your own reporting. You never know what you’re going to find.

When analyzing the Excluded reporting, you can find urls that fit this situation in a number of reports. For example, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”, “Google chose a different canonical than user”, and others.

Excessive redirects
There are times you might find a massive number of redirects that you weren’t even aware were on the site. If you see a large number of redirects, then analyze those urls to see where they are being triggered on the site, why the redirects are there, and determine if they should be there at all. I wouldn’t force both users and Googlebot through an excessive number of redirects, if possible. Make it easy for Google, not harder.

And some of those redirects might look like this… a chain of never-ending redirects (and the page never resolves). So one redirect might actually be 20 or more before the page finally fails…

Malformed URLs
There have been some audits where I find an excessive number of malformed urls when reviewing the Excluded reporting. For example, a coding glitch that combines urls by accident, leaves out parts of the url, or worse. And on a large-scale site, that can cause many, many malformed urls to be crawled by Google.

Here is an example of a malformed url pattern I surfaced in a recent audit:
https://www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/www.domain.com/blog/category/some-blog-post-title/

Soft 404s
You might find many soft 404s on a site, which are urls that return 200s, but Google sees them as 404s. There are a number of reasons this could be happening, including having pages that should contain products or listings, but simply return “No products found”, or “No listings found”. These are thin pages without any valuable content for users, and Google is basically seeing them as 404s (Page Not Found).

Note, soft 404s are treated as hard 404s, but why have Google crawl many of them when it doesn’t need to? And if this is due to some glitch, then you could continually force Google to crawl many of these urls.

Like I said, The Mother Lode…
I can keep going here, but this post would be huge. Again, there are many examples of problems you can find by analyzing the Excluded category in the new index coverage reporting. These were just a few examples I have come across when helping clients. The main point I’m trying to make is that you should heavily analyze your reporting to see the true size of your site. And if you find problems that are causing many more urls to be published than should be, then you should root out those problems and make crawling and processing easier for Google.

Sometimes Excluded can be fine: What you don’t need to worry about…
Not everything listed in the index coverage reporting is bad. There are several categories that are fine as long as you expect that behavior. For example, you might be noindexing many urls across the site since they are fine for users traversing the site, but you don’t want them indexed. That’s totally fine.

Or, you might be blocking 60K pages via robots.txt since there’s no reason for Googlebot to crawl them. That’s totally fine as well.

And how about 404s? There are some site owners that believe that 404s can hurt them SEO-wise. That’s not true. 404s (Page Not Found) are totally normal to have on a site. And for larger-scale sites, you might have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even a million plus 404s on your site. If those urls should 404, then that’s fine.

Here’s an example of a site I helped with many 404s at any given time. They do extremely well SEO-wise, but based on the nature of their site, they 404 a lot of urls over time. Again, this is totally fine if the urls should 404:

There have been several large-scale clients I’ve helped that receive over a million clicks per day from Google that have hundreds of thousands of 404s at any given time. Actually, a few of those clients sometimes have over one million 404s showing in GSC at any given time. And they are doing extremely well SEO-wise. Therefore, don’t worry about 404s if those pages should 404. Google’s John Mueller has covered this a number of times in the past.

Here’s a video of John explaining this (at 39:50 in the video):

There are other categories that might be fine too, based on how your own site works. So, dig into the reporting, identify anything out of the ordinary, and then analyze those situations to ensure that you’re making Google’s life easier, and not harder.

Index Coverage Limits And Running Crawls To Gain More Data
After reading this post, you might be excited to jump into GSC’s index coverage reporting to uncover the true size of your site. That’s great, but there’s something you need to know. Unfortunately, there’s a maximum one thousand rows per report that can be exported. So, you will be severely limited with the data you can export once you drill into a problem. Sure, you can (and should) identify patterns of issues across your site so you can tackle those problems at scale. But it still would be amazing to export all of the urls per report.

I know Google has mentioned the possibility of providing API access to the index coverage reporting, which would be amazing. Then you could export all of your data, not matter how many rows. In the short-term, you can read my post about how to add subdirectories to GSC in order to get more data in your reporting. It works well and you can read that post to learn more.

And beyond that, you can use any of the top crawling tools to launch surgical crawls into problematic areas. Or, you could just launch enterprise crawls that tackle most of the site in question. Then you can filter by problematic url type, parameter, etc. to surface more urls per category.

As I’ve mentioned many times in my posts, my three favorite crawling tools are:

• DeepCrawl (where I’m on the customer advisory board). I’ve been using DeepCrawl for a very long time and it’s especially powerful for larger-scale crawls.
• Screaming Frog – Another powerful tool that many in the industry use for crawling sites. Dan and his crew of amphibious SEOs do an excellent job at providing a boatload of functionality in a local crawler. I often use both DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog together. 1+1=3
• Sitebulb – The newest kid on the block across the three, but Patrick and Gareth have created something special with Sitebulb. It’s an excellent local crawling tool that some have described as beautiful mix between DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog. You should definitely check it out. I use all three extensively.

 Summary – The importance of understanding the true size of your site.
The next time someone asks you how large your site is, try to avoid giving the quick response with simply pages indexed. If you’ve gone through the process I’ve documented in this post, the number might be much larger.

It’s definitely a nuanced answer, since Google might be churning through many additional urls based on your site structure, coding glitches, or other SEO problems. But you should have a solid grasp on what’s going on and how to address those issues if you’ve dug in heavily. I recommend analyzing GSC’s index coverage reporting today, including the powerful Excluded category. There may be some hidden treasures waiting for you. Go find them!

GG

 

I recently started helping a new client that has seen a continued drop in search visibility over time. After getting up to speed on the site, its history, business model, etc., I started a thorough crawl analysis and audit of the site. The crawl analysis involves performing an enterprise crawl and then subsequent surgical crawls for areas I want to take a closer look at. I’ve always believed that crawling a site (just like Google does) could help surface potential gremlins that could be hurting a company’s SEO efforts. Unfortunately, what lies beneath from a technical SEO standpoint can sometimes be very scary. Problems invisible to the naked eye can fester over time. Well, this case is a great example of that happening.

Once the first crawls were completed across DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, and Sitebulb, I quickly noticed something strange. I saw many 302 redirects on the site in the crawl data. It’s not unusual to pick up a number of redirects, but this just seemed higher than usual considering the number of pages present on the site. So I dug in further.

302 redirects *to the homepage*… and many of them
Once I dug into the data, I found thousands of 302 redirects all leading to the homepage. That concerned me on several levels. First, these were real pages with real content that were 302 redirecting to the homepage during the crawls. If you want those pages to rank well over the long-term, then 302 redirecting them is clearly not the route you want to take.

You are basically telling Google that the pages are temporarily being redirected to another page (which was the homepage in this case). And if Google sees 302s in place for a long enough time, then they can treat 302s as 301s. That means they would eventually just index the destination page(s) and drop the pages that are 302 redirecting. Google’s John Mueller has explained that several times in the past.

Triangulating The Problem Via Multiple Crawlers
After surfacing the 302 redirect problem, I manually started checking the redirects and noticed the pages were actually resolving with 200s when I checked them via a browser. That was strange… and I started to think that maybe the site was treating the crawlers differently and redirecting them for some reason. So I fired up all three crawls to check the data (across tools) to see if all were seeing the same problem. I wanted to triangulate the data.

Well, all three tools were showing the same thing. The site was indeed redirecting those urls to the homepage during crawling.

Therefore, manual checks were being handled correctly on the site (the pages were resolving fine), yet crawlers were sometimes being redirected via 302s to the homepage. That was clear across all three crawling tools I was using. Next up, I wanted to check the index coverage reporting in Google Search Console (GSC).

Yep, Index Coverage Also Revealed The Problem
The new index coverage reporting in GSC is awesome. It’s such a huge upgrade from the old index status report and provides a wealth of information directly from Google about crawling and indexing. Although there are several categories in the reporting, nothing comes close to the power of the Excluded category. That’s where you can view a series of reports containing urls that Google is excluding from indexing. And that’s also where you will find redirects. I fired up the reporting, jumped into the Excluded category and found the redirects report.

Note, although the new index coverage reporting is awesome, there is a slight problem… Unfortunately, you can only view and export the top one thousand listings in any report. That’s typically not even close to enough for larger-scale sites (see the screenshot above). So the Excluded reports contain incredibly actionable data, but it’s somewhat limiting due to the lack of (full) export functionality. Just keep that in mind when you are analyzing the reports.

Note, I know that the GSC team might be working on API access for the index coverage reports. That would be insanely awesome, and incredibly valuable. I hope that’s the case and I’ll be sure to share that news widely if that ever arrives.

Back to the case study. So I checked a number of urls in the report and noticed they did resolve ok when checking them manually. Yet Googlebot was detecting redirects (so Google was running into the same problem that my crawlers were). Then I exported the top one thousand redirects from GSC and started crawling them just to see what my crawlers would return.

Yep, a number of them were 302 redirecting for my crawlers, but resolved with 200s when I manually checked them in a browser. So Googlebot was indeed coming across those 302s just like I was. This was an important find so I immediately crafted a document for my client.

Dev Team Zombie Hunters
After sending a document covering the 302 redirect problem in detail, my client sent that information along to the dev team. After digging into the issue, it ends up there was a load balancing issue that needed to be corrected. So the problem was indeed happening, but it was quietly occurring behind the scenes. It’s yet another example of a sinister SEO problem that can lie beneath the surface. What looks fine when visiting a site might be completely different when Googlebot visits the site. And that can end up very badly from an SEO standpoint.

So luckily, my client was able to push the SEO zombies back into the ground:

Based on this case study, and other sinister technical SEO problems I have surfaced in the past, I have provided some quick tips that might help your own situation.

• Crawl your site just like Google does, and do that on a regular basis. As demonstrated above, you never know what you’re going to find when crawling your site. Everything might be fine, but you might also surface new and serious problems. I recommend crawling your site monthly at a minimum.
• Always combine crawl data with a manual analysis. Validate what the crawl data is showing by testing the site manually and via multiple devices. Make sure you really have a problem and make sure Googlebot isn’t running into barriers.
• Triangulate the data via multiple crawling tools. I use three crawling tools extensively when auditing sites. That includes DeepCrawl (where I’m on the customer advisory board), Screaming Frog, and Sitebulb. All three are great and can help you confirm that a certain problem is indeed a problem.
• Don’t underestimate the power of Google’s index coverage reporting. It’s a powerful set of reports directly from Google covering information about how Googlebot crawls and indexes your site. In addition, the Excluded reporting contains information about urls that Google is excluding from indexing and often contains extremely actionable data. You can also use the inspect url tool to view the latest crawl information, as well as for testing live urls.
• Implement changes as quickly as you can once you surface problems like this. Technical SEO problems can cause all sorts of crawling, indexing, and ranking issues. The quicker you can rectify those problems, the faster you can recover. And if you haven’t been impacted yet rankings-wise, then you can nip serious SEO problems in the bud.

Summary – Crawlers + GSC Can Help Surface Sinister SEO Problems Invisible To The Naked Eye
Technical SEO is still incredibly important. And what lies beneath could be causing big problems from an SEO standpoint. For example, surfacing problems that Googlebot is encountering, that typical users aren’t, can help you avoid crawling, indexing, and ranking issues. If you’re proactive, and crawl your site on a regular basis, you can help keep the SEO zombies away.

Happy Halloween.

GG

 

{Update: Google’s John Mueller replied to my question on Twitter about this situation. You can read John’s feedback here.}

{Update 10/27/18: My client’s dev team figured out the problem and I provided more information about that below.}

I’ve been helping a client with a large-scale CMS migration recently and came across a very interesting, and potentially scary, situation. It’s a large and complex site with many moving parts, so there is a lot to process (both figuratively and literally).

The site has over one million pages indexed, and many more that get crawled based on the proper use of noindex in certain areas of the site. That was a big change for the site when I first started helping them a few years ago (after they got pummeled by a major algorithm update). Therefore, I’m always making sure those areas of the site are handled properly (as changes and updates go live on the site).

And now that a CMS migration was under way, I made sure to check on those areas of the site to make sure all was ok. It ends up they were ok… but they sort of weren’t either. Confused? Then read on.

The Magic Show Begins – Typical checks after a CMS migration
As I started crawling and checking the site after the migration went live, I noticed something very strange. The number of noindexed pages during my crawls was sometimes lower than what I expected. And while manually checking those pages, I noticed that my trusty AYIMA plugin sometimes went red (indicating the page was not indexable), but sometimes it didn’t. I found that odd and began to dig in further. Note, other plugins like the DeepCrawl indexability plugin also showed those urls were indexable. Again, strange…

Static HTML Correct, Rendered HTML Not So Much…
When checking the areas of the site I mentioned earlier, and digging into the source code (the static html), I noticed that the meta robots tag was in the proper place and contained the correct directives. For example, it was placed in the head of the document and contained “noindex, follow”.

But we know that Google renders the page and that rendered html can be different than the static html. For example, JavaScript-based content will be rendered and can be indexed by Google. So, I started to check the rendered html via a number of tools like Google’s mobile-friendly test, the rich results testing tool, Chrome Dev Tools (using inspect element), and then various crawling tools like DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, and Sitebulb. They have the ability to render the page, revealing what the final rendered html would reveal.

Note, the rich results testing tool will render the page via Googlebot desktop, while the mobile-friendly testing tool will render the page as Googlebot for Smartphones. Chrome Dev Tools will show you the rendered html via “inspect element” and then crawling tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and DeepCrawl have options for crawling with JavaScript rendering on. Therefore, it’s good to test across all of the tools to see what the results are across both mobile and desktop.

Render JavaScript option in Screaming Frog (first image) and then DeepCrawl (second image):

Wait, what just happened?
When I checked the rendered html across those tools, I witnessed the magically moving meta robots tag. The robots tag, and some other head elements, were now in the body of the document and not the head. I had to double and triple check this to make sure I was seeing it properly.

The meta robots tag went from line 105 in the source code to line 1,181 in the rendered version of the code. And again, it was NOT in the head of the document, where it needs to reside. It was now in the body! Here is a screenshot from Screaming Frog showing both the source html and the rendered html. Notice the line numbers next to each meta robots tag:

But Is It Safe?
When spot-checking urls containing the magically moving meta robots tag, they indeed were noindexed. Therefore, I’m assuming Google is using the meta robots tag from the static html and not in the rendered html (more about this in the next section). But will that always be the case? Again, on a site with millions of noindexed pages, and a history of getting hit by major algorithm updates, is it safe to believe that the magically moving meta robots tag won’t eventually cause problems? All good questions.

Google’s 2-phase approach for indexing JavaScript-based content
I passed all of this information along to my client and that was sent to the dev team. I’m still waiting to hear back about why this is happening, but needless to say, it could be very dangerous on a large-scale site with many moving parts. In addition, this is happening in sections of the site that absolutely should be noindexed and not released into the SEO wild.

Also, Google has explained that it uses a two-phase approach for indexing JavaScript-based content. The first phase will crawl and index the static html. And the second phase, which can take a few days or longer, will process and index the rendered html. And remember, the rendered html is where the meta robots tag ends up in the body of the document (for this case).

Here is John Mueller explaining that inserting canonical tags or meta robots tags via JavaScript can cause issues based on the initial phase of indexing versus the second phase (where it renders and indexes the JavaScript version):

So, theoretically for my client, Google would first see and process the proper meta robots tag in the static html, but then it would process and index the rendered html, which has the meta robots tag in the body of the document. If that’s the case, then Google may not decide to noindex the page in the long-term. I have to dig in further across those areas of the site to see how many pages are being noindexed versus indexed over the long-term (even though I’m hoping we just fix this problem sooner than later so we don’t need to worry about this!)

Again, with millions of pages currently being noindexed, I would NOT want to see a chunk of those pages suddenly get indexed. Remember, this site has felt the wrath of major Google algorithm updates in the past. It’s doing very well now, but the battle scars remain.

The CMS or the implementation?
Since my client just moved to a new CMS (a popular enterprise CMS), I naturally starting wondering if the problem was CMS-based or if it was due to the implementation of the CMS. Companies typically tailor the CMS implementation with various customized elements and code, and that can always cause unforeseen issues.

So, I decided to check several others sites running the CMS and they looked fine. The meta robots tag was on the same line in the html in the static and rendered versions (and it was located in the head of the document). Therefore, this looks to be an implementation problem. That’s often the case with CMS migrations. It’s not necessarily the CMS, it’s more about how the implementation goes. That’s where bugs can creep in and potentially cause big problems SEO-wise.

Update: Feedback From Google’s John Mueller
John Mueller replied to my question about this situation today on Twitter. John explained that if the meta robots tag is in the right place in the static html, then that should be fine. He explained that it’s different when you need to do something specific after indexing and rendering (like adding hreflang via JavaScript). That’s great to know. I am still going to make sure the problem is fixed, since I’m not a fan of having magically moving meta robots tags, but it’s great to know this shouldn’t be a big problem. That makes sense, since I am seeing those pages accurately noindexed. Here’s John’s tweet:

Update: The problem was identified and a fix was implemented
Well, my client’s dev team finally figure out the problem, which is great! It ends up there was a conflict with a GDPR script where it was validating which code to execute (production versus staging). And sometimes the validation was failing, or just late to determine the logic that was necessary (which resulted in a conflict with other JavaScript code on the page). The fix was implemented and the meta robots tag is now correctly being published in the head of the document for both the static and rendered version of the html. See the screenshot below after crawling the pages with rendering on.

Static HTML:

Rendered HTML:

Quick Tips For Stopping Magically Moving Meta Robots Tags
Based on this case, I have some closing tips for SEOs and site owners that are going through a CMS migration (or for anyone that wants to make sure the meta robots tag, rel canonical, or other important SEO code is set up correctly).

• Test your site via multiple tools that enable you to view the rendered html. That includes the mobile-friendly test (mobile), the rich results testing tool (desktop), Chrome Dev Tools (using inspect element), etc.
• You can also test your site via multiple crawling tools that render JavaScript, including Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, and Sitebulb. Then check the static html versus the rendered html. And make sure to check important reports to see what has changed compared to previous static crawls. For example, you might see noindexed pages drop off a cliff when you compare a static crawl to a JavaScript-rendered crawl. If so, why?
• If it’s a third-party CMS (and not custom built by your company), then test other sites running the CMS. You might see consistent behavior across those others sites, which would signal a problem with the CMS itself. But if they look fine, then it’s probably your implementation of the CMS. That’s important to know.

Summary – For SEO, don’t rely on magically moving code
This was an interesting case for sure. Any time you see important directives magically moving around the html code, you definitely want to dig in and find out what’s going on. And then it’s important to quickly address the situation with the dev team. That’s especially the case for large-scale sites with many moving parts. I’ll try and post an update after my client surfaces the problem and applies a fix. Needless to say, I’m hoping the magic show ends soon. :)

GG