Hi there! 👋

Today I'm sharing a note on what are 404 errors and how you can fix them on your site.

Now, for the last week's news, Google has made two changes in the GSC rich results report.

The first is related to job posting structured data where more properties are added, and the other is related to FAQ and Q&A rich results, which Google will now validate in the search console. 📃

Also, there's a bug found in Google My Business posts feature where new posts by business owners are getting rejected. Google is aware of this and investigating it.

For now, if you're facing this issue, you can try reposting the same thing.

Now, let's get to this week's SEO tip... 💥

Today we'll talk about improperly managed 404 errors.

A 404 error occurs when a URL is no longer accessible. This happens a lot when pages are deleted, URLs are changed, or products are removed in eCommerce sites.

If the URLs returning 404 errors are no longer linked to internally and are not receiving any traffic, then that's fine!

But if the pages returning 404 errors are inter-linked and/or receiving traffic, then that can cause issues. While 404 errors cannot damage SEO significantly, they can quickly eat away the crawl budget — especially for large eCommerce sites.

So the recommended solution is to 301 redirect the deleted page to any other relevant page on the site. This will help preserve the SEO equity and will avoid unnecessary 404 errors.

To find the 404 errors, you can start with the search console (Crawl > Crawl Errors). You can also use tools like Screaming Frog or SiteBulb to run full site audits.

You can read this and this to learn more about how to find and fix 404 errors.

• Google’s John Mueller shared details about Google's predictive method to detect duplicate content based on URL patterns, which could sometimes lead to pages being incorrectly identified as duplicates.
• When Google thinks a page is a duplicate version of another page because it has a similar URL, it won’t even crawl said page (to conserve crawling & indexing resources) to see what the content really looks like.
• This usually happens with the event or automobile sites where pages with the same content target multiple cities.
• A potential fix for this problem is to limit content overlaps (by using canonical or redirects) as much as possible.

• Bing has recently added a new SERP feature where it shows some questions and answers within the business's local panel in the search results.
• The Q&A content is pulled directly from the business website.

• Based on the analysis of billions of searches by Sistrix, it is evident that significantly more searches are carried out on mobile devices (64%) than on the desktop (35%).
• The first result gets almost 36% clicks on the desktop, while mobile searches get just under 30% clicks. Mobile phone users click more frequently on many lower-ranking results.
• Finally, to make sure your site is ready for the mobile future, you can...
  • Check if Google index your website with smartphone Googlebot or not.
  • Analyze the proportion of mobile searches in your industry.
  • Measure performance metrics for mobile devices (like core web vitals).
  • Use mobile Google SERPs while keyword research, site optimization, etc.

• Google's new Crawl Stats reporting in GSC can be very useful for domain name changes and url migrations. The report can tell what Google considers "site moves with url changes."
• To identify problems with domain name changes & url migrations, you can analyze the Crawl Stats reporting for the domain name you are moving from and the domain name you are moving to.
• You can use the Crawl Stats reporting to analyze and troubleshoot 404 and broken redirects, image errors, robots.txt issues, and performance problems.
• Also, it's recommended to set up domain properties in the search console for each of the domains involved in domain migration as it covers all protocols and subdomains.

• SEO metrics are essential to create useful SEO reports, set relevant KPIs for SEO, and track ongoing SEO performance.
• For simplicity, SEO metrics can be categorized into performance, technical, and authority metrics.
• Performance metrics include organic traffic, organic conversion rate, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), number of ranking keywords, keyword positions, and bounce rate.
• Technical metrics include indexed pages, site health, and core web vitals.
• Authority metrics include link authority, referring domains/backlinks, and brand searches.

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Until next week! :)

Saksham

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