David Jones SEO
Following on from the so called “faulty redirects” Google is now issuing these notices for sites where they have found an old page in the index that is now redirecting smartphone users to the home page. Previously we’d only seen these notices where smart phone users had clicked on a desktop result then had been redirected to the m.webaddress.com . Now if you have ever 301 an old page it would be a good idea to also remove it from the index if you have not done so already, lest you feel the wrath of a penalty.
David Jones Redirects
If you have a big site that you are fixing up it’s presence in the index, then the job just got a lot harder. The retailer David Jones has a lot of redirects. For instance the subdomains www2 (looks like an old site) has nearly 14,000 pages indexed, their shop.davidjones.com.au has over 400k, www has 2800. In addition to these subdomains there is also, blog.davidjones, facebook.davidjones , catalogue.davidjones, staffconnect.davidjones, fashionhub.davidjones.com.au and the list goes on. When I recorded this week’s video there were about 3million pages within the davidjones.com.au domain. 10 hours later there are 3.1 million. A lot of the new pages are these search results pages. It’s my guess that DJs would have a lot of these smartphone redirect errors. However the is the least of their problems.
Uncontrolled Indexing
A few weeks ago I said that you need to manipulate Google. By that I meant you need to tell Google what you want it to crawl and what you don’t. Simple things like using a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml can make a massive difference to your rankings rather than just giving Google unbridled access to index whatever it wants. Why on earth do you want Google indexing staffconnect.davidjones.com.au ? To give you an example of the duplication that is going as Google is running rampant through davidjones.com.au you need look no further than this search for this very expensive fragrance.
If you do a search for that fragrance at that price you will find this result it appears on 23 different pages at shop.davidjones.com.au including this one which I’m sure they do not want indexed.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
