The single most important SEO check.
Matt Cutts released a video yesterday in response to a viewer question about being hit by an algorithm change or a manual penalty. He explained you should do all the usual checks in Google webmaster tools as well as making sure you have a healthy site. The big check he did not tell you to do which I think is the most important one is the site:yourwebaddress check. It’s usually the first thing I’ll do with any site prior to beginning work on it. For most business owners it’s a lot easier to do to than having a look at webmaster tools.
Andrea Moss Site.
As I show in today’s video a friend of ours, Andrea Moss is currently in a TV show called Real Housewives of Melbourne. Her new site, andreamoss.com.au launched about a month ago. SHe asked me to have a look at it for her as it was not ranking for “Andrea Moss” which is pretty odd. The first thing I did was site:andreamoss.com.au in Google. What became immediately apparent was that Google had only crawled 3 pages and they were weird URLs.
It didn’t take the team long to work out what was going on but the site: check is what started the ball rolling. Here are the things you can discover using this simple but effective check.
- Page count – has Google crawled too many or not enough pages. If there are too many in there chances are you have bigger problems.
- Page Titles – Quickly see a list of page titles and spot duplications
- Duplicate Descriptions – Not really a big ranking factor but something you should fix.
- Find Weird Pages – Sometimes Google can be crawling part of your site that you didn’t even know existed.
- Find Subdomains – on more than one occasion we have come across all sorts subdomains that have been setup for a client that they didn’t know where live. Quite often these subdomains will be a complete duplication of the main site.
See how we fixed Andrea’s site in today’s video. So when was the last time you did a site: check? 🙂
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
