We understand that many webmasters restrict the concept of SEO to certain things that are done after a website has been created, it could be optimizing certain on-page variables for maximizing their chances of being ranked generally for precise keywords or even the method of requesting backlinks from certain qualified sources for fueling off-page SEO. However, overlooking the pivotal role of your site’s coding in the overall search engine optimization of your website would be like building a house on a weak and unstable foundation.
It is quite natural to take it for granted that everything you are seeing on a website would be accessible automatically to search engines. But that is surely not the case. As per https://www.huffpost.com, in the event, your website is failing to generate an impressive amount of traffic, you must understand that it could be attributed to poor SEO hence; searchers are failing to find your site.
Googlebot seems to have the capability of filling out forms, accepting cookies and crawling all kinds of links. However, accessing these elements could be resulting in the consumption of unlimited crawling, as well as, indexing resources. Hence, Googlebot would be paying heed to only specific commands, ignoring cookies and forms, and crawling just the links coded with perfect anchor tag along with a proper HREF. Here are some items that could be obstructing Googlebot along with bots from other search engines from crawling, as well as, indexing all your existing web pages.
Location-Oriented Pages
Websites having locale-adaptive pages are known to detect the IP address of a visitor and then demonstrate content that is based on that particular location. However, this method is certainly not foolproof or flawless. The IP of a visitor could seem to be in Boston, however, in reality, she resides in New York. She would end up getting content relating to Boston that she doesn’t wish to get. Googlebot’s default IP seems to be in San Jose, California area. Thus, Googlebot would be seeing all content associated with that particular region. Location-oriented content based on the first visit to the site seems fine. However, subsequent content must be based primarily on links clicked instead of an IP address. This is an invisible obstacle to SEO success and it is very difficult to be detected.
Cookie-Based Content
Sites are in the habit of placing cookies on the web browser for personalizing a visitor’s experience like language preferences or even clicking paths to render breadcrumbs. However, content that is being accessed by visitors solely because of cookies, instead of clicking a link, would not be accessed by any search engine bot. For instance, some websites serve language and country content based specifically on cookies. Suppose you check into an online shop and choose to read in German, a cookie would be set and all your successive visits on this e-store would be proceeding in German.
The URL would remain the same just as it was when the website was set in English; however, remember that the content is sure to be different. The site-owner, may want German-language content, to get an impressive ranking in Google search for driving German-speaking users to the site. However, it won’t. If the URL doesn’t seem to change with the changing content, search engines would fail to crawl or even rank these alternate versions.
Wrong Canonical Tags
Canonical tags are supposed to identify precisely which page should be indexed out of several identical versions. These Canonical tags are significant weapons for preventing duplicate content. Non-Canonical pages are generally not indexed by Googlebots. Canonical tags are hidden in source code. Hence, detecting errors could prove to be difficult. If your favorite pages present on your website are not indexed, it is pretty clear that bad Canonical tags could be the main culprits. You may seek professional assistance from a reputed SEO company.
Not Remembering a Sitemap
A sitemap is certainly one of the first destinations a search engine would be visiting on your site. Your sitemap would be telling the search engines about the pages that should be indexed and it would inform the search engine about the level of importance of each page. Often you encounter issues when your website ends up targeting a highly important and deep-level product page, however, that page is not included in the sitemap. You must include all web pages that you want your visitor to see along with few other pages such as CSS files within the sitemap.
Including Excessive Code
Often a website has excessive code that fails to serve any purpose. Search engines would take much longer to read the code if there is excessive code involved and this could end up in undesirable slow load times. You must focus on keeping the text-to-code ratio necessarily to at least, 5 percent. You may consider using free programs such as Xenu for examining your ratio. However, for enhancing this ratio, you could consider minimizing coding and boosting content.
JavaScript Links that Are Not Crawlable
Google does not consider a link to be a link unless it comprises an anchor tag along with an HREF to a particular URL. Moreover, anchor text is necessary since it helps in establishing the exact relevance of the specific page that is being linked to. Google wants links to include an anchor tag along with a precise HREF to a particular URL.
E-commerce sites are in the habit of coding their links utilizing onclicks rather than anchor tags. That should be working fine for humans; however, Googlebot would not regard them as crawlable links. Hence, pages linked such a way could have certain indexing issues.
Hashtag URLs
AJAX seems to be a well-known form of JavaScript that helps in refreshing content without even reloading the page. We understand that the refreshed content would be inserting a hashtag very much within the URL of the page. However, hashtags are not in the habit of reproducing the intended content to the user on subsequent visits. If search engines went about indexing hashtag URLs, we know that the content could be different from what searchers have been looking for.
Conclusion
Most of you are small business owners, not coders or programmers. Even so, the coding obstacles we have discussed above would be helping you. Coding doesn’t have to be perfect; however, you must ensure that it does not hurt your SEO endeavors.