Content earns rankings, but technical problems stop content being seen. Most sites lose visibility not through penalties but through duplicate URLs, broken redirects and pages search engines cannot reach.
One URL per page
Decide whether you serve www or bare domain, http or https, trailing slash or not, and redirect every alternative to the canonical form with a 301. Duplicate URLs split ranking signals between versions of the same page.
- Enforce one hostname and one protocol
- Redirect legacy URLs rather than leaving them live
- Set a self-referencing canonical on every page
- Make sure paginated and filtered URLs do not multiply endlessly
Sitemaps that reflect reality
A sitemap should list canonical, indexable URLs and nothing else. Generating it from your live content, rather than maintaining it by hand, keeps it accurate as pages are added and removed.
Crawl budget and robots
Block genuinely private areas, keep everything else open, and reference your sitemap from robots.txt. Blocking CSS or JavaScript prevents search engines rendering the page as users see it.
Structured data
Mark up organisations, articles, products and breadcrumbs. Structured data does not guarantee rich results, but without it you are not eligible for them.
After a redesign
- Map every old URL to its new equivalent before launch
- Redirect in one hop, never in chains
- Re-submit the sitemap and watch coverage reports for a fortnight
- Compare top landing pages before and after
The most common cause of lost traffic after a relaunch is not new content. It is old URLs that were never redirected.
Where to start
Crawl your own site and list every URL returning anything other than 200 or a single 301. That report is usually where the traffic went.
