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SEO trouble shooting

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zpyder:
A few months ago I redesigned my website from a Wordpress installation on a hostgator shared server, to a smugmug hosted website.

It seems that, despite the new website having much more information and tags (pages and galleries and photos themselves have descriptions and keywords), it's next to impossible to find pages on google. In fact, it's probably a bit easier to find a google result for one of the old, now non-existent pages from the previous version of the website.

I suspect I'm being penalised by google in some way in terms of how the move happened. Looking in search console I've got a bunch of "Indexed, blocked by robots.txt" results that started when I moved to SmugMug. I'm wondering if perhaps smugmugs robots.txt is blocking google from accessing the old wordpress pages.

This is just scratching the surface, but I was wondering if anyone is savvy with this stuff who could give me some pointers. I've tried doing search result removal requests for the pages that are blocked by robots.txt. SmugMug seem pretty pants when I have emailed them and asked why their SEO friendly platform is performing so poorly.

Website in question is www.muddyboots.xyz

zpyder:


Spot the point I remade my website heh.

Clock'd 0Ne:
Use Google Webmaster tools to check your robots.txt configuration, it will tell you what is accessible or not.

The other issue is, you've moved your site but Google doesn't know this, and will still have all the original pages indexed. What you needed to do was setup 301 redirects for all the old site URLs, in Wordpress you would do this with a plugin, now you would have to edit the .htaccess file on the server and add the redirections manually - you can Google how to do that its very simple really - but obviously you will need to know what all of the old URLs were to redirect to for the new pages. At this stage of the game its probably not worth the effort if you don't know the existing URLs now and I would simply fix the robots.txt, then use a sitemap generator site to index your website pages and submit that sitemap URL to Google and the other big search engines.

I don't know what SmugMug qualify as an 'SEO friendly' platform but that sounds like snakeoil bullsh*t to me. SEO is completely irrespective of platform unless you're doing something really wrong - like blocking pages in robots.txt files and not redirecting expired URLs. ;D

neXus:
- You do not need Keywords, not used by the search engines. Just tells everyone what the keywords you trying to get.
- Get yourself setup with google analytics and either install its default code or through google tag manager
- As Nige said, if you not done so yet setup your webmaster tools
- Your home page is pretty void of content
- On your inner pages your Header 1's are OK but could be stronger
- Your inner content page content needs sorting: https://www.muddyboots.xyz/New-Zealand/NZ-Nature You have paragraph per line so the strength and depth of the content and keywords is pretty weak in terms of SEO.
- Your sitemap is not really generating anything: https://www.muddyboots.xyz/sitemap-index.xml

zpyder:
Thanks guys. Gives me a place to start!

I suspect one issue is that smugmugs robots.txt by default is blocking all pages other than the ones that have been created through smugmug. So google can't access the old content to see it's not there. It's just blocked. I'll contact smugmug to see if they can do anything about customising the robots.txt to allow the old content...I remember I looked into it a while back and there was a lot of discussion on the net that SmugMugs approach wasn't the best/most efficient use of Robots.txt

I've been set up with GA and WMT for yonks, but have always found analytics to be just a bit of a monster in terms of usage. So many different reports, it's not entirely clear what most of them are saying. Typically I've used it just to see how many people have visited, and from what source.

Home page is tricky to put content on in terms of I've never known what would be useful. I guess blog posts...but again SmugMug is pretty poor in terms of blog support. I kind of regret moving from Hostgator, but the hosting was just too slow for such a media rich site. I'll look into blog integration though, I know it's possible, but just not sure how easy...

And regarding the sitemap...is that true? In Search console in the sitemap area I think the sitemap is a zip containing sub-sitemaps, and there's a few hundred pages and images that have been indexed etc.

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