Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills |  |
| Posted: 26 Jun 2014 06:30 AM PDT
This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of SEO. How Google uses signals relative to your website. So, if you have lots of duplicate title tags, Google will likely view all your title tags as not being a good representation about what that page/file is about and will likely discount the weight it puts on title tags across your entire site. If you have lots of 404 pages on your site, Google will discount the value your other signals are sending them. (This is why you really need to use an SEO Platform. If you do the math…you have 200 ranking factors, competing for each keyword, against at least 10 other sites, along with industry specific ranking algorithms and hundreds or thousands of keywords you are competing on, you have literally millions of factors that play into your specific sites rankings. An SEO platform takes all of that data into consideration and makes recommendations based on what is most likely going to help you in your specific case.) Back to our post though… While Webmaster Tools will notify you to down pages, you really need a real time alert to check daily and let you know when a problem is happening. The good news is, Google Analytics has a little known feature called Custom Alerts or Intelligence Events. I show you an intro for how to use them in this post. The Good News Is you can easily set up a Custom Alert for 404 Error pages, which will email you the moment it detects a page goes down or you have an increase in 404 errors. Here’s what you need to do. 1. Login to Google Analytics Now, you should see three columns of options. In the third column, it should say “view” and the third link should say “Goals” – Click on that. You should see a big button that says, “+New Goal” – click on that. Now, go ahead and name the goal and choose the option from the list of types of goals “Destination” Now, you will need to enter in the URL of the page you are tracking, Let’s say your 404 URL looks like this http://www.yoursite.com/404.html, you will need to create a goal that recognizes when that URL is hit. So, enter in /404.html as the destination for the goal you just created. If you don’t know what your 404 URL looks like there are a couple ways to figure it out. The best option is to go to the behavior tab in your Google Analytics reporting, and look at the pages your visitors hit. Browse through it for 404. Another option is to simply navigate to your site by typing in a URL of a deep page and misspell it, and look at the URL you hit. However, some CMS’s might keep the original URL when showing a 404 page but you’ll see the 404 in the page title or maybe say “Page Not Found”. You can easily find those pages in the same behavior report in analytics but have it show page title instead of URL. If the URL stays the same, you can still track this with the event we are about to create. Now that you have a goal setup to track 404 errors, you need to use the nifty tool called Alerts so that you get emailed (or texted) the moment a page on your site goes down and gets hit by a visitor. Here’s how to do that. To navigate to the section where you can set custom alerts, you need to go back to the admin page with three columns, the one where you went to create the goal. Now in that same third column towards the bottom you will see a section called, “personal tools and assets” the fifth item down will say “Custom Alerts” – click on that and you will see a big button that says, “+New Alert”. Now, name your alert, and as you see in the image above, you need to tell it where to apply your alert to. You can choose almost anything here, but if its a page title that says 404 or not found, just enter that in the “Alert Conditions” that says, “This Applies To” . Once that is set, you need to tell it when to alert you. In the example above they set the alert to email you when your 404 error pages go up by 15% or more. The reason this alert chose that criteria is because there will likely be a certain amount of 404 pages on your site at any given time. After all, your users just need to misspell the URL to hit the page. What you really want to be monitoring for is if your advertising is going to a 404 page or a page that gets lots of traffic is returning a not found error, or if someone links to your website and misspells the URL. However, you can just as easily have it alert you every time someone hits a 404 page. Now that you have this data, you need to figure out which page is getting the errors, and figure out how to fix it. You can go to your navigation summary and see what the entrance source for the 404 page is. This will let you know where the visitors are coming from. Good Luck.
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And if you don’t fix those errors by either putting the page back up or redirecting it to an appropriate page on your site, Google will eventually remove that page from their index, and if you have lots of errors, it sends a signal to Google that your site isn’t maintained actively and will eventually hurt your overall rankings.
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