The document discusses 12 important technical SEO issues that were discovered in recent consulting projects. These include thin or duplicate content on internal pages, poor internal linking architecture, indexed staging servers, canonicalization issues, soft 404 errors, blocked crawler access, excessive redirects, unstripped HTML injection, and ensuring user-generated content is optimized. The document encourages checking for these issues and properly configuring content, links, servers, and user inputs to improve a site's technical SEO.

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TECHNICAL SEO
WHAT’S IMPORTANT?
“12 Popular, interesting & critical issues we’ve
discovered in our most recent technical consulting
projects”
Richard Baxter – Founder / Director – SEOgadget LTD

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1) THIN INTERNAL PAGES / NO CONTENT / BOILERPLATE
CONTENT
You’ve got to have unique text on a page – try persuasive, beautifully written content to
inspire your customers to trust, be inspired and buy!

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2) POOR INTERNAL LINK ARCHITECTURE
Increased # links on homepage and improved internal nav
elements with CSS styled drop downs and popular products
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Internal links and links from the homepage to key internal category pages remains an important part of
your SEO strategy – Google “SEOgadget Architecture” for a guide on internal links and architecture best
practices.

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3) EXCESSIVE DUPLICATION OF CONTENT VIA PAGINATED
NAVIGATION / FACETED NAVIGATION
Check out this pagination guide: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience (SEOmoz), be
careful with rel=“canonical” and use noindex, avoid robots.txt if you can

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4) INDEXED STAGING SERVER
Cleaning up a leaky staging server is a pain – best way, user agent detect and 301 the staged urls to the
public site. Use IP detection – anything that isn’t from a pre-approved range, redirect it.

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5) CANONICALISATION – AND NOT JUST THE WWW
Domain level canonicalisation still a huge problem – most sites we review have a bunch of problems like
this. Check that the trailing slash is added (or removed) and case is handled correctly – check for https in
the index too.

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6) SOFT 404 HEADERS / NO 404 RESPONSE
Don’t install Firefox 4 just yet – live HTTP headers doesn’t work. Redbot is one of many
server header checkers

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7) IF-MODIFIED-SINCE PRODUCES 500 ERROR
Feed the Bots' IF-MODIFIED-SINCE server header checker is really useful – check it out:
http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/if-modified/

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8) SITEMAP.XML FILE RESPONDED WITH A 404 SERVER
HEADER RESPONSE EVEN THOUGH THE FILE WAS
DOWNLOADED
“Google webmaster tools reported no sitemap found at the
sitemap URL – the file was loading in a browser, but the
malformed server header response had everyone scratching
their heads.”
Internal pages and 404 pages aren’t the only files you should check out – sometimes
malformed server header responses can cause days of work to diagnose

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9) BINGBOT / MSNBOT CRAWL BLOCKED
It’s good to crawl like a search engine from time to time, use SEOmoz’s toolbar to change
user agent – disable JavaScript and CSS for a new kind of awesome.

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10) 40,000+ INTERNAL 301 REDIRECTS
Learn to install IIS SEO Toolkit - http://seogadget.co.uk/how-to-install-and-use-iis-seotoolkit/ we think it’s awesome

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11) VERY EASY TO INJECT LINKS WITH HTML
Do Followed Link
Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped –
particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search results

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12) UGC CONTENT ON INTERNAL PAGES IN JAVASCRIPT
“Fantastic!..Excellent quality with a brilliant bag to
keep all the items in...wonderful present for a
scooter crazy chick, with a pink scooter to match
her pink car/scooter wash kit! “
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Check your search boxes and other form functionality to make sure that HTML is stripped –
particularly for sites that create user profile pages and search results

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12) TONS OF DATA / CONTENT? MAKE IT EMBEDDABLE
Be it content, data, images, video, charts – almost everything can be converted to an
embeddable strategy – think: how can others use our data on their sites?

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THANK YOU
richard@seogadget.co.uk
@richardbaxter
Thanks for listening! Check out our blog at SEOgadget.co.uk for more actionable guides and
tips – or hire us for SEO, Conversion Rate Optimisation and bespoke technology consulting.