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Are those main category pages (like /collections/living-room-furniture) or are they different?

Hi Dana,

Expires headers and other caching headers can help improve site performance (as you said), and that will be a good thing for SEO. There is no reason to be concerned - they are common headers and there isn't much they could do to have any negative impact on SEO.

Good luck!

Tom

Hi there!

Ok, it is difficult to know all the ins and outs without looking at the site, but the immediate issue is that your robots.txt setup is incorrect. robots.txt files should be one per subdomain, and cannot exist inside sub-folders:

A **robots.txt **file is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlers

From Google's page here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

You shouldn't be blocking Google from either site, and attempting to do so may be the problem with why your hreflang directives are not being detected. You should move to having a single robots.txt file located at https://www.clientname.com/robots.txt, with a link to a single sitemap index file. That sitemap index file should then link to each of your two UK & US sitemap files.

You should ensure you have hreflang directives for every page. Hopefully after these changes you will see things start to get better. Good luck!

Hey NeatIT!

I see you have a working solution there. Did you have a specific question about the setup?

I did notice that your setup cane sometimes result in chaining 301 redirects, which is one area for possible improvement.

Let me know how we can help!

If you have many URLs from the old site in the index that are all in the same directory (or a handful of directories) you can quickly and easily remove whole directories of URLs from the index via Google Search Console. We have found it to work very quickly.

1. Go into Search Console, selected ‘Remove URLs’ under ‘Google Index’ in the left hand menu.

2. Add the page or folder you want to remove, and click next. If you add the homepage, that's the same as all pages on the site. If you add a folder you'll get three options under the ‘Reason’ drop down.

One of those options is ‘Remove directory’. Select that.

Ok, cool. To reiterate - with escaped_fragment you are just serving the same content in a tweaked format and Google recommend it rather than frown upon it. Good to be sure though.

See you at SearchLove!

Hi,

I am not sure I follow your concerns around serving an alternative version of the page to search engines - is that concern based on concerns it will be frowned upon or technical concerns?

Using the escaped_fragment methodology would work for your purposes, and would be the best approach. If you have technical concerns around creating the HTML snapshots you could look at a service such as https://prerender.io/ which helps manage this process.

If that doesn't answer your question, please give more information so we can understand more specifically where you concerns are.

It seems like the issue is a bug in the way Google handle data from your site ('null' being computer speak for 'empty', and often appearing after buggy handling of data). However, it seems that the indication from Umar is correct, and that this buggy data handling is likely prompted by crawling issue so that is the best place to start.

Is it possible for you to give a clearer description of the categories? You say they are different products but that one is a second category of the other

Does the page you want to rank show up for any other searches? In your analytics are you getting any traffic from Google to that page?