How to fix website redirects and Google crawl?

[cclun]

I have never really focused too much on specific SEO recommendations. I felt if I took care of providing the visitors some value and good experience, Google would pick it up. Leading with that I have been simply typing discoflip.com in the browser bar and using it as I normally would. It always worked.

However, I noticed something odd. Google Analytics showed me that I got direct traffic and visitors from a few other websites. But the last visitor from Google was back in May, and only a couple total visits this year. I chalked it up to Google not liking DiscoFlip yet. But curiosity got the best of me and I took a peek in Google Search Console.

Here is what I found:

• http://discoflip.com → In index, but last crawl was back in Oct 2020
• https://discoflip.com → Not in index, never been crawled
• LiveTest → Both versions fail
• Request reindex → Both versions fail with the message: “Index Request Rejected - During live testing, indexing issues were detected with the URL” (screenshot)

You can read more details and see live scan here.

If you know what is going on, please let me know.

 

[faitfulservant67]

@cclun Google will attempt to tie the duplicate content together with the canonical algorithm. The proper way to handle this is to send clear signals to Google as to which URL should appear in search and to send all the signals from other URLs to this preferred version. 301 redirects should have been setup in the .htaccess file to redirect the following versions to the preferred URL and send clear signals. If you don’t do this Google may or may not forward signals to the canonical version... aka why so many website migrations go bad.

301 redirects for the following should be setup in the.htaccess file.

http://

http://www.

https://www.

Any other URLs

To

https://domain.com/

You should also ensure each page is using a proper canonical tag (usually only an issue with javascript sites as the developers who are not SEO’s hand code the HTML).

May want to check the robots.txt file to make sure https:// isn’t being blocked.

 

[cclun]

@faitfulservant67 I don't have robot.txt on the server. I'm going to try the canonical input you have provided.

 

[cclun]

@faitfulservant67 How would I correctly add all three redirects to htaccess?

Here is what I currently have:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^system.*

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^application.*

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.(.*)$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP\_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]



ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

 

[faitfulservant67]

@cclun FYI.. you can take down a site very easily playing with this file so always make a backup first and consider having a developer do it if you're not comfortable. There are plenty of guides on the web explaining the code and samples. The following lines should currently be doing redirects and you just need to add other versions. Make sure you have the flag [R=301,L] otherwise by default it's a 302. Another reason why so many migrations go bad.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.(.*)$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

 

[cclun]

@faitfulservant67 These lines are currently redirecting to www. I want the reverse --> being redirected to non-www