Hi Casey,

I can’t thank you enough for the extensive feedback you gave me!  My favorite saying is “you don’t know what you don’t know” so you’ve given me some great action to work on!  Here are a few bullet points to follow-up on your feedback…

1. I just updated all of the permalinks late yesterday, so I should be good there.  I thought that I did them as I went along, but ahrefs alerted me to a bunch I missed.  So barring any error on my part, I think I am good.  I did the FBP course on GSC and look forward to watching the webinar you suggested.
2. Interesting on your powerful comment to switch to Yoast – I did notice that Yoast is the preferred SEO plugin for FBP in the courses that I have taken so far.  I will definitely heed your advice and look into the switch.
3. Yesterday I removed the tags from the few blogs that used them and then deleted the tags completely.  I had this in my mind from a FBP course I watched previously.  Hopefully I didn’t mess anything up by doing that (but knowing me – I am sure I did!)!
4. Thanks for pointing out the NOFOLLOW – I think somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I should do this, but it never made it all the way to front and center.  I am embarrassed to admit that I don’t know how to do a NOFOLLOW – but like everything else, I will figure it out!
5. Finally, I am so glad you made a point of focusing on my health claim stuff!  I think in my mind I was hoping to be a catalyst to pull together just some basic “word on the street” general information – but seeing it through your lens, I understand the errors I was making.  I will review the article you linked and figure out how to solve this.

Thanks again Casey – your help and kindness going above and beyond makes me so happy to be a FBP new member!

Hey Jen, first, if you updated your links and you are sure they working, you also have to update ALL the internal “permalinks” from the old URLs to the new ones.

This is necessary to insure you don’t dilute the flow of PageRank and authority through your site.

If you have not done this, I recommend you purchase the “Internal Redirect Fix” from the Blog Fixer here. He will do it for you:

https://www.blogfixer.com/internal-permalink-redirect-fix/

As for your questions above, you will find the answers to most of those questions by watching this webinar here on GSC:

https://tophatrank.com/blog/seo-for-publishers-episode-17-getting-started-with-google-search-console/

Understand that MOST of what you are seeing as “flagging” is not any cause for concern. MOST of those links above don’t get indexed and would be under the “discover not indexed” or the “crawled not indexed” or even the “alternate page chosen for canonical” filters and are just fine.

This is your site correct? https://organizingaplantbasedlife.com/

Just a couple of quick notes I see as causes for concern:

There is literally no competitive advantage, none, for you to use the “All-In-One” plugin over Yoast. And as a new blogger, this hurts you, it does not help you. I personally would recommend you switch.

You also need to be NOINDEXING tags on the blog. You shouldn’t be using them at all. Fortunately, you only have “five” of them right now. And that’s more than enough.

I also noticed two other big issues I would urge you to prioritize fixing:

– you must NOFOLLOW all affiliate links. You have a ton of links to “Walmart” per the example post here. All of those must be NOFOLLOWED per Google guidelines.

– you also must support all “health claims” on your site. You have two noticeable issues in this area; you do not show any clear health training or credentials that I can see via your About Me page. And, even if you did, you cannot make “health claims” without supporting them.

For example, take your post at https://organizingaplantbasedlife.com/superseeds-the-new-superfood-in-a-plant-based-diet/ you said the following:

“Not only are they packed with essential vitamins and minerals, but they can also offer a plethora of health benefits. From reducing the risk of chronic diseases to improving digestion and mental health, the power of greens should not be underestimated.”

“Sesame seeds are high in calcium and also contain a unique compound called sesamin, which has been shown to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties”

“Vitamin K is important for bone health and blood clotting, while vitamin A is important for vision and immune function. Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant that supports immune function and collagen production.”

“Vegetables are high in antioxidants, which help protect the body from harmful free radicals that can cause damage to cells and lead to chronic diseases. They also contain compounds that have anti-inflammatory properties, which can help reduce inflammation in the body and protect against chronic diseases.”

Unfortunately, you didn’t “support” any of the statements above. Everything above “may” be true, but you have to support them via in-content citations. Otherwise, this will get you in trouble!

Please review my article here: https://searchengineland.com/google-helpful-content-updates-survive-thrive-432843

Then, scroll down to “5. Bloggers must support any and all health claims.” That will help you understand why this is a big deal.

Good luck with your site and welcome to Food Blogger Pro!

Hello!

I have a couple of questions related to SEO, Google Search Console (GSC), and page indexing, and I’d appreciate your insights!

Redirects After Changing Permalinks:
About six months ago, I updated my blog’s permalink structure from URL/YYYY/MM/blog-name/ to URL/blog-name/ so I could periodically refresh the content. I used the Redirection plugin to create around 50 redirects for the old links.

1. I understand that redirects are necessary, but can having too many negatively impact SEO?
2. Will Google eventually stop referencing the old URLs so I can safely remove those redirects?
3. GSC currently shows 61 “Pages with Redirect,” which matches the number of redirects I’ve set. Should I ignore this in GSC, or is there something I need to address (like validate a fix just to remove it from showing up?)?

Indexing Specific Page Types:
GSC is flagging various types of pages, and I’m unsure whether they should be indexed or excluded. Without digging too deep into each of these specifically, could you advise on whether I should index the following types of pages?

• URL/files/recipe-name.pdf (e.g., Tofu 101 PDF)
• URL/category/category-name/
• URL/YYYY/MM/ (e.g., archive pages by year and month of blog publication)
• URL/blog/page/2/ (pagination for older blog posts)
• URL/clients/client-1/ (not sure what this is or where it came from!)
• URL/portfolio-items/name
• URL/blog-name/feed
• URL/comments

Thanks in advance for your help! I’d love to get a better understanding of best practices for both redirects and indexing in situations like this.

Hi Alison,

Thank you so much! I’ve currently set up downloads on my site by using the grow forms. So, I will use their forms to get email sign ups (so it increases my RPMs), and then using an API connection, send that subscriber data to mailerlite, to send off a drip campaign that includes delivering the ebook for download.

As for your other notes, that’s good to know! I will let you know if I have more questions then.

BTW I haven’t received any messages from you on coaching. But still interested in setting something up. 🙂

Hey Audrey!

A few things here – let me try to break some of them down.

Do you currently have PDFs on your site for download? Can you point me to one so I can see how its implemented?

For the GTM Google Tag matter – You need to have a Google Tag with the Measurement ID set and have it fire on All Pageviews – Initialization, but you are correct that if you implement this as is then you could be getting duplicate pageview data. In order to circumvent that issue you need to add a parameter of “send_page_view” and set the value to false:

For form tracking, you are correct that form_start is the beginning of engaging with a form and form_submit is just that, a submission. I would separate out the form events in an explore report and use “form_id” or “form_name” to se which forms are abandoned most often.

I do offer training and I know you reached out to me via email so I will send you a note back there on what those offerings are!

Let me know if you have other questions!

Alison

Hi Alison,

Thanks for this instruction! This was so incredibly helpful. I went ahead and created the custom dimensions. It looks like the event name, file_download is already being measured in enhanced measurements in my GA4. However, it’s not listed in my events list. Will it start to show up in reports & settings once I create and add the pdf in my report?

After looking at some of the gA4 tutorials (trying to get a better understanding of custom dimensions and events), I came across some google tutorials that showed how to create a custom event around newsletter sign ups and tracking the different forms. This was really cool to see, but I realize that what I’m tracking now may not be enough. I went ahead and started setting this up in GTM, but GTM told me I don’t have the tag in my container (i think that’s because I used site kit to add GA4 instead of GTM). But my question, if I add it, would I be essentially adding two GA4 tags to my site and duplicating the data that GA4 receives? See picture at the bottom of what I’m seeing. I would love to set this up, but don’t want the tags/events to fire twice. Any advice or help on this would be appreciated.

Also, this is a semi-unrelated question, but was curious. In the GA4 standard events, I see form_start and form_submit. what’s the difference? Does the form_start mean that the person may have started filling out the form but didn’t finish and abandoned it? In my analytics, there is a big difference in how many people started the form vs. submitted.

Lastly, do you offer any 1-on-1 coaching sessions? I can see I need more help, like how to set up my google tag manager effectively to set up detailed custom events, etc. I have several different scenarios in my head that I also want to track that we haven’t discussed yet.

Thanks!

Hi there,

I started my blogging journey with Siteground as my registrar and host. I’m looking to switch to Bigscoots for hosting now and wondered how that process works and if there’s any “good to know” info before I dive in.

When I sign up with Bigscoots, will it automatically cancel my hosting for Siteground, or do I need to contact them? Should I contact Siteground before or after switching?

Is there anything I should look out for during the switchover? Is it common to notice issues with the website after a host switch?

Any other good stuff to know ahead of time?

Thanks for any help!

Yep, no need to worry about these redirects, McKenzie. Those are set up correctly!

One other thing! There’s a cool little search thing you can do to see how your site is showing up in Google and what URLs are currently being included in search results.

Thank you Jo! No, your experience is really valuable. That’s interesting though. I have wordpress, so I hope I wouldn’t have a problem like that. I also use HubSpot for my work and absolutely love it, but probably won’t ever be able to justify the price. I’ve never used active campaign though.

I’ve used professionally mailchimp and infusionsoft, but didn’t like them for various reasons and wouldn’t want to use them for my food blog. So, I went with what the buzz of the food community was talking about – mailerlite and/or convertkit.

Thanks again,

Thank you that helps! I was thinking this was a bad thing and potentially causing me to not have much traffic but I think that is just me needing to focus on high quality content and SEO!