Occasionally, a problem will land on your desk that's a little out of the ordinary. Something where you don't have an easy answer. You go to your brain and your brain returns nothing.
These problems can’t be solved with a little bit of keyword research and basic technical configuration. These are the types of technical SEO problems where the rabbit hole goes deep.
The very nature of these situations defies a checklist, but it's useful to have one for the same reason we have them on planes: even the best of us can and will forget things, and a checklist will provvide you with places to dig.
Fancy some examples of strange SEO problems? Here are four examples to mull over while you read. We’ll answer them at the end.
1. Why wasn’t Google showing 5-star markup on product pages?
- The pages had server-rendered product markup and they also had Feefo product markup, including ratings being attached client-side.
- The Feefo ratings snippet was successfully rendered in Fetch & Render, plus the mobile-friendly tool.
- When you put the rendered DOM into the structured data testing tool, both pieces of structured data appeared without errors.
2. Why wouldn’t Bing display 5-star markup on review pages, when Google would?
- The review pages of client & competitors all had rating rich snippets on Google.
- All the competitors had rating rich snippets on Bing; however, the client did not.
- The review pages had correctly validating ratings schema on Google’s structured data testing tool, but did not on Bing.
3. Why were pages getting indexed with a no-index tag?
- Pages with a server-side-rendered no-index tag in the head were being indexed