I recently updated an old site with Blocs and uploaded the default sitemap, which looked fine, but I typically use Integrity Plus, that produces more detailed sitemaps, including image names and PDF files etc. From past experience Google seems to like this.
In the sitemap produced by Integrity Plus it lists both example.com/ and example.com/index.php as separate pages. I understand that both are technically correct, but in this instance I wonder if it’s causing confusion or undermining my SEO?
That being the case, should we be creating 301 redirect rules via htaccess for sites built with Blocs? With other design apps I’ve not encountered this problem, but I usually employ a different URL structure so that each web page is uploaded as an index.php file within a folder, so you end up with something like example.com/about/ rather than example.com/about.php with Blocs.
The only links to the home page are internal, using the navigate to page interaction and selecting Home, so those should be consistent. Integrity Plus is spotting example.com as the home page and gives it a maximum importance ranking, but then example.com/index.php shows up as another page just like any other.
Its actually a great tool for spotting errors and looking now in the links section I can see a single entry for example.com, however there are 8 occurrences over more than one page leading to example.com/index.php, so it looks like Blocs is handling internal links in a slightly strange way.
I don’t think Integrity Plus is a match for Screaming Frog in terms of features, however it does the basics well. If you are looking for something more full featured and feel confident you will use those features, Scrutiny is a clever piece of software, which is still excellent value compared to Screaming Frog. I am using it extensively nowadays on all my sites.
Regarding the lazy loaded images, at one point none of them were showing up in the sitemaps. By exporting once with lazy load disabled I can make them appear, but it makes little difference if you then upload again with lazy load enabled, because Google still won’t index them.
It’s down to the way lazy load is currently implemented in Blocs and it’s frankly a problem from my perspective, because I can have a hundred images that appear in the sitemap with alt tags and named for Seo but Google is only finding that single file lazyload.png. Fixing this is fairly high on my wish list for changes.
Integrity Pro is a decent app and I have it myself. I managed to pick up Scrutiny for peanuts on Bundlehunt and it was just too good a deal to ignore. Less than I paid for Integrity Pro.
At the moment you have the sitemap in place, but Google won’t index the images unless you keep lazyload turned off. Mirage is a pro feature on Cloudflare and I’ve used it in the past. I seem to recall it was more aimed at mobile users. Google will definitely index the images with Mirage enabled, though with properly optimised images the differences in speed will be small.
I love messing about with server configurations and Cloudflare for performance. It has almost become a hobby for me and I’ve implemented various strategies, including Railgun and using a LiteSpeed server with Quic enabled.
On a side note, Norm said something recently about making changes that will help with Seo and I hope a change in the Lazyload setup will be part of that, because it is potentially really useful when done in a way that Google likes.