For a long time we’ve had a template that hasn’t worked properly on Mobiles, partially down to the Template, but also, as all-around CSS Hero Joseph found out, was down to our Geo-location plugin.

As we’d soft-set our map to be 500px wide, it was demanding that space, even if a map wasn’t being shown. This led to a large white right hand column appearing when looked at on a mobile.

The fix has been a two stage process. Initially involving changing the Geo-location plugin and its CSS, later making some other changes to the sites more general CSS.

I’m delighted to report that it’s now working on a mobile like a dream, all thanks to the skills and thorough approach of Joseph.

We had over 1,200 ‘Not found’ links being reported by Google Webmasters tool. Have reduced this to 168. A large amount of them was /tag/ links. Created a server redirect to point them to about.

We used to use a little URL redirect program, redir.php, so have manually edited out all references to this now.

146 ‘Server errors’ as well. Many of them links to the VB Forum, which had been updated to onthewight.com/forum during search and replace of shift to OnTheWight. Have been in searching for the string, eg ‘/viewtopic.php?p=6102’ in the Posts. Then manually edit out. Still about 82 left

Fixed ‘Smartphones’ ones (42 server errors + 14 not found) too

News-specific crawl errors
Good Tips

We have 169 articles that are marked with the following summaries:-

‘Article fragmented’ – “The article body that we extracted from the HTML page appears to consist of isolated sentences not grouped together into paragraphs”;

Going through and manually un-including them in Google News index.

‘Article disproportionately short’ – “The article body that we extracted from the HTML page is too small when compared to other clusters of text without links on the page. This applies to most pages that contain news briefs or multimedia content, rather than full news articles.”

‘Article too long’ – Fix: “User comments – consider enclosing the comments in an iframe, dynamically fetching them with AJAX or moving them to an adjacent page.”;

‘Article too short’ – “The article body that we extracted from the HTML page appears to contain too few words to be a news article. This applies to most pages that contain news briefs or multimedia content, rather than full news articles.” Fix: “Try formatting your articles into text paragraphs of a few sentences each. If the article content appears to contain too few words to be a news article, we won’t be able to include it. Make sure your articles have more than 80 words.”

_Tip
“Article too short or article disproportionally short – these two crop up with some frequency especially on blogs, which are more likely to publish some fairly short pieces. The minimum requirement for Google News is 80 words, but I’ve seen articles just over that figure still trigger the error. For any news content that you want to be indexed, include a minimum of 100 words and preferably 250+.”
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