Issues with TeamRaiser and SEO

JD Piland

Hello LO Community,


Our SEO editor continues to grapple with TeamRaiser. We work together as best we can to address the issues as they are flagged, but, frankly, it's getting old trying to figure out the issue or seeing the same thing flagged over and over. Because I am not terribly well versed in SEO, here's an explanation from our editor.

 

We have been running audits of our site using SEMRush. The audits are flagging Teamraiser pages for various issues, such as:

• Duplicate title tags
• Duplicate meta descriptions
• Duplicate content
• Redirect chains and loops

What is the best and easiest way to go about addressing these problems?

Here's one of our TR instances: https://support.bestfriends.org/site/TR/Events/General?pg=entry&fr_id=1460

And a recent flag on that page: A link to the login on that page was "being redirected too many times and is being flagged in the audit."


We’ve added an updated robots.txt file and that worked well -- especially for what was being considered duplicate TR content -- but other issues persist.


Are these issues in the setup? Some place else? If anyone out there has any insight, that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Jeremy Reynolds

A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Luminate has some SEO issues that just can't be fixed, others that can be fixed in configuration, and still others that come down to content (e.g. consistency when you link things), image sizes, keyword relevancy). Redirects can be caused by your DNS configuration, LO's pre-software redirect settings, your link formatting, and quirks on how it switches to/from HTTPS. Looking at that page, some of the first things that I noticed:

1. Implement <link rel="canonical" href="_________"> in your page wrapper. TeamRaiser doesn't pay attention to certain parts of the URL string, meaning you can have an infinite number of URLs referencing the same page (for example, https://support.bestfriends.org/site/TR/Events/Are/Great/In/General?pg=entry&fr_id=1460 works the same as the link you shared). The trick is coming up with code that is uniform no matter what the URL shows.
2. Add schema.org and open graph tags too, if you can. Use google's microdata tester, facebook's open graph debugger, etc. to highlight issues.
3. Prioritize fixes based on severity. Redirect chains and duplicate content are much more harmful than meta descriptions (which aren't an SEO heuristic but do have an impact on user behavior).
4. SEMrush is good, but make sure you're leaning even more heavily on Google Analytics, Webmaster/Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, etc. It's easy to fall into a pattern of focusing on edge cases like duplicate content, while missing lower-hanging fruit (e.g. offscreen images are adding four seconds to your mobile rendering time and giving you what's probably a heavier impact in the SERPs).

Bri MacBain 2

SEO is definitely an issue, I've ended up just building outside of LO and using the API to connect- here's an example using WordPress and Yoast SEO (makes it much easier for this sort of stuff): https://treatweek.ca/