Kinaxis

With worldwide offices serving a broad range of global customers in a variety of industries, Kinaxis helps companies run their supply chains.
The company was founded in 1984 and headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. Their product: A RapidResponse platform was first introduced in 1995 and It is one of the fastest growing and most innovative supply chain planning systems of record in the marketplace today.

Goal

Improve their overall website structure and solve their SEO issues.

Kinaxis has a good base to build on

• Site size and pre-existing search engine optimization (SEO) at Kinaxis.com are in better shape than most sites
• That said, to gain on its competitors Kinaxis needs to increase its SEO footprint by focusing on indexation and site crawlability

Robots.txt directive

A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of all webpages on your site. It may also contain additional information about each URL in the form of meta data. Since search-bots crawl robots.txt first when crawling a site, it is highly beneficial to add the sitemap.xml file here because it contains a list of every page on the site and the pages can be crawled/indexed quicker.

* Each subdomain with a robots.txt file should have it’s own sitemap included in the robots.txt file

Unsupported Hreflang Links

Hreflang elements are not supported inside normal anchor tags, they need to be inside <link> tags in the header.

Thin Pages

Pages with a small content size can be classified as ‘thin content’ and may not be indexed or devalue your site quality. It is best practice to populate Google’s index with high quality results which, in most cases, means providing in-depth and valuable content that users will find useful.

Here’s an example of a “thin page”:

https://www.kinaxis.com/en/node/397

Broken Pages (4xx Errors)

These are often caused because a page has been removed but is still linked, or because the linked URL is incorrect. The solution is to update the links to point to an alternative target or remove the link if there is no suitable alternative. If the linked page has been deleted, it could be 301 redirected to an appropriate alternative.

Canonicalization

A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical”) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs. Practically speaking, the canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results.

HTTP Pages

Pages using the HTTP protocol are at a disadvantage when competing against secure pages in Google search, and are marked as Non Secure in Chrome browsers from July 2018. A major of the pages still loading over HTTP are from a subdomain.

Non-301 Redirects

URLs redirecting with a 302 status tell search engines that the redirect is temporary, and will not immediately drop the redirecting URL in favour of the redirect target.

Minify JS, CSS, HTML

By compacting HTML, CSS and JS code, including any inline JavaScript and CSS files contained in it, the site can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.

Homepage H1 Tag

HTML header tags are an important way of signaling to search engines the important content topics of your page, and subsequently the keywords it should rank for or would like to target.  In this case, the site is targeting “Know sooner. Act faster.” as the main H1 on the homepage and this does not highlight what Kinaxis does. It would be better to use a keyword such as “Supply Chain Management” as the H1 tag or whatever the primary target keyword is.

Spammy Backlinks

Google works very hard to make sure that actions on third-party sites do not negatively affect a website. In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site and result in poor rankings or even a manual action penalty.