10 Common SEO Mistakes for Beginners (and One-Click Solutions) – Special Edition for Foreign Trade Website Building

  • Independent station technology optimization
  • Independent website marketing and promotion
  • Independent website operation strategy
  • Foreign trade website
Posted by 广州品店科技有限公司 On Jan 10 2026

1. Robots.txt mistakenly blocks the entire site. Novices often write Disallow: / into the test environment and forget to delete it after going live, resulting in the entire site being crawled and empty.

  1. Use Baidu Robots tool to check the blocking status in real time before going live;
  2. To include robots.txt in Git version control, merge requests require secondary confirmation from the technical lead.
  3. In the Pinshop backend, set "Automatically add Allow: / to the pre-release environment" to prevent manual omission;
  4. Use the Search Console weekly to check for crawling anomalies, and investigate any sudden drops immediately.

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2. The entire site uses "Home" as its title. The default template hardcodes the brand name, resulting in hundreds of pages with the same title, making it impossible for search engines to differentiate the weight of the pages.

  1. It adopts a three-part format of "product keywords + brand + city" and automatically calls up the relevant fields;
  2. Scrape the entire site with Screaming Frog and export duplicate titles with one click;
  3. Batch replacement in the background, completing differentiation in 30 seconds;
  4. Use the "Web Page Title Specifications" from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology as internal training material to reduce the error rate.

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3. Forgetting to add Alt attributes to images: Foreign trade websites often have many product images, and lacking Alt attributes means giving up image search traffic.

  1. The upload window forcibly pops up an Alt input box; it cannot be saved unless filled in.
  2. Use AI to generate short descriptions containing keywords while maintaining semantic relevance;
  3. Run a Site Audit once a month; automatically send an email if the missing data rate is higher than 5%.
  4. Include compression and Alt in operational KPIs to ensure continuous compliance.

Fourth, the coexistence of HTTP and HTTPS and the legacy HTTP internal links after migrating SSL dilute trust.

  1. Batch replace HTTP to HTTPS in the database, excluding third-party references;
  2. Use a 301 redirect to redirect the entire site using the old protocol to avoid a 404 error;
  3. Add max-age=31536000 to the HTST header to force the browser to use encryption;
  4. Use Baidu's crawl diagnostic tool to confirm that the homepage returns a 200 error, ensuring that the domestic nodes are also trustworthy.

5. Duplicate content without specifying Canonical: Product pages with different specifications have the same content but different parameters, resulting in a dispersion of weight.

  1. Add a pointer to the main specification in the head section;
  2. The parameter page is automatically updated with noindex and follow to prevent search engine spiders from getting lost.
  3. Monitor the number of excluded items using Google Search Console coverage reports;
  4. Success stories can be featured in the Shenzhen Cross-Border E-commerce Association's technical column to gain backlinks.

6. Missing structured data: Without Product and Review Schema, search results are still blue links, limiting click-through rates.

  1. In the Pinshop backend, check "Automatic Schema" and the system will automatically generate a JSON-LD.
  2. Verify using Rich Results Test, and receive immediate email alerts for errors;
  3. Integrate the AggregateRating field with the comments module to update the star rating in real time;
  4. Submit products to the China E-Commerce Association's Trusted Product Database quarterly to enhance its authoritative endorsement.

7. Small font size on mobile devices: Baidu Ice Bucket 5.0 explicitly targets fonts smaller than 12px, which negatively impacts mobile rankings.

  1. Set the global CSS value to calc(10px + 0.5vw) to balance readability and layout.
  2. Use Lighthouse CI to run automatic benchmarks; if the score is below 90, the merge will be blocked.
  3. Include font screenshots in the design guidelines; UI reviews will always check them.
  4. Real user testing covers both Europe and America and Southeast Asia to ensure a consistent experience across borders.

8. Pagination without rel=prev/next: Blog list pagination lacks related tags, making it difficult for search engine spiders to track in-depth content.

  1. The list template will automatically output prev/next, while the homepage will only add next.
  2. Staticize the page number URL to avoid using the ?p=2 parameter;
  3. Use Screaming Frog to check for broken chains and ensure the label is in a loop;
  4. Add a "Back to Top" button at the bottom of each page to improve the user experience.

9. Hreflang miswritten language code: en-us was written as en-uk in the English-Chinese bilingual website, causing regional ranking misalignment.

  1. Adopting the ISO 639-1 standard, simplified Chinese uses zh-cn, and English uses en-us;
  2. Pinshop's multilingual switch automatically generates labels, eliminating the need for manual input;
  3. Each new language is validated using XML before being deployed.
  4. Reporting monitoring errors using Search Console International Targeting reduced the number of warnings to 0.

10. A 404 page returned a 200 error code. The custom 404 page did not return the correct status code, and the web crawler mistakenly identified it as duplicate content.

  1. Configure the server with ErrorDocument 404 /404.html to ensure a 404 return code;
  2. Add a site map link to the 404 page to reduce user bounce rate;
  3. Use a Python script to batch detect all site status codes and write them into the CI process;
  4. The repair process was uploaded to the open-source repository of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology to continuously accumulate backlinks for the brand.

Using CTA (Common Reporting and Tag) techniques to troubleshoot is only the first step; letting the system automatically avoid these pitfalls is the long-term solution. Pinshop has pre-configured the above 10 checkpoints as a "one-click repair" module, providing fully visualized operations from Robots.txt to Hreflang, completing a full site scan in 30 seconds. Visit pintreel.com now to give your new site a head start on its first crawl.

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  • SEO optimization for independent websites
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  • Independent station conversion and improvement
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