Hiding tag and category root in wordrpess = plunge rank
-
I deleted the "tag" portion of my tag urls's that were ranking pretty high....so:
www.businessinteriors.co.uk/tag/office-fit-out-bristol became
www.businessinteriors.co.uk/office fit-out-bristol
The old tag page ranked 7 before the change and even 3rd at one stage.
The new name page without the tag has re-appeared at 23....
So quite a plunge in ranking from the change and this is across the board for all my tags (200) that were ranking high and I wanted to improve.
Have I made a major error? Or will they naturally start coming back to where they were before?
Weirdly some of the changes have had a positive impact - so ranking has gone up slightly in some areas..but completely out done by the plungers :-s
-
yes...the wordpress plugin I used took care of that....
-
Did you 301 the old urls to the new? Otherwise you would have all your incoming links pointing at pages that are 404ing
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
SERP Ranking
Hi everyone, I'm struggling to figure out why our website has dramatically changed and is ranking far worse than ever. We were top for around 10 keywords, and had over 4 high traffic keywords in position 1. I think the website needs updating (as it's magento 1.7), and that the competition is increasing. Taking our eye off the ball has been a huge mistake. Could anyone advise on what the next steps would be to start increasing to a better serp rank? These two are own main ranking pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mg33dev
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/budget-roller-banner.html Any advice or pointers would be absolutely awesome. Thanks0 -
Adding a secondary keyword or other keyword variation to the title tag affect ranking for primary keyword?
Hi Moz Community, According to Google Search Console, the main keyword for our website is undergoing a low click through rate, even though we have good ranking for that keyword (top 3). Currently, our homepage's title tag is "Brand Name: Primary Keyword". I am thinking about adding a secondary keyword or other keyword variation to differentiate our company from others in order to possibly increase the click through rate. Will this affect the current ranking for the primary keyword? Also, is the clickthrough data in Google Search Console accurate? Thank you! Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii0 -
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Ecommerce: A product in multiple categories with a canonical to create a ‘cluster’ in one primary category Vs. a single listing at root level with dynamic breadcrumb.
OK – bear with me on this… I am working on some pretty large ecommerce websites (50,000 + products) where it is appropriate for some individual products to be placed within multiple categories / sub-categories. For example, a Red Polo T-shirt could be placed within: Men’s > T-shirts >
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
Men’s > T-shirts > Red T-shirts
Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts
Men’s > Sale > T-shirts
Etc. We’re getting great organic results for our general T-shirt page (for example) by clustering creative content within its structure – Top 10 tips on wearing a t-shirt (obviously not, but you get the idea). My instinct tells me to replicate this with products too. So, of all the location mentioned above, make sure all polo shirts (no matter what colour) have a canonical set within Men’s > T-shirts > Polo T-shirts. The presumption is that this will help build the authority of the Polo T-shirts page – this obviously presumes “Polo Shirts” get more search volume than “Red T-shirts”. My presumption why this is the best option is because it is very difficult to manage, particularly with a large inventory. And, from experience, taking the time and being meticulous when it comes to SEO is the only way to achieve success. From an administration point of view, it is a lot easier to have all product URLs at the root level and develop a dynamic breadcrumb trail – so all roads can lead to that one instance of the product. There's No need for canonicals; no need for ecommerce managers to remember which primary category to assign product types to; keeping everything at root level also means there no reason to worry about redirects if product move from sub-category to sub-category etc. What do you think is the best approach? Do 1000s of canonicals and redirect look ‘messy’ to a search engine overtime? Any thoughts and insights greatly received.0 -
Website Suddenly dropping rank
Morning Moz Fans: My URL is: http://goo.gl/Dhbjwj According to MOZ, which we are tracking this URL with, somewhere between the 3rd Feb and 10th the domain went from being fairly well indexed to being dropped to pages further back than 6-7, for pretty much everything, even the company name was only registering at the bottom of page one. Around this time we were transferring the website from .php into wordpress, so we were creating new pages, called by the same names and all the same content but we created the wordpress area in a sub domain of the website. Again around this time we had an issue with the blog area and had to take it down for 4-5 weeks due to some errors which meant google wouldn't have been able to crawl these pages properly, but the rest of the website was up and running. We also discovered recently that the company have and use this domain http://goo.gl/5JvDUH So my question is, what do you think caused the problem? has it been premaritally penalised? is there a way I can get google to specifically look at it and is there any more i can do?Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
Why I am loosing my ranking?
My website is lonestarperio.com, I am loosing my website ranking, Is SEO agency doing any black hat SEO or doing anything wrong to my website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward1 -
Could this URL issue be affecting our rankings?
Hi everyone, I have been building links to a site for a while now and we're struggling to get page 1 results for their desired keywords. We're wondering if a web development / URL structure issue could be to blame in what's holding it back. The way the site's been built means that there's a 'false' 1st-level in the URL structure. We're building deeplinks to the following page: www.example.com/blue-widgets/blue-widget-overview However, if you chop off the 2nd-level, you're not given a category page, it's a 404: www.example.com/blue-widgets/ - [Brings up a 404] I'm assuming the web developer built the site and URL structure this way just for the purposes of getting additional keywords in the URL. What's worse is that there is very little consistency across other products/services. Other pages/URLs include: www.example.com/green-widgets/widgets-in-green www.example.com/red-widgets/red-widget-intro-page www.example.com/yellow-widgets/yellow-widgets I'm wondering if Google is aware of these 'false' pages* and if so, if we should advise the client to change the URLs and therefore the URL structure of the website. This is bearing in mind that these pages haven't been linked to (because they don't exist) and therefore aren't being indexed by Google. I'm just wondering if Google can determine good/bad URL etiquette based on other parts of the URL, i.e. the fact that that middle bit doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, my colleague Steve asked this question on a blog post that Dr. Pete had written. Here's a link to Steve's comment - there are 2 replies below, one of which argues that this has no implication whatsoever. However, 5 months on, it's still an issue for us so it has me wondering... Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gmorgan0