Are blog pages hurting rankings?

[DuBois]

Let me begin by saying that I have a Wordpress site with a customized theme.

When I view my webpage's crawl diagnostics, it keeps showing a lot of Warnings. There are 89 pages with Too Many On-Page Links and 90 Pages with a missing meta-description tag.

The problem is that the pages are listed as follows for both errors:

Blog Page 10

Blog Page 11

Blog Page 12

Etc.

There are no other pages, just the blog pages (which include about 7 posts/page). How do I eliminate the too many links without deleting them from individual blog posts, and how do I add meta-description tags to blog pages without duplicating the tag for /blog?

Thanks!

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[evolvingSEO]

Hi Shulman

Definitely get familiar with the WordPress SEO guide I put together for Moz. It will cover all the basics including good settings for a starting point on any WordPress blogs.

To answer your question specifically;

First make sure you're using Yoast SEO

Then, it sounds like you need to "noindex subpages" - these are pages where the URL is /page/2/ /page/3/ etc. You make this setting in Yoast.

Secondly, set up title and description templates, also in Yoast. This is why some descriptions are empty. If you set up a template it will fill them automatically.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

[eyepaq]

For the Metadescription you can use a WordPress plugin : all in one SEO or my favorite Yost plugin.

You then can edit page by page meta description.

Just run a search for Wordpress SEO plugins and you will find several options.

As for the too many links per page: in my opinion you should't get concerned about this. It dose diminish the Page Rank flow on those pages but it's nothing you should be worried about.  However you should get rid of any unnecessary links from any page. If you have a warning of too many links per page but all links make sense - then leave it be.

Just remember that if you don't touch anything - the missing meta description and the pages with too many links per page are NOT affecting your website. The worst that those can do is affecting those pages only - and by affecting I mean poor rankings for those pages.

The meta description will affect the CTR for those pages only - no ranking minuses there...

Hope it helps.

[CMC-SD]

First off, keep in mind that the "too many links" warning is a flexible guideline. If this is only showing up on your paginated blog pages, you probably have nothing to worry about.

Second, meta-description tags aren't important for paginated blog pages. Ideally, you're using rel=prev and rel=next, which lets Google figure out which page is the first in the series and probably the most relevant (and therefore the one that will appear on the SERP). Also, meta-description tags in general aren't super high priority. Google doesn't always use them as the SERP snippet. They appear most often on Facebook shares, but how often are people going to share Page 10 of your blog? Never.