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
-
Wordpress Tags error in MOZ
Hi, We are getting an enormous amount of missing meta description only on our tag archives. When we post we fill in a description and are using the Yoast plugin ( getting green lights). Now we are finding that we're missing descriptions in tags archives. What is the best thing to do? We're finding that the tags are creating a separate url for each tag that has missing description even though the post has a full description. 1. To block spiders from crawling tags? 2. To stop using tags? 3. What do you suggest? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WalterHalicki0 -
Best approach to rank for this keyword?
Hi i want to rank for the keyword "white sandals" on Google Australia. Currently, the top 5 ranking pages are not optimised and specific to white sandals. See screenshot: https://image.prntscr.com/image/WenSRHqTTFSqYNg2MHvH1A.png To rank for this keyword, would you create a page dedicated to white sandals even though it looks like it doesn't matter and you could rank the broader sandals page (not colour specific). Any recommendations? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | crazy4seo780 -
Does >70 character title tag affect a pages ranking in search?
We are a publication that puts out hundreds of articles a month. We have +5000 medium priority errors showing that our title element tags are too long. The title tag is structured like this: [Headine] | [Publication Name that is 23 characters] . However, since we are a publication, it's not practical for us to try to limit the length of our title tags to 70 characters or less because doing so would make the titles of our content seem very unnatural. We also don't want to remove the branding because we want it to go with the article when it's shared (and to appear when some titles are short enough to allow room in SERPs). I understand the reasons for limiting characters to 70 or less with regard to SERP friendliness. We try to keep key phrases in the front. People are more likely to click on a page if they know what it's about etc etc. My question is, do the longer titles affect the ability for the page to rank in search? To put it a different way, if we altered all the +5000 of the title tags to fit within 70 characters, would the page authorities and our site's domain authority increase? I'd like to avoid needed to clean up 5000 pages if the medium priority errors aren't really hurting us. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CatBrain1 -
Google Tag Manager
Has anyone used Google Tag Manager and do you feel it is worth it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Site rankings down
Our site is over 10 years old and has consistently ranked highly in google.co.uk for over 100 key phrases. Until the middle of April, we were 7th for 'nuts and bolts' and 5th for 'bolts and nuts' - we have been around these positions for 5-6 years easily now. Our rankings dropped mid-April, but now (presumably as a result of Penguin 2.0), we've seen larger decreases across the board. We are now 5th page on 'nuts and bolts', and second page on 'bolts and nuts'. Can anyone please shed any light on this? Although we'd fallen some before Penguin 2.0, we've fallen quite a bit further since. So I'm wondering if it's that. We do still rank well on our more specialised terms though - 'imperial bolts', 'bsw bolts', 'bsf bolts', we're still top 5. We've lost out with the more generic terms. In the past we did a bit of (relevant) blog commenting and obtained some business directory links, before realising the gain was tiny if at all. Are those likely to be the issue? I'm guessing so. It's hard to know which to get rid of though! Now, I use social media sparingly, just Facebook, Twitter and G+. The only linkbuilding I do now is by sending polite emails to people who run classic car clubs that would use our bolts, stuff like that. I've had a decent response from that, and a few have become customers directly. Here's our link profile if anyone would be kind enough as to have a look: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com Also, SEOMOZ says we have too many links on our homepage (107) - the dropdown navigation is the culprit here. Should I simply get rid of the dropdown and take users to the categories? Any advice here would be appreciated before I make changes! If anyone wants to take a look at the site, the URL is in the link profile above - I'm terrified of posting links anywhere now! Thanks for your time, and I'd be very grateful for any advice. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone1 -
Need help in Title tags
Hi I have word press site and it has 24 pages and the main keywords is Stairlifts there are various kind and type of stairlifts and all the 24 page has the title tag stairslifts , i have tried to make each unique but i cannot avoid using the keyword stairslift. Will that have a negative impact if my main keyword is stairlifts. My target page for stairlifts is the home page. Any suggestions please Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Canonical Meta Tag
Can someone explain how this works and how necessary is it? For example, I have a new client, who is ranking WITHOUT the www in their domain, but they have a good deal of backlinks already that have www in it. When I set up google webmaster tools I made 2, one for WWW and one for WITHOUT and there are diffenet numbers of backlinks for each. I have no idea what do about this or if I should even do anything. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGrid0 -
H1 tag proper uses
Ok I see this happening all of the time. I get my hands on a new website and there are one of four header tag issues: 1. There are no H1 tags at all 2. There are multiple H1 tags on the same page 3. Every page has an identical H1 tag 4. Header tags are used all out of order Do any of these have a negative impact on rankings? I've always tried to get one H1 tag on each page, have it be the first header tag, and make it unique to each page. Is this a waste of itme? Could improper header tag use hurt a website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster1