How best to structure wordpress site.
-
I need help on how to structure my wordpress site to avoid duplicate content issues. Basically I have a main category page for each of my targeted keywords (about 12). From each of those though I want to create a category for each county in the uk and then about 15 towns within each county. This means I'm creating a LOT of categories. Eg: /plumbers/lincolnshire/lincoln x 15 other counties and towns /local-plumbers/cambridgeshire/cambridge x 15 other counties and towns (I have about 12 main keywords I'm going after) I'm basically creating a category for every town in the UK going after long tail keywords. What is the best way to manage this in wordpress? Advice from another question I posted on here is to write a unique category description for each one as the posts in each category are almost identical. The other problem here is I'm ending up with hundreds of links on a page. (They can't all be seen by the user as I'm using a drop down menu plugin). Any advice appreciated.
-
Having a lot of links in your navigation isn't a big issue. Just understand that the more categories & pages you have, the more links you will need for them to rank well. So you are really setting yourself up for a big link building project getting relevant backlinks for all those pages. But from a site architecture standpoint, there is nothing wrong with the way you are setting it up.
-
Dan Shure wrote an excellent Wordpress guide that I think that addresses a number of your issues. Rather than repeat him, here is the link as it really is very substantial and I hope it can help you.
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
-
Best Practices to Design Site Mock Up Using Wordpress Rather than Wireframes?
We are in the process of redesigning our real estate website. Our designer/developer is very quick and confident on Wordpress. He suggests designing directly on Wordpress and bypassing wireframes and a mock ups. He is very confident in his Wordpress abilities. Is it a mistake to take this approach? He has also asked that we select a real estate theme at this point. I would think that the theme would be selected after the wireframes and mock ups get done. But there are certainly different approaches. Are there best practices for redesigning a webiste; any suggestions? Are there significant risks/disadvantages to bypassing wireframes/mock ups? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan Rosinsky0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Best Practices
Okay this would be a piece of cake for most of you out there.. What are the best practices once you add a page or piece of content on your website with a new keyword that you have never used before but plan to use it with every relevant new page you add. How do you ensure that Google will crawl that page? Secondly, if you add the new keyword in the old pieces of content/ pages you have already published by editing the content to suit that keyword, how would you ensure that it gets crawled my Google. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LaythDajani0 -
Shoemaker with ugly shoes : Agency site performing badly, what's our best bet?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
We're a web agency and our site www.axialdev.com is not performing well. We have very little traffic from relevant keywords. Local competitors with worse On-page Grader scores and very few backlinks outrank us. For example, we're 17th for the keyword "agence web sherbrooke" in Google.ca in French. Background info: In the past, we included 3 keywords-rich in the footer of every site we made (hundreds of sites by now). We're working to remove those links on poor sites and to use a single nofollow link on our best sites. Since this is on-going and we know we won't be able to remove everything, our link profile sucks (OSE). We have a lot of sites on our C-Block, some of poor quality. We've never received a manual penalty. Still, we've disavowed links as a precaution after running Link D-Tox. We receive a lot of trafic via our blog where we used to post technical articles about Drupal, Node js, plugins, etc. These visits don't drive business. Only a third of our organic visits come from Canada. What are our options? Change domain and delete the current one? Disallow the blog except for a few good articles, hoping it helps Google understand what we really do. Keep donating to Adwords? Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks!2 -
Best way to fix 404 crawl errors caused by Private blog posts in WordPress?
Going over Moz Crawl error report and WMT's Crawl errors for a new client site... I found 44 High Priority Crawl Errors = 404 Not Found I found that those 44 blog pages were set to Private Mode (WordPress theme), causing the 404 issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOEND
I was reviewing the blog content for those 44 pages to see why those 2010 blog posts, were set to private mode. Well, I noticed that all those 44 blog posts were pretty much copied from other external blog posts. So i'm thinking previous agency placed those pages under private mode, to avoid getting hit for duplicate content issues. All other blog posts posted after 2011 looked like unique content, non scraped. So my question to all is: What is the best way to fix the issue caused by these 44 pages? A. Remove those 44 blog posts that used verbatim scraped content from other external blogs.
B. Update the content on each of those 44 blog posts, then set to Public mode, instead of Private.
C. ? (open to recommendations) I didn't find any external links pointing to any of those 44 blog pages, so I was considering in removing those blog posts. However not sure if that will affect site in anyway. Open to recommendations before making a decision...
Thanks0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Can this site be optimised?
I have been told that because of the technology this site was developed with it cannot be changed for example urls title and meta tags cannot be changed. why is that and what other types of sites also cannot be changed. http://www.alliedpickfords.com/Pages/Landing.aspx For example i have been told alot of online stores cannot be optimised because the urls change every time some one goes to the page therefor you cant lionk to a certain page is that true and what is the way around it if any.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | duncan2740 -
Best practice to change the URL of all my site pages
Hi, I need to change all my site pages URL as a result of moving the site into another CMS platform that has its own URL structure: Currently the site is highly ranked for all relevant KWs I am targeting. All pages have backlinks Content and meta data should remain exactly the same. The domain should stay the same The plan is as follow: Set up the new site using a temporary domain name Copy over all content and meta data Set up all redirects (301) Update the domain name and point the live domain to the new one Watch closely for 404 errors and add any missing redirects Questions: Any comments on the plan? Is there a way (the above plan or any other) to make sure ranking will not be hurt What entries should I add to the sitemap.xml: new pages only or new pages and the pages from the old site? Thanks, Guy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jid1
