Control indexed content on Wordpress hosted blog...
-
I have a client with a blog setup on their domain (example: blog.clientwebsite.com) and even though it loads at that subdomain it's actually a Wordpress-hosted blog. If I attempt to add a plugin like Yoast SEO, I get the attached error message. Their technical team says this is a brick wall for them and they don't want to change how the blog is hosted.
So my question is... on a subdomain blog like this... if I can't control what is in the sitemap with a plugin and can't manually add a sitemap because the content is being pulled from a Wordpress-hosted install, what can I do to control what is in the index?
I can't add an SEO plugin...
I can't add a custom sitemap...
I can't add a robots.txt file...
The blog is setup with domain mapping so the content isn't actually there. What can I do to avoid tags, categories, author pages, archive pages and other useless content ending up in the search engines?
-
That almost looks like... your client doesn't have WordPress actually installed on their sub-domain at all. It looks like they set up a 'something.wordpress.com' site, which WordPress actually hosts - and somehow overlayed their own sub-domain over it (using DNS / name-server shenanigans)
If that is true then, since WordPress hosts the blog, there's not much you can do. If it is a local WordPress install that does exist on your client's actual website instead of being 'framed' in (or something shady like that) - then I haven't seen this error before and it seems really odd. It smacks of someone trying to cut corners with their hosting environment, trying to 'be clever' instead of shelling out for a proper WP install. Clearly there are limitations...
Ok, there's only one other alternative really. This is also technical though and I don't know if it wold be any easier for your dev guys but...
You can send no-index directives to Google without altering the site / web-page coding, as long as you are willing to play around with the (server-level) HTTP headers
There's something called X-Robots which might be useful to you. You need to read this post here (from Google). You need to start reading from (Ctrl+F for): "Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header"
As far as I know, most meta-robots indexation tag directives, can also be fired through the HTTP header using X-robots
It's kinda crazy but, it might be your only option
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
-
Homepage not indexed
Hi, I have a problem with my website. From my PC, when I search for site:nobelcom.com the homepage of the website doesn't appear, but on other PCs (different IPs) it is ok.
Technical SEO | | Silviu
Also any keywords that usually responded with homepage, now responds with other page. Does anyone know way this is happening. It happen before the Penguin update, and after a fetch like google and send to index, I had the homepage back on serps0 -
Not ranking - Scarped content
Hi, I have a problem with a website, that never compe up with before. The website is: https://www.enallaktikidrasi.com It has a bunch of excellent articles, good enough on-page SEO and a medium backlink profile. However, it is ranking just for very very few keywords. The major problem is that there are original articles that searched by their title won't appear in top100 results but they will appear in other websites that scapre them (even if they give a backlink to our original article!) Also, the website has good rankings in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google. There are keywords ranking in #1 in Bing but nowhere in top10 pages in Google.... I am guessing for 3 issues: 1. Majestic shows a very low trust score (just 13). However, the website has not got any kind of penalty in the last 3 years. 2. There are many scarpers. The odd is that scarpers with no real value outrank our content. (Scarpers with almost zero backlink profile) 3. We ran Sucuri on website as there were a large bots attack. Is there a correlation between it bots attack and Google results? (but why not in Bing and Yahoo too?) It seems like Google underestimates the website when indexing websites for some reason. Moreover, some of the articles are really the best around but the keywords they are targeted are not either within the 30 first pages... Any help?? Thanks..
Technical SEO | | alex33andros0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
Host sitemaps on S3?
Hey guys, I run a dynamic web service and I will start building static sitemaps for it pretty soon. The fact that my app lives in a multitude of servers doesn't make it easy to distribute frequently updated static files throughout the servers. My idea was to host the files in AWS S3 and point my robots.txt sitemap directive there. I'll use a sitemap index so, every other sitemap will be hosted on S3 as well. I could dynamically mirror the content from the files in S3 through my app, but that would be a little more resource intensive than just serving the static files from a common place. Any ideas? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tanlup0 -
What happens to content under a category page that is not indexed?
We are reevaluating our URL structure. We have a flat architecture but would like to add subfolders per recommendations here and elsewhere. Some of our category pages are ad heavy/content light so we have them no indexed. We do have lots of quality content on the site that we would like to put under some of these keyword categories. Should we leave it flat? If Google does not see that category page then there will be no link from the homepage to the content page? Now: homepage/content-page Proposed: homepage/category/content-page (category is not indexed)
Technical SEO | | hoch0 -
WPEngine hosting
I see WPEngine now has a discount as pro member perk. I'm looking a superfast host for a wordpress site. Has anyone used WPEngine? or have any suggestions? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
.htaccess file in wordpress blog
I want to redirect non www to www in blog hosted by wordpress. Where can i find .htaccess file ? Shall i have to create a new one ? If yes, where should i upload it ? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050