Wordpress-related warnings
-
As proposed by a number of people here, I have moved from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress blog. I have also installed the SEO All in One plugin. This has been up and running for a month or so.
My problem is that it is generated many (thousands) of warnings through my PRO Dashboard for Crawl Diagnostics. Specifically, I have a huge number of "Overly-dynamic URL" warnings. A typical URL is as folows:
This has three querystring parameters, all generated by WordPress automatically.
Here's another significant issue. With the SEO All In One plug in I can control the SEO-related parameters for each post (title, meta description, etc). However, WordPress generates a ton of virtual URLs which I can't (as far as I know) directly control. For example, the following page is a category page with all the posts for a single category. This is generating warnings because the meta description is missing. However, I do not know how to control such parameters since the page is automatically generated.
http://www.wednet.com/blog/category/ceremony/
These type of warnings dominate the stats I have through my dashboard. How can I resolve these?
Thanks.
Mark
-
I'm surprised it's pulling anything after the ?. Usually those parameters are saved for things that aren't a real page. In your example, it's GA's tracking code for your RSS feed.
So I went into my own Wordpress sites in my SEOmoz account, and I'm not getting the same warning for the overly dynamic URLs. (In fact, I'm running 3 Wordpress blogs on my domain.) This to me says there's something up with your Wordpress.
Do you have the latest version up and running? Do you have a plug-in that's causing problems? Is there something not on the correct setting in your robots.txt?
-
Thank you for the response, Erica. I am aware of the Permalinks settings but, as far as I can tell, these only help with the structure of the initial part of the URL (before the ?). The issue I am seeing - as reported by SEOMoz - are hundreds/thousands of URLs with multiple querystring parameters after the ?. See the example in my original post for an illustration.
Thanks again.
Mark
-
Hi Mark,
You can control URL writing in the Settings > Permalinks part of WordPress. There you can set what directories (if any) you want to list in the URL.
As for meta descriptions, All-in-One SEO has a section to add a meta description. And as far as tags and categories go, you can set them in those sections on Wordpress.
Hope this helps!
-
The problem is I have no idea what these URLs are, whether they are necessary, where I should redirect, etc. I'm looking to understand their purpose and whether there is any way to determine whether WordPress generates them.
What concerns me most is that this is a relatively new blog (just a couple of months old) with a little over 40 actual posts. This is turning into thousands of URLs. I'm struggling to believe that all WordPress sites tolerate this type of "URL noise" so eager to learn what others have done.
Thanks.
Mark
-
On iis you can install the url-rewite modeolif it not already on there, then you can rewrite the urls.
they have some examples on iis.com you would ned to write a outbound rule, and look for utm_source in {QUERYSTRING} then rewite {URL}
somthing like that.You can also install orchard cmd in a fe minutes using web platform installer though IIS. might be easer
?are these duplicates urls or just have the query string has been added.
-
I am hosting WordPress on IIS 7.0. I have a virtual server from the cloud (GoGrid) so while not technically my own I have full and complete control over the virtual machine, so no constraints there (full admin rights, can reboot whenever I like, etc).
What's on your mind (what does that change)?
Thanks.
Mark
-
What are you hosting on, Appache or IIS.
Your own serer or hosted remotly
-
Thank you Alan. Ironically, I use a CMS for the majority of my web site pages (except the blog) that is also very ASP.Net centric, namely DotNetNuke. I am very happy with it. I use WordPress just for the blog component.
There are many reasons I went went with WordPress but - although I am an "amateur programmer" (OK in C#, ASP.Net) I much prefer the simplicity and richness available with such a popular product. For example, it installed in 10 mins and within an hour I had the blog on my site, had configured permissions for a bunch of bloggers we have and so on. I also just grabbed a theme I liked and it "just worked". All that without a single line of code.
That said, this particular SEO issue is a problem for me. I was told by numerous folks here that switching to self-hosted WordPress was the way to go from an SEO perspective. I made that change, implemented an SEO-focused plug in (didn't need to develop anything myself :)) and then found what I agree is a "mess". However, the very fact that WordPress is a mature and massively used platform is what gives me confidence that there's a solution here. Hundreds of thousands of web sites use it and I'm pretty sure this sort of issue isn't just "accepted" by all those web sites.
Anyway, those are some of the reasons I use WordPress but my real question is how to resolve them while still using WordPress.
Thanks again.
Mark
-
I dont know why wordpress is so popular, i have scaned many word press sites and they really are a mess SEO wise, yet so many boggers want good SEO.
I delveop websites in ASP.MVC that is perefect for SEO, I have never used a CMS untill a few days ago so I am no expert on them, but a client wants a blog. Its not the sort of work i normaly do, and he not going to pay for one to be made from scatch, but i found one that is SEO friendly, not perfect but not bad. nice clean code, Orchard CMS, It is made by programmers from Microsoft and sponsered by Microsoft but it is open souce its still quite new.
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
-
Difference keyword tool and related topics
Hello, Can someone explain me the difference between those 2 ? Because to me they are very similar. Thank you,
Moz Pro | | seoanalytics0 -
Ive been using moz for just a minute now , i used it to check my website and find quite a number of errors , unfortunately i use a wordpress website and even with the tips , is till dont know how to fix the issues.
ive seen quite a number of errors on my website hipmack.co a wordpress website and i dont know how to begin clearing the index errors or any others for that matter , can you help me please? ghg-1.jpg
Moz Pro | | Dogara0 -
How to remove broken links from our wordpress site?
Hello! How are you? We just signed up to Moz.com. Moz link tool. It gave us many broken links with 404's and 302's. Could you please help me with deleting the links? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | hsma0 -
Can relative links PLUS multiple hompage versions spell disaster?
I still see internal links to default.asp from every other .asp page even though I have updated most of the relative /default.asp links to www.site.com since I 301 redirected it. I am seeing this in Open Site Explorer for one. (I'm sure my lack of understanding has to do with not quite getting the purpose of default.asp.) Anyways, I am wondering if all the relative links throughout the site pointing to other .asp pages need to be updated to absolute links (so www.site.com/page.asp instead of /page.asp) for me to avoid this problem. Does one even have anything to do with the other?
Moz Pro | | kimmiedawn0 -
Crawl Diagnostics Warnings - Duplicate Content
Hi All, I am getting a lot of warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some news stories or blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Should I ask google not to index the tag pages? Does it really affect my site? Thanks
Moz Pro | | skehoe0 -
I have a Rel Canonical "notice" in my Crawl Diagnostics report. I'm presuming that means that the spider has detected a rel canonical tag and it is working as opposed to warning about an issue, is this correct?
I know this seems like a really dumb question but the site I'm working on is a BigCommerce one and I've been concerned about canonicalisation issues prior to receiving this report (I'm a SEOmoz pro newbie also!) and I just want to be clear I am reading this notice correctly. I presume this means that the site crawl has detected the rel canonical tag on these pages and it is working correctly. Is this correct?? Any input is much appreciated. Thanks
Moz Pro | | seanpearse0 -
90% of our sites that are designed are in wordpress and the report brings up "duplicate" content errors. I presume this is down to a conical error?
We are looking at getting the Agency version of SEOMoz and are based in the UK Could you please tell me what would be the best way to correct this issue as this appears to be a problem with all our clients websites. an example would be www.fsgenergy.co.uk Would you also be able to suggest the best SEO plugin to use with SEOMOz ? Many thanks Paul
Moz Pro | | KloodLtd1 -
Campaign warnings and recommendations
How crucial is it to follow / fix the campaign warnings. For example, even though our website is ranking well the campaign report is stating that we've too many links on the majority of pages and the title element is too long. My question is if I make changes based on these recommendations, do you think that we will see a dramatic improvement in our rankings ?
Moz Pro | | NeilTompkins0