What to do with WordPress generated pages?
-
I'm an SEOmoz Newbie and have a very specific question about the auto generated WordPress Pages.
SEOmoz caught and labeled the auto generated WP pages as Crawl Warnings like:
Long URL - 302 - Title Element to Long - Missing Meta Description Tag - Too Many On-Page Links
So I have learned the lesson and have now made those pages "no follow" / "no idex."
HOWEVER, WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ONES THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN INDEXED?
Do I...
1. Just leave them as is a hope they don't hurt me from an SEO perspective?
2. Redirect them all to a relevant page?
I'm sure many people have had this issue. What do you think?
Thanks
Dominic
-
True... But mine is a disaster!
I may need some air and ground support from some of the experts.
I'm assessing the damage now...
I'll get it! -
Thats is good news, it means you have room to improve, you dont want to find you have every thing spot on and still dont rank.
-
Thanks Sha... I'll work on this today!
I didn't realize how "crappy" my site is from an SEO perspective.
Dom
-
good point about the nofollow, should of mentioned it myself
-
Hi Dominic,
If you want pages to be removed from the index and ensure that they are not crawled again, you do exactly what you did with the others EXCEPT for one detail - the robots meta tag that you use should be "noindex, follow.
If you use "nofollow" you are trapping all incoming link value on that page and preventing it from flowing internally through your site.
Yes, you can add robots meta tags using the Yoast SEO plugin. You will find the features you are looking for in the "Indexation" section. Read the support documentation and on-page instructions carefully and you should be fine.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
in never use wordpress, buut in general, you want to exclude the urls in robots.txt
You are probably better of using a canonical tag in the pages pointing to the true url
-
Thanks Alan... Forgot about that function.
How do we make sure Google no longer crawls and index those EXTRA WP pages?
**Will the Yoast SEO Plugin work? Or is there a better way? **
Of course I want Google to see new Blog Posts, but not the other crap.
Thanks
Dominic
-
Site configuration
Crawler access
remove url -
How long do you thing it will take them to drop off the index?
How do I remove them from Webmaster Tools, what function should be used?
No external links that I saw, just a million way to get to the same blog information.
Thanks Alan...
Dominic
-
Let then 404 and eventualy drop from the index, or remove them from WMT, unless they have external links, there is no use 301'ing them
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
-
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vitzz1 -
Why Would My Page Have a Higher PA and DA, Links & On-Page Grade & Still Not Rank?
The Search Term is "Alcohol Ink" and our client has a better page authority, domain authority, links to the page, and on-page grade than those in the SERP for spaces 5-10 and we're not even ranked in the top 51+ according to Moz's tracker. The only difference I can see is that our URL doesn't use the exact text like some of the 5-10 do. However, regardless of this, our on-page grade is significantly higher than the rest of them. The one thing I found was that there were two links to the page (that we never asked for) that had a spam score in the low 20's and another in the low 30's. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to maybe get around this? Certainly, a content campaign and linking campaign around this could also help but I'm kind of scratching my head. The client is reputable, with a solid domain age and well recognized in the space so it's not like it's a noob trying to get in out of nowhere.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnisye0 -
Redirecting homepage to internal page (2nd Tier page)
We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
Our 1,300 page site conversion from static html to Wordpress platform went flawlessly with the exception of 1 significant issue....an old, important, highly ranking page was 301 redirected to the wrong corresponding new page. The page it was redirected to is about a similar product, but not the same. This was an oversight that slipped through. It was brought to my attention when I noticed this new page was still holding the old page's rankings but the bounce rate skyrocketed (clearly because the content on the wrong new page was not relevant). Once identified, we cleaned up the redirect. My fear is that all the juice built up on the old .html page that ranked well has now permanently been passed to an irrelevant, insignificant page. -Is there any way to clean up this mistake? -Is there anything I can do to assist Google in associating the correct 'new' page with correct 'old' page after the wrong redirect was initially set-up? -Am I going to have to start from scratch with the new page in terms of trust, backlinks, etc. since google already noted the redirect? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen0 -
NoIndex Purchase Page
We ran a ScreamingFrog report of one of our websites and found that there are thousands of instances of a single page with a different URL parameter, for example: purchase.cfm?id=1234
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ErnieB
purchase.cfm?id=1235
purchase.cfm?id=1236
purchase.cfm?id=1237 and we do not need purchase.cfm to be indexed for any reason as there is practically no content on that page to begin with, but it's just part of the purchase steps in our website. What is the best way to deal with this for Google & SEO? Should we do a Meta NoIndex of this purchase.cfm page? Thank you.0 -
Using AggregateReview markup to generate star sinppets for wordpress blog posts? OK or Spam?
Do you believe using a plugin that allows visitors to rate your blog posts and then generating AggregateReview markup code for each blog post is in accordance with google guidelines? I saw there are a couple of wordpress plugins that offer this functionality. Anybody who had any negative experience? Star icons will certainly increase visibility in SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
How would you handle 12,000 "tag" pages on Wordpress site?
We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak1 -
Should I change wordpress urls?
Should I change my wordpress permalinks to include the keyword? For examples at the minute my url is http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is it better to be http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-bands/wedding-singer. 'home' is not relevant so surely 'live-bands' would be better? If I change the urls won't I lose 'link juice' as external links will all point to a url that no longer exists? Or will wordpress automatically redirect the old url to the new one? Finally, if I should change the url as described how do I do it on wordpress? I can only see how to edit the last bit of the url and not the middle bit.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0