Does Google hate wordpress?
-
I have my categories pages set to noindex, follow.
I deactivated the author and date based archives, and all the /page/2 /page/3 are noindex.
Is this the right approach?
I had thought about adding some text to the topic of each category page and then changing them to index.
I'm using showing recent post excerpts on the homepage.
Another other suggestions? I think two of my sites are in panda for no good reason. It seems like non-wordpress blogs in my industry do better than comparable wordpress sites.
-
hi there, wonder if i can ask my question here to you Tom --
I found your post helpful and have been reading that blog entry you linked to. I'm working on a couple wordpress blogs grandfathered into the company I work for and am trying to clean them up. They are providing something like a combined 800 links to my company's domain and we have a manual penalty with Google currently so I'd really like our backlink profile to be cleaned up.
So basically... I can't seem to install the Yoast plugins. Is that only for those who are hosting their wordpress offsite? Or how does that work... because basically, i go to wordpress.com and login and I can't upload files to directories or anything like that.
I guess I'm a wordpress noob, but proud to be. Because my experience with wordpress so far has been far from positive.
(backstory: when I got here, our company website had been developed in a Wordpress format and was a pain in the ass to work on. Nay, impossible to work on. I spent a month completely redesigning the site in HTML and have been happy as a clam since. But that is unrelated to the wordpress blogs we are running...)
Anyway, thanks
-
Hi there
Wordpress can be very SEO friendly when set up correctly, but setup incorrectly it can be a bit of a nightmare.
Let's be clear - Google hates duplicate content, not certain CMS's - particularly one of the most popular ones in the world.
Sounds like you're well on your way to fixing any problems that may have occurred, but if you're still looking for help, I'm always reminded of Dan Shure's excellent blog post on how to optimise WordPress for success. Have a read through there to see if it helps.
Panda is being integrated into the general algorithm as we speak/type, but it may still require a refresh to lift any Panda penalty on your sites. These have been monthly, but expect them sooner in the near future now it is being integrated.
To double check to see if your penalty coincides with the panda penalty, check out: MyTrafficDropped and Ryan Kent's great blog post. If you can't see why your site is being penalised, you may find that your penalty is down to something else.
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
-
I have never seen this in Google SERPs before?
What is this that I am seeing in the Google SERPs? It's a bank of 3 separate articles from one site, but they are grouped together like an organic listing. Checkout the link to see what I'm talking about http://imgur.com/xbUk1NG
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Google search results
I have been doing some searches on google to see where my new site shows up, I started using the search words "graphic design firm st. louis" as a gauge, because my title is St. Louis Missouri Graphic Design Firm. I showed up on about page 5 to start , if I include the word "firm" and a few pages further back if I just search "graphic design st. louis", without the word firm. It seemed i was slowly moving up pages with both searches and then a few days ago I jumped to page 1 for search "graphic design firm st. louis" the thing is it doesnt show up at all now if i search "graphic design st. louis" without the word firm. what would cause the one search to jump so high while the other one dissapeared completely?? and what can i do? my keyword density is same for both , any ideas.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric69660 -
Could this work for Google Reconsideration Request?
One of my websites has received the following message: We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. I have used LinkResearchTools DTOX to locate unnatural links and remove them. So far I've been able to remove or nofollow 50/350 and that's as far as I can ever go. The rest of the websites either don't respond or don't have any contact information. I added another 300 suspicious websites to my list and I'll try to get the links manually removed. Hopefully I can get 100/650 websites (and a bit more links) removed in total - at most. That is my estimate. I've been thinking to use Google Disavow Tool for the rest and make sure to submit a nicely written report with spreadsheets to Google - when I get to the reconsideration point. What are your thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zorsto0 -
Effect of I-Frame on Google Rank
My commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) allows visitors to search for office space listings. The site sources listings through a third party and they are displayed in an i-frame. The i-frame directs visitors to listing pages such as: http://listings.nyc-officespace-leader.com/getspace.mpl?sp_id=A0173921&cust_id=offspldr Atleast 10,000 of these pages have backlinks to my site. My question is the following: Could these tens of thoudands of alpha numeric URLs be detrimental to my sites ranking on Google after the Panda/Penguin updates? SIte traffic dropped from 7,000 per month to about 3,300 after the April Google update. Rewriting content for dozens of pages and adding a blog have only somewhat mitigated the negative effects of Panda/Penguin. Could Google be viewing these links from the third party lisitng provider as a negative when they viewed these links as a plus before? Any downside to removing the third party links and parsing these listings from landlord websited and displaying them as part of my site with their own URL, title tag, description tag? Obviously the new URLS would not be alphanumeric. If these links have not caused the drop in traffic last April, what could be responsible? Thanks in advance for your opinion!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Optimizing the HomePage of a WordPress blog
Dearest SEOmozzers, I am creating WordPress blogs and I would like to know from a WordPress expert how to better optimize the homepage of a site. In particular, I'd like to know how to create an SEO-friendly homepage that I want to optimize for certain keywords. Do you think that it is better to show on the homepage the posts that I write, which change constantly, or a static, well-optimized text that will include the keywords I want to rank for? I have been naively using the changing posts, but after an analysis of the competitors I have noticed that most of them use a static text and show only the most recent post at the bottom of the page. I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know the best practice to adopt to optimize the site. Thank you. Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Google is indexing wordpress attachment pages
Hey, I have a bit of a problem/issue what is freaking me out a bit. I hope you can help me. If i do site:www.somesitename.com search in Google i see that Google is indexing my attachment pages. I want to redirect attachment URL's to parent post and stop google from indexing them. I have used different redirect plugins in hope that i can fix it myself but plugins don't work. I get a error:"too many redirects occurred trying to open www.somesitename.com/?attachment_id=1982 ". Do i need to change something in my attachment.php fail? Any idea what is causing this problem? get_header(); ?> /* Run the loop to output the attachment. * If you want to overload this in a child theme then include a file * called loop-attachment.php and that will be used instead. */ get_template_part( 'loop', 'attachment' ); ?>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TauriU0 -
Why does google keep shortening my title?
IRS Problems, Tax Problems <cite>www.taxproblem.org/</cite> We are a Local Houston CPA Firm in Harris County Texas, dedicated to helping taxpayers resolve their tax problems. We mean, “actually resolve their IRS ... Checking the source code doesn't reveal any reason I can see why they would do that. It happens most often, if not all the time, and only Google results So if anyone would check the source code of my main page and can see why and what needs to be done, I can fix it. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemas990 -
Links on Google Notebook
I have used OSE to look at links of a competitors site and notice they have dozens for links from Google Notebook pages eg http://www.google.pl/notebook/public/05275990022886032509/BDQExDQoQs8r3ls4j This page has a PA of 48 Is this a legitimate linking strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0