Wordpress pagination and SEO
-
Hello Mozzers,
We have incorporated Wordpress blog in our website. The blog has a fair share of what we believe is a valuable content both for the users and SEO. We have reached the point where our content is getting pushed out to pages 2, 3 and etc. 99% of the older content is still relevant and useful.
However it does get less traffic from the users because it is not on the front page. I am dealing with it by showing "related posts" and get some traffic through that.
I feel that the content that got pushed from the front page of the blog gets less love from search engines as well.The my permalink structure is /%postname%/ only, however when Wordpress adds page/1/ the SEO ranking appears to drop.
Is it because Wordpress adds page/1/ to the address? What is a good way to optimize is? I have 15 posts showing on the front page should I increase it?
-
I really hope it helps and wish you luck.
-
Thank you Dave,
Your response makes sense.
Great caveat about being aware that older posts are more popular by the nature of them being older.
I will look into logs to see what posts I want to "promote" through the popular post plugin that have the highest engagement percentage wise.
-
Hello SirMax.
Removing the "/page/" is easy enough with Mod Rewriting or I'm sure some plugin or another but the issue will have more to do with the weight the post is being given by the engines than the URL as the final URL is the same. To illustrate, there's an article on Search Engine Watch at http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2179376/internal-linking-promote-keyword-clusters that outlines how the math of internal links work (simplified). Essentially what's going on is that your homepage is the strongest page (at least I assume you're part of the 99.99% of sites like that) and even in a blog, the blog homepage will be the strongest page within the blog, so pages it links to get the most weight. When one of your posts moves onto page 2 it's not the URL that causes the drop it's that the link to that post is now on a weaker page.
The related posts plugin is a solid idea but won't fix the specific issue you're having (though it will help in other ways). What you probably want is something like this plugin that displays the most popular posts. What you can do is place a widget on your homepage and set the posts to a reasonable number (10 or 20 max) and it'll display always your most popular posts on the homepage (read: blog homepage) helping insure their internal link weight is maintained. This will weaken slightly the actual post links as they stand today by adding more links to the page but it should help you address the issue you're having.
One concern to be aware of here is that you do need to review these pages. Some posts are popular simply by age and won't give the highest value for current traffic. You'll want to occasionally review which pages are appearing and if there are posts with low current traffic that are blocking other posts (those just below the post number threshold you set in the plugin) then you could be losing traffic so you'll want to exclude them.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Need help related to SEO ?
Hi, Hope you guys are doing well! I need help from experts, I have a query that "Does google allows SEO for websites related to crypto currency ?" If yes, what is best way to do SEO for crypto currency website ?
Technical SEO | | JessicaThompson0 -
How to optimize Wordpress.org hosted blogs
I've got a blog I'm working on that isn't self-hosted. I've attached a screenshot of the message I get if I try to install any plugins. I really want to block archive, author, tag, category, etc pages but I can't seem to find a way since there's no server for me to block via robots.txt or .htaccess and I can't actually install these plugins which would give me the ability to do it. Any suggestions? vQfnt
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Schema for Banks and SEO
I'm researching Schema opportunities for a bank, but besides the shema markup available today (like bankorcreditunion) and developments with FIBO, I can find no answer as to the effect of tagging interest rates and such in terms of SERP/CTR performance or visibility. Does anyone have a case study to share or some insight on the matter?
Technical SEO | | Netsociety0 -
Anyone a Bing SEO Expert?
I have a website that is getting great long tail search positions in Google for a website.The site is not getting any Bing or Yahoo positions for these long tail terms. I'm trying to find someone has experience or can give advice on Bing rankings. Is their anything specific I should watch out for when trying to rank in Bing?
Technical SEO | | EngNet0 -
Yoast canonical SEO question
Hi I've installed Yoasts SEO plugin. I've just set it up as a campaign in SEOMOZ pro and i now see 14 notices about rel=canonical. I haven't added the rel=canonical myself and is in connection with the Yoast code on the site. Why does it do that and should i do something about it?
Technical SEO | | infocell0 -
Duplicate canonical URLs in WordPress
Hi everyone, I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation... I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework. After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php: <code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical'); remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code> ... what I get is this: With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
Technical SEO | | robertdempsey
With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags. Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress? Thanks for your help everyone. Robert Dempsey0 -
Does changing nameservers negatively impact SEO?
Had to redirect the nameservers to the hosting account in order for the domain email addresses to work. Since then, search results have dropped from the first page to second and much lower with the same keywords. Does that make sense? Another change was redirecting approx 10 parked domains to the main site, was that a mistake?
Technical SEO | | reeljerc0 -
How I can deal with ajax pagination?
Hello! I would like to have your input about how I can deal with a specific page in my website You can see my page here As you can see, we have a list of 76 ski resort, our pagination use ajax, wich mean we have only one url, and just below the list, we have a simple list of all the ski resort in this mountain, which show all the 76 ski resorts.. I know it's quite bad, since we can reach the same ski resort with two différents anchors links. Thanks you very much in advance, Simon
Technical SEO | | Alexandre_0