Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Non Published Wordpress Pages
-
Hi,
Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site.
Thanks
-
William and Ramon have good answers here. Roman also has good points but some of it may be a bit confusing for this thread because it's not fully explained. If the pages haven't been published they shouldn't be indexable to Google based on standard Wordpress functionality. Having a bunch of messy unfinished pages could slow down use of the cms (if only because you have to paginate through them) but as Will and Ramon have said they're unlikely to slow down the site front end unless they are truly huge amounts.
Most relevant is the opportunity cost for not having all those pages published, if they aren't published they can't rank. So if you're posting this to get reasoning to finish the work I'd start by considering the keywords those pages are targeting; use semrush, stat, or similar and pull out the search volume for the keywords. Then you can point to what you're accumulatively missing out on.
Hope that helps
-
First Question
Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published?As long as you setup the hidden content as a "no index"
you will not have any problem.If your are using worpress and Yoast SEO plugin,
you should set up all the articles and post
that you want to hide properly. What that means?
Means that if you did no set the content as "No Index" and "No Follow"
Im pretty sure Google is indexing dummy content
of your websiteGo to your articles a set this parameters
- Meta robots index - No index
- Meta robots follow - No follow
So you need to make sure the Search Engine
is not indexing irrelevant content.How can you do that?
it is very simple you just use a basic search operaror (write on your browser)site:www.yoursite.com (Search Operator) > There are many useful tricks
This will show you how many pages you have indexed on Google
Example if you have 10 useful pages and 20 dummy content pages of course it will hurt your SEO.So to make sure, go to your Search Console > Google Index > Remove URL and remove those pages that you want to hide or delele.
Talking about the second question (speed)
Nowaday the speed has become in a relevant factor on SEO,
that is the main reason for the existence of Google AMP, the next year Google will replace
the destop search results by mobile search results (mobile first)
and on mobiles speed it really matters.If my answer were useful don't forget to mark it as a good answer
Cheers -
Hi Aua,
Since speed is a ranking factor for Google anything influencing this speed negatively would theoretically be bad for SEO. I don´t know how many are "too many" but if you are talking about several dozens that shouldn´t really impact that much. It isn´t good practice though to leave not completed unpublished posts in your site, and usually not necessary, to keep a clean database it would be better to finish them off site on an editor and insert them in your site when they are done.
Hope this helps
-
Hello, in WordPress because everything is based on the Database, in my opinion, it is not helpful to have an extraordinary amount of unpublished pages. If the pages are unpublished and are not indexable you should be ok with the search engines, but I think it is not a good practice to get into. Also if the unfinished pages are resource heavy and have a lot of images that take up space it may start to slow the general operation of the site, especially if you are on shared hosting with limited resources.
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 want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks1 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Should we change the publish date in WordPress when updating a post?
Hi everyone, We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today? If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site. Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Tom
Technical SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Authorship and Publisher on WordPress
I successfully enabled rel=publisher on our WordPress blog, and as a test I also enabled rel=authorship for a set of blog posts. (Tested both in Google's Rich Snippets Tester.) However, on the individual blog posts the publisher credit disappears. Is there a way to enable both to appear on blog posts?
Technical SEO | | ufmedia0 -
How to identify orphan pages?
I've read that you can use Screaming Frog to identify orphan pages on your site, but I can't figure out how to do it. Can anyone help? I know that Xenu Link Sleuth works but I'm on a Mac so that's not an option for me. Or are there other ways to identify orphan pages?
Technical SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Splitting Page Authority with two URLs for the same page.
Hello guys, My website is currently holding two different URLs for the same page and I am under the impression such set up is dividing my Page Authority and Link Juice. We currently have the following page with both URLs below: www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/home.aspx
Technical SEO | | JoaoPdaCosta-WBR
www.wbresearch.com/soldiertechnologyusa/ Analysing the page authority and backlinks I identified that we are splitting the amount of backlinks (links from sites, social media and therefore authority). "/home.aspx"
PA: 67
Linking Root Domains: 52
Total Links: 272 "/"
PA: 64
Linking Root Domains: 29
Total Links: 128 I am under the impression that if the URLs were the same we would maximise our backlinks and therefore page authority. My Question: How can I fix this? Should I have a 301 redirect from the page "/" to the "/home.aspx" therefore passing the authority and link juice of “/” directly to “/homes.aspx”? Trying to gather thoughts and ideas on this, suggestions are much appreciated? Thanks!0 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1