How do I best optimize my on-page SEO for a magazine-style wordpress theme?
-
My Wordpress website is set up with a magazine style theme (Newspaper). Maybe that's the issue overall here. Questions:
1) Pages vs Categories vs Posts
I currently have a category with a few dozen posts under it. The category page itself has a ~1000 word article on it. It paginates every 10 posts or so at the bottom, but most of the page is duplicate because it's only swapping out a few links.
Should I instead make the "category" a page with the posts childed under it? What's the best way to go about that?
2) Canonical and Pagination
I get errors about a ton of duplicate content for paginated categories and my author page (all posts are under the admin account, which has ~40 pages or so. Every page is just a list of posts and it bitches about duplicate Titles and Descriptions on every one of the paginated posts). Should I canonical these back to the root author? Same question regarding pagination for categories, assuming I'm not going to be switching them to Pages.
3) Home Page Links
Right now my home page just shows a few links to the top posts of all time. After that, it shows the 5 newest posts. On the sidebar it lists a few random pages/posts. There are also a few "category listings" which just shows random posts relevant to that category. Do I want something more static/structured? The navbar does list most main content pages under their appropriate category, but the home page itself is pretty much dynamic.
-
Thank you for the response. I ended up disabling pagination on the category pages (as there aren't more than 20-30 posts per category) to fix the duplicate content issues caused by paginating each page 5-10 times with the same 1000 word article on each page.
I then fixed the author page Titles and Description issue by adding some dynamic tags provided by Yoast in the Author page. Simply changing it from "All Posts by (Author) - Site Name" to "All Posts by (Author) - Page 2 of 36 - Site Name" dynamically, it fixed the duplicate titles completely. Same with the meta description..
As for the home page links, I changed the linking structure entirely. Instead of random posts per category, it now has a link to each category page with the 5 most recently added articles per category under them with a link, image, and text snippet so the page will be more "static" for a while and provide some link flow to my new content, but still update as i add content. I then moved the top 5 posts of all time in the sidebar followed by the most trending article from the last 7 days (by view count).
Finally, I customized my 404 page to show the top 3 articles from my top 3 categories after reading an article about keeping your 404 page relevant and helpful to your viewers just in case I have a bad link come in.
I made all of these changes about a week ago and am waiting to see any changes in rankings, but I think, at least from a reader's viewpoint, the site looks much cleaner and easier to navigate. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to just randomly display whatever the theme felt like every refresh.
Thanks again!
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
-
Does a number of products in anchor text (link to product list page) have any influence on SEO?
For example: shower cabins (660), used in our onpage-navigation which links to a product list page.
Technical SEO | | Maxaro.nl0 -
SEO optimation for smal gambling site
i have a web site we are a third party web connecting player to the big gambling site.. How can i optimize the SEO in our page?
Technical SEO | | 323SM0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic indicates duplicate page content for home page?
My first SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostic report for my website indicates duplicate page content for my home page. It lists the home page URL Page Title and URL twice. How do I go about diagnosing this? Is the problem related to the following code that is in my .htaccess file? (The purpose of the code was to redirect any non "www" backlink referrals to the "www" version of the domain.) RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^whatever.com [NC]
Technical SEO | | Linesides
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.whatever.com/$1 [L,R=301] Should I get rid of the "http" reference in the second line? Related to this is a notice in the "Crawl Notices Found" -- "301 Permanent redirect" which shows my home page title as "http://whatever.com" and shows the redirect address as http://http://www.whatever.com/ I'm guessing this problem is again related to the redirect code I'm using. Also... The report indicates duplicate content for those links that have different parameters added to the URL i.e. http://www.whatever.com?marker=Blah Blah&markerzoom=13 If I set up a canonical reference for the page, will this fix this? Thank you.0 -
If you only want your home page to rank, can you use rel="canonical" on all your other pages?
If you have a lot of pages with 1 or 2 inbound links, what would be the effect of using rel="canonical" to point all those pages to the home page? Would it boost the rankings of the home page? As I understand it, your long-tail keyword traffic would start landing on the home page instead of finding what they were looking for. That would be bad, but might be worth it.
Technical SEO | | watchcases0 -
What SEO considerations for multiple languages on a single page?
I am working on a language teaching site for Chinese speakers learning English. I consider myself above average when it comes to basic SEO issues, but all I know here is that Google doesn't like multiple languages on a single page. Without getting into too many details, both Chinese and English text will appear on the same page with links, tags, phonetic spellings, etc. I'm hoping someone here knows the science about using the lang="zh" xml:lang="zh" attributes within text and the effects on ranking for text within the declarations. And it'd be great if there was clarification on the link juice passed using the hreflang attribute for both internal and external links. Also, of course, any info on using both English and Chinese characters in the URL would be most helpful. A heads up on any other language specific SEO issues would also be much appreciated. My goal is to get the most out of both languages per page in terms of ranking.
Technical SEO | | kwoolf0