Ive been using moz for just a minute now , i used it to check my website and find quite a number of errors , unfortunately i use a wordpress website and even with the tips , is till dont know how to fix the issues.

[Dogara]

ive seen quite a number of errors on my website hipmack.co  a wordpress website and i dont know how to begin clearing the index errors or any others for that matter ,

can you help me please?

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[Dogara]

Hi @ThompsonPaul

Thanks soo much for your help , i've been able to do the things you instructed , atleast i think i have lol , i'm a beginner with all this , you really simplified most of it , thanks alot , i know i've still got alot to learn .

Can i contact you via E-mail ?

if you don't feel like dropping it here , heres mine ''Ejembidogara@gmail.com''

Please do message me when you get the chance .

Best Regards.

Dogara.

[ThompsonPaul]

You've got some work to do, @ Dogara. It's essential to realise that just installing SEO plugins doesn't finish the job - they must also be carefully configured. And then the pages themselves must be optimised using the information the SEO plugin provides. Think of the plugin as a tool to make the optimisations easier, not one that will do all the work for you. Here's the task list I would tackle if I were you:

First things first - make certain you have a solid current backup of your website that you know how to recover if things should go sideways.

You currently have two competing SEO plugins active - definitely not recommended. You have both Squirrly and Yoast Premium. Since Squirrly doesn't appear to be configured at all, it should be removed. (This is assuming you haven't' done any customisation work with Squirrly - as it appears to me from a quick scan through your pages, But I didn't' do an exhaustive check, so if you've done customisations in this plugin, they may need to be exported, then imported into Yoast.)

Your Yoast Premium hasn't been updated in a full year - get it updated both for security and functionality. (And get all themes and other plugins updated too if they're behind - this is the biggest thing you can do for your website's security. Did I mention you need to have a solid backup first? )

Fix your page layout templates - they are duplicating the page title and featured image.

Set up configuration of Yoast settings, configure the defaults for page:

• Turn off the meta keywords functionality (no longer used)

• Decide what you wish to do with all your redundant archive types that are creating a huge amount of duplicate content and bloat. My recommendations:

• Since your site only appears to have one author, disable author archives.

• turn off date-based archives. You're not using them anywhere that I can see, and few people are likely to search by date on the site

• no-index the tag archives. These are straight-up massive duplicate content on your site as they are just lists of posts that are also listed elsewhere, like your categories.

• add a couple of paragraphs of quality introductory text on each of your category pages (needs WordPress customisation to do this depending on your theme - may be doable with a plugin.) The alternative to this is to no-index your categories as well, but for a site like yours, this probably isn't recommended, since those categories are used as your primary header navigation.

• NOTE! These recommendations are based on assumptions about how visitors use the site. If you have business reasons for keeping some of these archives, the decisions may be different!

• write solid custom meta descriptions for your categories (assuming you are going to keep them indexed.) Currently, it is these category pages having no meta descriptions that is giving you that high error total in the Moz crawl. Do note that when you fix the meta descriptions, you may start seeing a large number of "duplicate meta description" errors listed in a new Moz crawl. This is because you have a large number of paginated pages for each category, and each will have the same meta description as the main page. This is not an issue, even though Moz may flag it, since the pages have proper pagination code in place already (re-next and rel-prev in headers). Note that Google has just this week changed the number of characters allowed in meta descriptions to be much longer - tools may not have caught up to this change yet.)

• while you're editing the category meta description, take the opportunity to write better SEO page titles for each of them as well. They're edited in the same place as the meta descriptions in Yoast, so easy to do at the same time.

• get the template for your homepage adjusted to include proper rel-next and rel=prev meta tags in the header so that its pagination is handled properly.

• turn off JetPack's XML sitemap functionality and turn on the built-in sitemap tool in Yoast. You'll want to make certain only the appropriate sections of the site are in the sitemap (e.g. Any post types/taxonomies you've no-indexed, should be marked to exclude from the sitemap - like tags, author archives etc etc. You'll also need to resubmit a new sitemap address to your Google Search Console - make sure it's set up for the HTTPS address and submit the sitemap address https://hipmack.co/sitemap_index.xml

• the "URLs too long" warning is somewhat arbitrary, but make certain you are rewriting the URLs of your new posts when you create them if they are too long (more than 4 or 5 words) I wouldn't' bother going back to change the old ones at this stage.

• you are currently using an HTTPS Redirection plugin to manage the internal files of the site after your HTTPS migration. Would strongly recommend using a Search & Replace plugin for your database to properly rewrite these so you don't have a large number of internal redirects. Better for speed and more reliable.

• Moz will tell you which page titles are too long and you can go into Yoast for each related page/post and rewrite them. Note that Google will still index a "too long" title, it'll just lose the end of the title when displaying it on search results pages. (So, for example, if it's just the website name getting cut off at the end, it'snot a big deal. This is also a good time to optimise the meta description for those posts as that's done in the same spot as the title are edited.

Whew! And that's just the start, but if you get those things cleaned up, you'll be well on your way to cleaning up the technical SEO of your site.

Paul

[Dogara]

Hello Don

Thanks for your reply , problem is i already have the yoast pro plugin installed , thats why i am soo confused .

[donsilvernail]

Dogara,

Install the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin. Then manually create descriptions and titles for your pages.

The duplicate content issue is most likely caused by disorganized categories or tags. Every time you categorize a post or tag content WordPress creates a new Archive page. This can create duplicate content on many pages of your site.

Thanks,

Don Silvernail