You generally don't need to take any action on these types of links (you don't need to remove or disavow). Google can see they are just scraped duplicates or a real article and ignore them.

But let's say they were harmful bad links (maybe paid links or irrelevant placed sneakily by you - ie: a link to iphones from a page about dogs), then when you remove links it's always a good stop-gap to also disavow. Because Google might not immediately crawl the URLs with bad links right away, but the disavow they will in theory pick up on more quickly.

Hello!

You probably don't need to do anything, Google will likely know the difference. You can disavow them if you'd like just to be safe.

Unless you see traffic drop and rankings drop (for no other known reason) they are likely not affecting the site.

Hey Dan

Ha! Yes a lot changes but this is one thing that has stayed consistent - it's still totally fine to delete old tags. They will result in a 404, but those 404s are generally harmless!

Yes there can be big impacts, as template changes may result in any of the following changes:

• Design and UX
• Site Architecture
• Internal Linking
• Page Speed
• Other possible inconsistencies between themes, depending on your WordPress setup in general (title tags, structured data, etc)

In general, to mitigate against these, I would do the following:

• Design and UX - at minimum take a 'gut check' and be sure the new theme is a design and UX improvement - ie: is content still above the fold? Are there any weird scrolling issues (I see this sometimes with themes that try to be too fancy), are the menus still easy to navigate?
• Architecture - make sure the new theme doesn't break anything like your URL structure, or pagination links to archive pages etc.
• Internal linking - aim to keep your menus (main nav, drop downs, footer, sidebars) exactly the same at least for now - if your footer nav has links to important pages for example and those links go away, this might hurt the performance of those pages.
• Page Speed - as Donald astutely noted, make sure the new theme is at least the same in page speed, or better an improvement. You can use a few tools like WebPageTest or GTMetrix to test.
• Other - also as noted, try to get your SEO settings situated correctly before making the switch, and use the Yoast plugin. Then when you switch your theme, be sure the Yoast plugin settings are still primary and your new theme has not overridden anything.

Hope that helps!

-Dan

Hello! Roman's answers are really good, but thought I would add some info as well.

Article or BlogPosting Schema can help in some of the following ways (vs hentry)

• Give search engines backend / structured info about the contents of the page
• Google's reference on Article schema shows all the snippet and SERP features
• Using article schema is the only way to get into 'in depth' article spots on Google
• I've had luck with Google showing the 'Last Updated' date in search results, which shows a newer date when using it in conjunction with article schema

So even though you'd technically be doing a 'blog post' I would use the parent Article schema as it's more widely recognized.

I'd say for any drops, 4-6 weeks is pretty reasonable. To agree with Kevin again, most drops are user error (not doing redirects correctly etc) or as he said, major design/UX changes.

You may want to also be sure to implement an XML sitemap right away, and submit it to Search Console.

Also try to keep your internal linking the same where possible (menus, breadcrumbs, sidebars etc).

Hello! Kevin pretty much answered it but just wanted to add a few things:

1. To prioritize pages to check etc, export your top landings pages from Google Analytics. Run those through Screaming Frog SEO Spider in list most to check status codes and be sure they redirect. This way you're accounting for the highest trafficked content as a priority.

2. Schedule the exact switch for a low traffic time of day/week to be cautious.

To reiterate what Kevin said - having working redirects is the essential component here!