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Lisa

I would honestly switch to the Yoast SEO plugin. It handles the SEO (and robots.txt) a lot better, as well as the XML sitemaps all within that one plugin.

I'd check out my guide for setting up WordPress for SEO on the moz blog.

Most WP robots.txt files will look like this;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

And that's it.

You could always just try changing yours to the above setting first, 

before switching to Yoast SEO - I bet that would clear up

the sitemap issues.

Hope that helps!

-Dan
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Hi David

What you really want to do is _noindex_tag pages. See my guide to setting up WP for SEO. You can nofollow the tag links too, but not totally necessary. Google's pretty good at figuring that stuff out.

-Dan

Brandon

Just catching up here. You can do as suggested and use .html but I would highly recommend going with the new URL structure and using 301 redirects. Especially if it's a fairly small site (under 100 pages). I've rarely seen this affected rankings one bit.

-Dan

Hi Mario

Just making sure you're all set? I looked at the page and it seems the code is there.

-Dan

Thanks for chiming in! Just want to clarify, canonical tags would be the last resort. In this case, especially for WordPress, noindexing tag archves and noindexing subpages is the way to go first.

-Dan

Hey There

See my other answer. You first have to noindex tag archives. Then you can exclude them from the XML sitemap.

Noindexing tags will not harm SEO. Google has been not returning tag pages in search results very much at all anymore. You really want your articles themselves to rank.

-Dan

Hi There

What you need to do is;

• Using your SEO plugin (hopefully Yoast SEO plugin) - noindex tag archives.
• Also, noindex subpages of archives

It is normal for tags to be their own page, but it is not desirable to let the search engines index them, thus why we'll add the noindex for tag pages. The search engines can potentially see them as duplicate or thin content. It's OK they exist, just not ok to index them.

Some resources;

My article on Moz about setting up WordPress correctly

Yoast SEO plugin

-Dan

Correct. Just install WordPress in its own subfolder, don't put any of its files or anything into the root directory. And also make sure you have a MySQL database free on your webhost and its running PHP. I can't imagine you wouldn't but good to check!

It would be meta noindex. Yoast is my plugin of choice. Happen to have a little article right here if you need to see if its "safe" to remove them from a traffic standpoint.

-Dan

Hello... Yes, this is very possible and commonly done.

You want to install WordPress into a subdirectory of the existing site. This acts like an install of WordPress within the subfolder you choose and doesn't touch or change the rest of the site. Normally when people do this, they try to find a theme they can modify to have a similar design to the existing site. Or you can have a custom theme designed, but a lot of smaller businesses don't do that because its more expensive.

But regardless of the design, to get a WordPress install working you just install in a subdirectory. So if the dentist's site is www.greatdentist.com just make an actual folder on the server at www.greatdentist.com/blog and install WordPress in the /blog folder.

Hope that helps!!

-Dan

Hi Mark

Are you all set with this? I'm crawling the site now with Screaming Frog and am not seeing the 404 errors any longer, so perhaps it has been fixed?

-Dan

Cary

That stinks, really sorry to hear less than one month of link building did that. Without being able to do a full investigation, I surmise the links simply don't count anymore. In other words, they're likely not hurting you or helping you in any way.

Yes, brand is any variation on the company name or URL.

Also, this extensive list on link building strategies has some great ideas for local businesses.

-Dan

Cary

Your onsite looks cleaner than most I've seen lately. Your link profile does look slightly suspect though. Its heavily weighted towards keyword anchor text. Although perhaps they're all legit sources, lack of brand signals in anchor text could be to blame. There is also very little social sharing of the site.

Also, I did find some suspect links like I mentioned, for example at the bottom of this page: http://www.automobilesbook.com/index.php - also a comment here: http://howtosplitanatom.com/how-to-hack-your-life/how-to-use-firefox/

Did you outsource anything and were perhaps told they didn't do anything spammy?

-Dan