Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Sarah!

An alternative resource might be my article on Moz about optimizing WordPress for SEO

https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

There are also some prior Q&A threads that address duplicate content in WordPress:

• https://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-category-archives-index-but-will-this-cause-duplication
• https://moz.com/community/q/utilising-wordpress-attachment-pages-without-getting-duplicate-content-wwarnings
• https://moz.com/community/q/moz-analytics-telling-me-i-have-duplicate-content-issues-how-to-fix-this

Hope these help!

While what Matt and CleverPHD (Hi Paul!) have said is correct - here's your specific issue:

Your categories are loading with "ugly" permalinks like this: http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/?cat=175 (that loads fine)

But you are linking to them from the bottom of posts with the "clean" URLs --> http://screencast.com/t/RIOtqVCrs

The fix is that Catgory URLs need to load with "clean" URLs and the ugly one should redirect to the clean one.

Possible fixes:

• Try updating wordpress (I see you're on a slightly older version)
• See if you .htaccess file has been modified (ask a developer or your hosting for help with this perhaps)

Found another linking issue:

This link to Facebook in your left sidebar --> http://screencast.com/t/EqltiBpM it's just coded incorrectly. It adds the current page URL so you get a link like this http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/category/unique-baby-girl-gifts/www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique instead of your Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique

You can fix that Facebook link probably in Appearance->Widgets.

That one issue is causes about 200 of your broken URLs

Hi Steve

Yes, it sounds like if you're looking at pages showing in search for only one query they may be ranking interchangeably, or simultaneously.

Have you manually performed searches in Google (de-personalized etc) to see if you have multiple pages showing, or if they are switching? Also - do you track daily rankings for these keywords? That's another way to see what's ranking there - rank trackers like Authority Labs will show you all URLs ranking for a query.

Would there be any other reason two different users might get a different page? Location, language?

How specific is the search query vs. how targeted/focused are your pages? Or is there overlap in content? It really depends on the types of pages and content as far as determining your next step. Normally, we do see secondary pages occasionally ranking for one query, but your percentages sound high (unless you are getting two results a page).

Hi There

I don't know of a plugin or easy way to do this. Your best bet is to just keep an organized spreadsheet or list of what content you want to 'republish' when and go in manually on that day and update the date.

EDIT: If your desire is to feature certain posts on the homepage, you could also reconfigure the homepage to show featured posts you specify.

Hi There

Any luck with this? What CMS are you using? Most CMS's allow editing of this sort of thing. If not, as others have suggested you could see if the descriptions show up in something like Screaming Frog or even just a simple header checker like http://urivalet.com/

Hi Vadim

Did you have any luck with this? I found a few resources that might help (I don't have intimate experience with writing special .htaccess redirects):

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20658268/htaccess-301-redirect-for-url-with-parameter
• https://gist.github.com/ScottPhillips/1721489
• http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/61227/changing-from-parameter-to-readable-urls-301-redirect

Hi Aron

This prior question has a really great answer as well as this one.

In short, it depends how many keywords / topics you're targeting. It can work fine for a "one-topic" site but if you'd normally be targeting separate keywords for several or more pages, that's where you'll run into SEO trouble.

This should be totally fine. It's pretty common blog/wordpress practice to have excerpts on a category page and then the full article/recipe on that individual page.

Also, just to dispel a myth there is no duplicate content "penalty" - so nothing to fear from that standpoint anyway - just try to make each page have a distinct purpose, which they do. The category page allows users to browse all the recipes in that category and choose which to view. The recipe page allows users to view the whole recipe and use it to hopefully cook something tasty

Thanks! Does the "click" data and trends match up with your visits from Google Organic search in Analytics?

Also - do you track rankings separately (in Moz or another rank tracker) - have those changed?

Did you register a "new" site in webmaster tools for the https version? The old account for http won't work anymore, and you should have all your new impression data in the new https version. Google calls these different "site variants".

Hi There

I believe I gave some suggestions for this site a few months ago here: http://moz.com/community/q/ranking-go-down - I think the only improvement from that time is the graphics look better. Other than that, the other issues still remain. The highest priority is the unnatural links pointing to the site with a lot of commercial anchor text. I would start with that list and let us know if you need more help after that.

-Dan

Hey There

Kevin's got a lot of good tips. Here's some additional help:

• If you are keeping the same domain (which it sounds like you are) I would

• Build the new wordpress site on a test/dev server - you can use a spare domain name or hide it in a subdomain of your existing domain (just make sure to not let search engines find it)

• When you are ready with it and happy, before launching - prepare redirects ahead of time

• Then you can move the WordPress install to the root of your site domain

• If your site is on www now, leave it that way (don't switch from www to non-www or vice versa)

• Put the redirects in place and leave them there forever

• Also, be sure to submit your new XML sitemap to webmaster tools (search console) and delete the old one

• Watch search console for crawl errors and fix any that come up

You shouldn't hurt your rankings if this is all executed properly. Your URLs probably will change (thus needing redirects) but as Kevin said, try to keep your architecture the same (menus, footers etc).

Hi David

Yes 2-3 weeks is fairly young for a site. Image indexation can lag behind a little bit from what I've seen. Unless you're super dependent on images for traffic (which is unlikely) I would give it 2-3 months honestly. I don't see any issues from what I can tell crawling etc. So I wouldn't take it as a sign of a problem, just probably Google's normal timeframe. Definitely write back or follow up if it's 3 months and there hasn't been much more indexed.

Hi David

That data can lag behind a little bit. Checking Google directly there's a bit more then 5 images indexed (granted they might not all be in the sitemap) - see this search

Also, how new is "new"? I don't see any accessibility issues, the images are crawlable etc. It can sometimes take Google longer to index the images especially for a new site that is not crawled really often. Plus many of the images appear to not be 100% unique, which means Google may not prioritize indexing them as much as unique images.

Hi There

This seems like a way to do custom 301 redirects - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24795465/use-301-redirect-in-google-blogger-blogspot - is that method possible for you?

Eric

I think there may be three main factors getting "for rent" to rank just brand searches (without "rent" or "buy")

• Internal architecture - if you link to 'for rent' more often and closer to the homepage more often, compared to 'buy' - you should send more authority to 'for rent' and maybe they will rank better. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO spider to see how your internal linking is. Think if it like trying to optimize for users to internally click through to "for rent" more, and you'll sort of optimize architecture at the same time.

• External authority to those pages specifically - external links directly to those pages and people searching and clicking on those pages. In other words, link building and external traffic to those pages should help them grow in authority. Not sure if they are the type of page you can build links to directly, but you should be able to build links to pages that link to them - like External site-->article on your blog-->brand "for rent" page.

• Time - I think to some extent it will take time. Google needs to gain trust in these pages, crawl them multiple times, see users interacting with them etc etc. Set it up for success with the suggestions above, and then give it time!

I think it's important to understand the options and the results they will cause:

• You could "noindex" the for sale page - it will still live on your site, it's just that no one will find it in Google.
• You can rel = canonical "for sale" -> "for rent" but technically you're not supposed to because the content is different. If it worked, it would basically achieve the same thing as the noindex anyway. It's supposed to pass value like a redirect, but I doubt it would since the content is different.

I think the hidden dilemma is in the fact you're trying to capture both "for sale" and "for rent" traffic - what are the keywords driving traffic to the far sale or for rent page? Maybe it's really a matter of getting both pages to rank for their respective keywords/intents and making it cleat to the user front and center on each page they can in fact both buy or rent. So the "for rent" page would clearly state "hey, did you know you can buy this too?"

I don't know how popular the keywords are too - this would help determine the overall strategy - knowing how big the market is, how competitive, the search volume - and what a typical user expects in the industry.

Hi Rob

I don't currently see the error on that page, and do not see an RSS feed linked in your source code - did something change or can you provide more info? The URL to your RSS feed if possible?

Thanks!

Yes this should be doable, just follow the instructions here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and note that there is some specific info for IIS in there.

There are two things to do to fix this:

1. When you upload a photo to a post, don't link it to the "attachment page' - this is a unique page just for the image, and is not needed. Here are your four options ---> http://screencast.com/t/KlUXTbes

2. 'None' - makes the image not clickable

3. Media file - links to the image file itself, which is good if you want users to see the image bigger

4. Custom URL - you can link the image to anything you want, like an external link

5. Attachment Page - is the one you want to avoid

6. If you use the Yoast SEO plugin

7. Go to Advanced -> Permalinks

8. Check off "redirect attachment URLs to parent page' - this will redirect any images on their own URLs back to the page or post.

Joost - that's correct! Yes, I assume woocommerce, since they are product pages.

Hi Brad

ATP has the right idea indeed. I don't foresee there being any issues with this at all. You're biggest two risks with any migration (back or front end) are broken links and downtime. If you're not changing any URLs, then you don't need to do redirects. Just obviously minimize any downtime as much as possible and you should be fine!

Joost

I think you'll need to get a developer or someone involved to help execute, but here's the ideal scenerio:

1. Add meta "noindex" tags to ?show_products=24 and 48
2. Make your 'view all' URL ideally just /product-category/t-shirts/ - with no parameter - or if you have to, maybe /t-shirts/all/ - your goal here is to keep it consistent and NOT the same parameter as the other pages
3. Then, whatever consistent URL you have for the 'all' - don't add "noindex" to that (keep it indexable).
4. Wait for Google to remove 24/48 URLs from the index (you have to just check every week or two with site: searches)
5. Once they are noindexed, block crawling with robots.txt with this line:

Disallow: /?show_products= <---but ONLY use that if you've changed your 'view all' URLs to something else! You ideally want a different URL structure for 'view all' vs. not view all to control crawling and indexation more easily.

Hi There

I don't think you need to worry about the sitemap being indexed or not - it's an XML sitemap, not an HTML page users will need to find. It's accessible to Google, and they will use it to crawl the site. Have you submitted the XML sitemap to webmaster tools? If so, make sure it's free of errors and you should be all set!

https://support.google.com/sites/answer/100283?hl=en

Hi Joost

Can you provide examples of how all your URLs are setup? What does the URL look like for view all, 24 items etc etc?

Hi Joost

It would be better to just "noindex" anything except view all. Then once they are gone from the index, set a block in robots.txt so they can't be crawled anymore. That fixes the issue at the source, the canonical is more of a bandaid. So:

1. Add a meta "noindex" tag to everything except view all (I am not 100% sure how in your wordpress setup - there's no one way, it depends on your setup).

2. Monitor the indexation of these pages in Google and wait for them to be removed (you can check with just searching for the URL in the search bar).

3. Once they are all gone from the index, block crawlers from accessing them by adding a line to your robots.txt file blocking the 24/48 URLs - again, I don't know the exact code for your robots.txt because I am unsure of your URL setup, but a dev or someone can help - or feel free to write back with these details and I'll try to help further.

I agree 100% with Hutch and Patrick. Your best bet is to dive into whatever analytics data you have for the content. I would probably follow a rough procedure like:

• Identify content no one is looking at, is not ranking, is old/poor - start there and you can probably trim out the lowest quality stuff - remove completlely or just noindex to be more conservative
• Then find the other extreme - think 80/20 - find the obvious highest achievers and those are the ones you'd most want to maybe move over or maintain in some way. If any high achievers are getting traffic despite being old/poor - that won't last - so update them.
• The hardest to figure out is the mediocre performing stuff (moderate visits, moderate search visibility). I would probably put all the moderate content in a spreadsheet. Categorize it by topic. Figure out what can stand alone, or be consolidated. Basically you want to arrive at a situation where every piece of content you keep is, if not recent, at least still quality (quality as defined by: unique, well executed, good design, good UX, helpful or entertaining).

The content audit process mentioned by Patrick is a great way to do this analysis with data, but you can also just use some traffic and basic segmenting in analytics as an easier method.

You could also try some tools like URL Profiler, which cake make such an audit process a little easier.

That's just decided if you should keep it - when it comes to migrating I guess it depends on your ultimate vision for the company / branding.

I wouldn't try any tricky things like putting a canonical to say your site is the original source. Google probably knows this is not true, and a canonical is just a "suggestion" so there's no guarantee they will honor it. I would be more in favor of migrating it to your site, removing from the old with a 301 redirect to your site and maybe just a note on your site saying "this article originally appeared in ...." and be really transparent with the user.

Hi There

It's tough to give specifics without seeing the exact page and site. But in general, this is something I have seen sometimes. It's possible Google re-ranked the newer page highly to test for user metrics like click-through-rate, dwell time and "pogosticking" - maybe the user metrics didn't go so well so they dropped it back down.

Here's the question too - it's important to note that if Google actually crawled and re-cached the page with the new design when re-ranking. I would recommend always checking the cache date so you can tie the ranking timing to which version of the page they are ranking.

Also, another thought - when you updated the page, did you give it a social push and/or did it get lots of traffic from other sources too? Sometimes I've seen Google rank a page higher while it's getting social attention and then drop it back down after the social attention goes away.

Hi Sanjay

Dirk and Matt have the right idea by pointing out the link profile. This is very likely to be what caused the rank drop. In fact, the site was probably artificially ranking higher than it deserved, and then Google caught up with the bad links and either discounted them or maybe has suppressed rankings.

I would highly recommend cleaning up the link profile. You'll want to contact webmasters and get as many removed as possible. You'll also want to create and submit a disavow file. Greenlane SEO has a wonderful process for this here.

Then moving forward, you'll want to just acquire links naturally and if you do build links, follow some general best practices - and Point Blank SEO has a fantastic list of strategies here.

It's true there are some on site issues like keyword stuffing and site speed - but the ranking drop is most likely due to bad links. Definitely fix the on-site issues as well, but rankings may take some time to improve again while you fix the link profile. I would recommend seeking other short term channels for traffic like PPC, social, referrals etc while improving SEO again.

Great - glad it was sorted out!

-Dan

Hi Adam

I have not personally used one, but this particular search looks like it uncovers some that are available. "Simple Mobile Redirect" has the best reviews. Also, this is a good general guide from Google on user agent detection / HTTP redirects.

Hi Dirk

My opinion somewhat varies. They have been requesting webmasters unblock css, js and images for some time now so they can evaluate the layout and design with their algo. Most of the elements I mentioned can be done algorithmically. The poor font color, the lact of padding / margins, the lack of social buttons, poor text readability because of no line breaks.

I'm wary of user engagement metrics, especially as being reported 3rd hand.

Side-note - as we all know, they do have a "mobile-friendly" UX test, which evaluates basically the same types of things for mobile - there's no reason they can't for desktop but just haven't told us.

Hi There

I think the issue is the design. Believe it or not, this is likely a ranking factor. I've seen the opposite - a site will get a new design and rankings will improve.

I think in your case, being totally honest - the old design was much better. Here's some issues I see with the new design that make it hard for me as a user to enjoy using the site.

• The top menu text (home, about us...) blends almost complete in with the background - you can barely read it (at least I can barely read it)
• You breadcrumbs sit way off to the left --> http://screencast.com/t/rsGKJ8cZc -- they are not within a container or anything, which makes it look odd.
• A shotcode is showing up in the content --> http://screencast.com/t/AoaexaPcL -- [get_laughing_image]
• The old site links out to facebook, twitter, RSS etc much more prominently - on the new site it's hard to find those buttons at all.
• So many of the jokes, especially with dialog, don't even have line breaks - it makes it incredibly difficult to read --> http://screencast.com/t/7udxq536

I'm sure we could find more, but the point is that I think the old design was better.

Have you tried the old design on the new domain?

Just to mention, the site: searches are very artificial and the rankings for those searches does not have much meaning or hold any clues about how Google views the site.

Hi Adam

What are you looking for a WP plugin to do specifically?

This can happen if you don't have the correct version of your URL registered in webmaster tools, so something to check

Hi There

One thing to check - do you have the exact version of domain registered in webmaster tools? So www or non-www and http or httpS? This has to be exact, webmaster tools considers them all different sites and you can get limited data if the wrong one is registered.

That would be the biggest cause of discrepancy. If this is not the case, there are many times Webmaster Tools data can lag behind, or be different than the index. I would go with what you see in actual Google searches though as the "final answer".

Here's how I do it. I use a custom filter and filter IPs by range

PART ONE - Generate RegEx for IP Range

1. Go to this RegEx range tool: http://www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools/ipregex
2. Enter your IP address in "First IP, but change the "D block" to your start range
3. Enter your IP address into "Last IP", but change the "D block" to your end range
4. Click generate, and here's what you get for your first location: ^174.177.179.([0-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$

PART TWO - Create The Filter

1. Go to create a new filter in Analytics
2. Give it a name
3. Select Custom
4. For field choose "IP Address"
5. Paste your RegEx in "Filter Pattern
6. Save

Hi

You are most likely still seeing "A description for this result...." etc in Google because they may not have re-cached the page yet.

If the site is crawlable with a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or a header checker like http://urivalet.com/ - it's also accessible to Google, you just need to wait for them to re-crawl.

Let us know if you need more help!

David

It's hard to tell from that image if the SVG title is nested like in this example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Element/title - can you let us know?

Thanks!

Oh by the way, here's a post I wrote for Moz on setting up wordpress for SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

Hi There

In my experience, so long as you redirect any URL changes correctly you shouldn't see a drop in rankings. A good coder should be able to clean up a template, as well as take measuers to help with load time. Definitely use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache. I think WordPress is a great way to go for a quick solution. A premium theme is only about $50 - go with one that is from a developer that a) has really good star ratings and b) and this is important - seems to provide good support.

Hi There

Dirk is right - most responsive templates should pass the mobile test. If not WordPress, are you on a different CMS or something?

Themeforest.net has a ton of themes for all situations. Just look for "responsive".

Hi Sanjay

There's a lot of issues with this site. I'll list out the worst ones I saw:

• There is a lot of unnatural link building as you can see here in the Open Site Explorer anchor text report - way too many links for "pharma machines manufacturer" and other commercial keywords
• There's tons of keyword stuffing on the site itself. The homepage header does not need to have all those variations of keywords for example. Your title tags are also long lists of keywords. Check out Google's guide for title tags.
• You're linking out to web designers and SEO companies in the footer, also with exact match commercial keywords - it definitely would count as links that are being given to sites in unnatural ways possibly.
• There are issues with the graphics and design which might deter users and give you bad user metrics. The graphics are low quality and show pixels. There is a broken image at the very top of every page. I would clean those up and make it look higher quality.
• Social accounts like Twitter are just stuffed with keywords as well: https://twitter.com/prismpharma - you'll want to clean up social accounts and remove keyword stuffing.

You probably ranked where you did artificially before, because of the spammy links etc. So it may take some time of doing things to right way before you rank well again.

-Dan

Hi Tafser - thanks for helping out! Just want to point out, looks like they have a mobile site at a mobile subdomain which passes the test: http://m.prismpharmamachinery.com/

Dan (Moz associate)

Jose

You should always point redirects at pages that have the same, or 98% the same content. See Cyrus's article: http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects - if you point all the redirects into the Internships section, the rest of the site should inherit a little bit of that link authority. If you point old internship pages at your homepage, Google will probably see the content is a bit different and likely not pass value anyway.

So treat the new Internships section on the new site, as a little site inside the big one and redirect your old Internships site into the new internships section. Do it page by page so all the content matches

Hi Joost - I'll try to tackle each of the questions one by one:

• About categories, I'm not sure of the specifics, but you'll definitely want to find a category variable that just pulls in the category name for you. What that variable is, I am not sure off the top of my head.
• The way I'd look at it - you don't want to end up with a "category" that's so deep or specific it only have a couple products in it. You may as well rank a product page instead. So long as your categories have maybe 5+ products which makes it useful for the user, you'd be fine I think.
• I wouldn't worry about duplicate content. The "duplicate content" scare from years back is only a penalty if you are scraping content from other sites and building a whole website off of other people's content. I would just judge each page individually and aim for it being as helpful to the user as possible - in terms of trying to predict their questions, fears, doubts, etc in terms of actually purchasing the product

Hi Jose

If this is essentially the same site with the _same _content I would migrate all content and redirect all pages to their individual new pages right away. The old site is making money, but by pointing users at the new site, you'll make money at the new site right? No money lost.

If this is a 1:1 move - Domain A --> Domain B and all the content is basically the same, that's really the way to go. You'll make it harder in the long run for Google and users to understand what site is the correct one.

Did I understand that correctly, or is the move not so simple?

Kimberly

Here's a little more background straight from Google on "duplicate content" - http://www.thesempost.com/duplicate-content-penalty-exception/