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Back in June, we had seen a sharp drop in traffic on our website. We initially assumed that it was due to the Core Update that was rolled out in early June.

We had switched from http to https in May, but thought that should have helped rather than cause a problem. Until early June the traffic was trending upwards.

While investigating the issue, I noticed that only a fraction  (25%) of the AMP pages have been indexed. The pages don't seem to be getting indexed even though they are valid.

Accordingly to Google Analytics too, the percentage of AMP traffic has dropped from 67-70% to 40-45%. I wonder if it is due to the indexing issue.

In terms of implementation it seems fine. We are pointing canonical to the AMP page from the desktop version and to the desktop version from the AMP page.

Any tips on how to fix the AMP indexing issue.  Should I be concerned that only a fraction of the AMP pages are indexed.

I really hope you can help in resolving this issue.

Hi James,

Thanks for the response. I am looking for the best practices. Actually, I was thinking of adopting strategy mentioned towards the end of the article, which includes 1 and 2 as well.

I run a couple of gadget/technology based blogs, which essentially has news based articles and long form articles such as reviews, tutorials, and tips. Looking for some advice on the strategy for internal links:

We have been using internal links in the following ways in articles so far:

1. Links to the category pages at the end of the article (we call it related topics)
2. Links to category pages wherever relevant preferably in the first paragraph. The logic here was that if we can add the link to a category in the first paragraph, which appears on the home page and category page, it will pass the link juice to the category page.
3. Link to relevant articles, mostly by using the full title of the post as we thought that it stands out.

Issues with the current strategy:

1. In the case of the 1st strategy, it doesn't seem that natural, so we are not sure if people actually end up clicking them.

2. In case of the 2nd, we have couple of concerns:

3. it could result in linking to a category page twice. One within the article, and the second at the end of the article because of strategy 1.

4. Because the first paragraph also appears on the category pages, it would mean that in some cases we will be linking to the same category page (recursive).

5. In the case of the 3rd strategy, the problem is it does not appear natural so we are sure if it increases the value of the content.

I was wondering if we should adopt the following strategy:

1. Get rid of category links at the end of the article.
2. Avoid linking to the category pages in the first paragraph, instead link to the category pages after the first paragraph, so we don't end up with the issue mentioned in b. i. Alternatively, we could remove the excerpts from the category pages so we don't hit the issue of linking to the category page from the category page.
3. Add links more naturally. So have a sentence which talks about the related article and link to it using partial match (keyword phrase) or exact match.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

We use Disqus for our comments. However, one of the issues we notice from time to time is that it takes some time to load.

So we were thinking of using the Disqus Conditional Load plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/disqus-conditional-load/) so that only readers who are interested in comments can click on a "View Comments" button to load the comments.

However, I wanted to know if disabling the auto loading of comments is a good idea from an SEO point of view. On one hand, it should reduce the page load times which should help, but just want to know if there are any issues I should be aware of before using the plugin.

Yeah, I think we need to mess around with the template files to make it look better.

Btw, the website in question is AndroidBeat.com. I will look into the schema markups, though the structure of the site is quite flat, so not sure if breadcrumbs would be useful.

When your website has to depend on advertising for revenues, page speed is difficult to optimize. I keep getting told that the page load cannot be improved further because of the ads on the website. So it is important to strike the right balance. If you know someone who can help with improving page load times then please let me know. I am happy to get a second opinion.

Thanks again for the suggestions. Any thoughts on this point:

How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.

Thanks Martijn for the suggestions. We are going to try roll it out as soon as possible.

Thanks Clayton for the suggestions and the quick response. Rand's WBF was the one that got me to rethink our current approach. We have also realized that it is not helping with the rankings either. But had a few questions.

How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.

Can you also point me to a resource for Schema markups?

We are also not able to get a good look and feel for AMP optimized pages. Any recommendations would be welcome.

I am a very basic question on managing categories in WordPress. We have an Android website, and we cover news, rumors, tips and tricks about new devices. We have been creating categories for the new devices or at least for the popular ones which are launched every year, and link to them internally with the hope that it would improve the page authority and ranking.

For example, we have a category page for Moto X, another one for Moto X (2014) and one more for Moto X (2015).

One of the reasons for creating a category was to ensure that it is easier for readers to get information about a particular device rather than going to a category page that has information about all the models.

However, the problem with their strategy we're now realizing is that it means we have to build page authority for the new category page from scratch, which can take time.

So we are thinking of reusing the same category for multiple models. So reuse the Moto X category page for Moto X (2016).

However, we are not sure if it would be right approach as we would be linking to the same category page with different anchor texts. So while it would be good to reuse a page rather than rebuild the page authority from scratch, would we be diluting the authority for the main keyword by using it for different models.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how we should be handling categories and internal links in this case.

Back in June, we had seen a sharp drop in traffic on our website. We initially assumed that it was due to the Core Update that was rolled out in early June.

We had switched from http to https in May, but thought that should have helped rather than cause a problem. Until early June the traffic was trending upwards.

While investigating the issue, I noticed that only a fraction  (25%) of the AMP pages have been indexed. The pages don't seem to be getting indexed even though they are valid.

Accordingly to Google Analytics too, the percentage of AMP traffic has dropped from 67-70% to 40-45%. I wonder if it is due to the indexing issue.

In terms of implementation it seems fine. We are pointing canonical to the AMP page from the desktop version and to the desktop version from the AMP page.

Any tips on how to fix the AMP indexing issue.  Should I be concerned that only a fraction of the AMP pages are indexed.

I really hope you can help in resolving this issue.

Thanks Clayton for the suggestions and the quick response. Rand's WBF was the one that got me to rethink our current approach. We have also realized that it is not helping with the rankings either. But had a few questions.

How about internally linking to the same page with multiple anchor text. Wouldn't we end up confusing the bots. We have seen category pages doing well in some cases. So wouldn't this approach affect the ranking for such category pages that are doing well.

Can you also point me to a resource for Schema markups?

We are also not able to get a good look and feel for AMP optimized pages. Any recommendations would be welcome.