Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Non Published Wordpress Pages
-
Hi,
Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site.
Thanks
-
William and Ramon have good answers here. Roman also has good points but some of it may be a bit confusing for this thread because it's not fully explained. If the pages haven't been published they shouldn't be indexable to Google based on standard Wordpress functionality. Having a bunch of messy unfinished pages could slow down use of the cms (if only because you have to paginate through them) but as Will and Ramon have said they're unlikely to slow down the site front end unless they are truly huge amounts.
Most relevant is the opportunity cost for not having all those pages published, if they aren't published they can't rank. So if you're posting this to get reasoning to finish the work I'd start by considering the keywords those pages are targeting; use semrush, stat, or similar and pull out the search volume for the keywords. Then you can point to what you're accumulatively missing out on.
Hope that helps
-
First Question
Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published?As long as you setup the hidden content as a "no index"
you will not have any problem.If your are using worpress and Yoast SEO plugin,
you should set up all the articles and post
that you want to hide properly. What that means?
Means that if you did no set the content as "No Index" and "No Follow"
Im pretty sure Google is indexing dummy content
of your websiteGo to your articles a set this parameters
- Meta robots index - No index
- Meta robots follow - No follow
So you need to make sure the Search Engine
is not indexing irrelevant content.How can you do that?
it is very simple you just use a basic search operaror (write on your browser)site:www.yoursite.com (Search Operator) > There are many useful tricks
This will show you how many pages you have indexed on Google
Example if you have 10 useful pages and 20 dummy content pages of course it will hurt your SEO.So to make sure, go to your Search Console > Google Index > Remove URL and remove those pages that you want to hide or delele.
Talking about the second question (speed)
Nowaday the speed has become in a relevant factor on SEO,
that is the main reason for the existence of Google AMP, the next year Google will replace
the destop search results by mobile search results (mobile first)
and on mobiles speed it really matters.If my answer were useful don't forget to mark it as a good answer
Cheers -
Hi Aua,
Since speed is a ranking factor for Google anything influencing this speed negatively would theoretically be bad for SEO. I don´t know how many are "too many" but if you are talking about several dozens that shouldn´t really impact that much. It isn´t good practice though to leave not completed unpublished posts in your site, and usually not necessary, to keep a clean database it would be better to finish them off site on an editor and insert them in your site when they are done.
Hope this helps
-
Hello, in WordPress because everything is based on the Database, in my opinion, it is not helpful to have an extraordinary amount of unpublished pages. If the pages are unpublished and are not indexable you should be ok with the search engines, but I think it is not a good practice to get into. Also if the unfinished pages are resource heavy and have a lot of images that take up space it may start to slow the general operation of the site, especially if you are on shared hosting with limited resources.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Indexed pages
Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?
Technical SEO | | muzzmoz1 -
301 Redirect non existant pages
Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.
Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Is it good to redirect million of pages on a single page?
My site has 10 lakh approx. genuine urls. But due to some unidentified bugs site has created irrelevant urls 10 million approx. Since we don’t know the origin of these non-relevant links, we want to redirect or remove all these urls. Please suggest is it good to redirect such a high number urls to home page or to throw 404 for these pages. Or any other suggestions to solve this issue.
Technical SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Should we change the publish date in WordPress when updating a post?
Hi everyone, We're going through some of our old posts in our WordPress blog and updating them, adding new information, new links, and photos. My question: If we update the posts significantly, should we also update the "published" date to today? If we only correct some typos or a dead link, we don't touch the date. However, if we've done some real work on the post, we'd like to update the published date in order to bring it to the top of our blog feed and draw new attention to the post. However, I'm a little nervous that this could be seen by Google as spammy, as it's not technically a new post and the URL already exists in Google's index of our site. Here's an example of a post that was published several years ago and then updated a few week's ago with new information (and a new date stamp): http://www.eurocheapo.com/blog/barcelona-tip-five-cheap-eats-under-e6.html Any thoughts on this? Thanks, Tom
Technical SEO | | TomNYC0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
Can you 301 redirect a page to an already existing/old page ?
If you delete a page (say a sub department/category page on an ecommerce store) should you 301 redirect its url to the nearest equivalent page still on the site or just delete and forget about it ? Generally should you try and 301 redirect any old pages your deleting if you can find suitable page with similar content to redirect to. Wont G consider it weird if you say a page has moved permenantly to such and such an address if that page/address existed before ? I presume its fine since say in the scenario of consolidating departments on your store you want to redirect the department page your going to delete to the existing pages/department you are consolidating old departments products into ?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0