Page content not being recognised?
-
I moved my website from Wix to Wordpress in May 2018. Since then, it's disappeared from Google searches. The site and pages are indexed, but no longer ranking.
I've just started a Moz campaign, and most pages are being flagged as having "thin content" (50 words or less), when I know that there are 300+ words on most of the pages.
Looking at the page source I find this bit of code: page contents
Does this mean that Google is finding this and thinks that I have only two words (page contents) on the page? Or is this code to grab the page contents from somewhere else in the code? I'm completely lost with this and would appreciate any insight.
-
That's great! I'm glad to hear that.
-
Solved this issue with the duplicate title tags. I'm using the Divi theme in Wordpress. I couldn't find the code I mentioned above in the header.php file, but when I went to the Divi theme options and clicked on the Integration tab, the code was in the Field under the code for the Bing verification code. Removed now and everything is fine.
-
I guess time will tell, meanwhile I have plenty other issues to work on
I'm still trying to find out where that extra code is coming from.
-
Sorry I couldn't attach the screenshot. But I wouldn't panic too much a lot of times websites tend to experience a loss in rankings after web redesigns so I'd give it some time and see if rankings improve. In the meantime, I'd look at updating the code to remove the extra title tag and fix the body tags.
-
Thanks again. The content does render correctly in search console so maybe I'm panicking about nothing. I can't find the extra title tag in the theme code but i'll keep looking.
-
The issue is that there are duplicate title tags on the site. You could have a developer remove the extra title tag that say "Your SEO optimized title". Then, you would need to work with a developer to correct the tag issue also. Currently, there isn't any content within the tag just leftover generic text "page contents". I'm not a developer but it appears as if it's an issue with the theme and these appear to be generic default settings. You can view this on any page of your site by pressing "CTRL U" on a PC and then pressing "CTR F" and search for <title>or <body> and you should be able to see the code issues.</p> <p>The Moz report could be incorrect I looked and you definitely have more than 50 words on certain pages but the majority of the pages are thin content. I wouldn't pay too much attention to that report.</p> <p>Also, just because Moz or another tool can't recognize certain content doesn't mean Google isn't actively crawling and indexing it. To double check this take a page where Moz is telling you there is 50 words or no content and do a "fetch and render" in Google Webmaster tools. This will show you how Google is viewing the page and will be a more accurate representation of what they are viewing.</p> <p>I hope that helps clear up the situation a bit more. Like I said I'm not a developer so that's my best guess as to what's going on.</p></title>
-
Hi Jordan,
Thanks for taking the time to look. Some great suggestions from you there that I've added to my list of things to do.
I have removed the Yoast SEO plugin that may have been causing the duplicate titles issue, but the issue persists.
About the content, I know my pages are a bit thin as you point out above, but what I'm concerned about is that Moz reports that I have less than 50 words on each page, which is not the case, and another tool reports that each page only has 13 characters of content. I can see this bit of code when I look at the page source code, but I don't know where it's coming from.
| <title></span>Your SEO optimized title<span class="html-tag"></title> |
| | |
| | |
| | page contents |
| | |I'm sure this is what's causing both issues. I don't want to add more content to the pages at this stage if crawlers can't see it, I'd rather fix this issue first.
-
I crawled your site and you have roughly 30 pages with under 300 words on them and the rest of your pages are under 1000 words or so. I'd recommend building out some of the content on these thinner pages.
You also have some paginated urls with a /page/ folder attached to them that you could apply a meta no index tag to and remove from Google.
I'd also look at disabling your current SEO plugin because "Your SEO optimized title" appears on all the pages and is causing your duplicate title tag issue. And I know meta descriptions aren't a ranking factor but all yours are blank and it's a great opportunity to build these out to drive extra click throughs from Google search results.
I hope that helps a bit.
-
This is what I mean - if you look at the attached screen shot you can see the words "page contents" at the top left. I think this is what all the tools are picking up and reporting back as my page content, and ignoring everything else. This is not usually visible but appeared when I used the Moz toolbar.
You can also see the other problem I have, that is duplicate page titles - there is the actual page title, and another which says "your seo title". I don't know what's causing these issues and have no idea how to fix it.
-
Hi Jordan,
Thanks for the reply. I set up 301 redirects only for the pages that I'd changed the name of. The domain format has changed from www.domain.co.uk to domain.co.uk without the www, and although it seems to redirect fine, the page authority has gone down from 26 to 16 after the move so there's something not right there.
The new site was submitted and indexed in search console, so the pages are indexed.
All the tools that I've used report that my page content is only 13 characters, - that's what makes me wonder if they think that "page contents" from this bit of code page contents is the actual content, and it's ignoring all the other stuff on the page.
-
It's kinda hard to understand what's going on without looking at the source code. But my first question is did you implement 301 redirects from your Wix site to your WordPress site, I believe Moz looks at the content within the
tags on your site. Also, did you set up your WordPress site within search console and submit your XML Sitemap? That will let you see any issues with your content being indexed.
Back to the thin content issue if you do indeed have thin content on your pages it's possible you are being penalized. Google is pretty explicit about having thin content that provides little or no value. I'd do an audit of your web pages using screaming frog or Moz and review the word count for some of your key pages.
Hope that helps some.
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
-
Is my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Could a dropdown list of products dilute the page content?
Hi all, On our site, due to the fact we only have some 120 or so products split across 5 different categories we have a dropdown menu that displays all of the products in the menu. Forgetting usability for a moment, my question is whether by having links to all of products appear on each and every page (because they are in the main menu), are we diluting the content on the page. For example, if I take a particular product - the main phrase I want that page to be discovered for is "perspex sheet". This phrase does appear in the H1, H2 and within the main description of the product - but, as mentioned, each of our pages has some 120+ internal links due to the menu which contain all sorts of product names that arent relevant to "perspex sheet". The Moz report does flag a Medium issue on every page due to the number of internal links. I don't know whether I'm making a fuss about nothing, or whether this does have some serious side effects. It's an eCommerce site so of course im nervous of making changes that could have an adverse affect on our rankings. I thought there used to be a tool on Moz that showed what phrases a page was optimised for but i can no longer find that tool. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards,
Technical SEO | | SimplyPlastic
Al0 -
What are the SEO recommendations for dynamic, personalised page content? (not e-commerce)
Hi, We will have pages on the website that will display different page copy and images for different user personas. The main content (copy, headings, images) will be supplied dynamically and I'm not sure how Google will index the B and C variations of these pages. As far as I know, the page URL won't change and won't have parameters. Google will crawl and index the page content that comes from JavaScript but I don't know which version of the page copy the search robot will index. If we set user agent filters and serve the default page copy to search robots, we might risk having a cloak penalty because users get different content than search robots. Is it better to have URL parameters for version B and C of the content? For example: /page for the default content /page?id=2 for the B version /page?id=3 for the C version The dynamic content comes from the server side, so not all pages copy variations are in the default HTML. I hope my questions make sense. I couldn't find recommendations for this kind of SEO issue.
Technical SEO | | Gyorgy.B1 -
Can up a page
I do my best to optimize the on-page parameters for my page www.lkeria.com/AADL-logement-Algerie.php for the kw "aadl" but i can't understand what Ii'm doing wrong (i desapear 2 mounths ago). The page is optimize (title, description, h1, h2 etc.) few links with different ancers, but google put a spamy site www[dot]aadl[dot]biz in top 3 ratheer my page. Can you give me some advice to fix this issue? What I am doing wrong? Tanks in advance
Technical SEO | | lkeria0 -
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 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0 -
Duplicate Content Home Page
Hello, I am getting Duplicate Content warning from SEOMoz for my home page: http://www.teacherprose.com http://www.teacherprose.com/index html I tried code below in .htaccess: redirect 301 /index.html http://www.teacherprose.com This caused error "too many re-directs" in browser Any thoughts? Thank You, Eric
Technical SEO | | monthelie10