WordPress redesign: using posts as pages?
-
Starting a redesign for an attorney who is currently using WordPress with an old framework that is no longer being supported, so I'm going to install a new WP and start from scratch.
The site consists of about 30 static pages (practice areas, attorney profiles, etc.) and they write about 5 blog posts per month.
I've always differentiated between posts and pages for WP sites I've done in the past, but this time around I thought it might be more clean (less files, and easier for their webmaster to make routine edits) if I just brought over the static pages as posts. However, the recent webinar on the Yoast SEO plugin mentioned using the month/day in the permalink structure for posts to avoid duplicate content issues. That would go against how I was thinking of setting it up, because I would have just generated the URL off the page title and make a separate category for "pages".
Just wondering if anyone's used posts as pages before. While this seems like it would make things easier for the webmaster, I'm not sure it maximizes potential for SEO.
Thanks.
-
Thanks for sharing. I've always built using pages as well, and the pages as posts idea was presented to me as, I guess, just a way to keep the webmaster in one place when in the dashboard. By webmaster, I mean basically a word processor. It actually sounds more confusing now, especially the idea of them forgetting to tag something as a page and having to search through hundreds of posts a few years from now.
Good reasoning, and I think I'll stick to the traditional architecture.
-
I have never built a site that way myself, but I have rebuilt a couple that were. I was specifically asked to rebuild a site that had been built in this manner because the client found it cumbersome to use. Because everything was a post just divided up by categories they had to click posts and then select the appropriate category to see the posts they were interested in.
When creating posts if they forgot to set the category, the post didn't show up anywhere on the site because all archives were generated by category. Easy enough fix once they caught it, but why bother? I don't think this is easier for a webmaster really more of a pain.
With a little training on wordpress, my clients have always appreciated the fact that when they want to post to their blog, they click "posts" and when they want to add a page to the website they click "pages." In fact, I use custom post types to handle different types of entries for my clients because that breaks it down even further for my clients and they prefer that. An example would be creating a custom post type for "properties" for a property management company. But what exactly do you mean by "routine edits"? I think of routine edits as updating telephone numbers, addresses, etc which I would think you would handle with widgets in any event.
I am not sure what you mean by "less files." As all entries whether posts, pages, custom post type, etc are stored to the posts table in wordpress there are no more or less files or tables based upon how you enter the information into wordpress. So, unless I am missing something or misunderstood your comment, there is no benefit there.
From an SEO perspective, using the structure that is built into wordpress should again be a benefit. For example the Yoast SEO plugin allows for you to template your meta titles based upon post type (page or post), although manually setting them is always best. The permalink structure allows you to have dates shown for posts, but leave them out for pages and other post types. So the added flexibility of uses posts, pages & other post types is a benefit for SEO as well.
Finally, since Google is believed to use categories and tags to determine what the content is about, you are probably losing out on a opportunity for SEO benefit by using them for site architecture.
Honestly, I think using categories to set the architecture of the site is a throwback to when wordpress was much less robust than it is now. It was a workaround to be able to divide information up in a logically fashion on a site when you had no other options. Now we do.
Good luck!
-
Hi,
I am not sure how to use the month/day in the link to avoid duplicate content issue. I should check it out. As long as you don't have any same contents within your website, then it should be easy to avoid duplicate content.
If I am redesigning the website, I would probably use pages for practice areas, attorney profiles and etc and use posts for the blog. Since the practice areas and attorney profiles are all static and wouldn't change often, I find pages to be better.
my 2 cents.
Hope it helps!
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Do I use H1 tag for logo or page content?
Should the h1 tag be used for the main page content or the logo? I understand the original method was too H1 the logo with the main search term, does this still hold true or should it be content focused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Canonicle & rel=NOINDEX used on the same page?
I have a real estate company: www.company.com with approximately 400 agents. When an agent gets hired we allow them to pick a URL which we then register and manage. For example: www.AGENT1.com We then take this agent domain and 301 redirect it to a subdomain of our main site. For example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet
Agent1.com 301’s to agent1.company.com We have each page on the agent subdomain canonicled back to the corresponding page on www.company.com
For example: agent1.company.com canonicles to www.company.com What happened is that google indexed many URLS on the subdomains, and it seemed like Google ignored the canonical in many cases. Although these URLS were being crawled and indexed by google, I never noticed any of them rank in the results. My theory is that Google crawled the subdomain first, indexed the page, and then later Google crawled the main URL. At that point in time, the two pages actually looked quite different from one another so Google did not recognize/honor the canonical. For example:
Agent1.company.com/category1 gets crawled on day 1
Company.com/category1 gets crawled 5 days later The content (recently listed properties for sale) on these category pages changes every day. If Google crawled the pages (both the subdomain and the main domain) on the same day, the content on the subdomain and the main domain would look identical. If the urls are crawled on different days, the content will not match. We had some major issues (duplicate content and site speed) on our www.company.com site that needed immediate attention. We knew we had an issue with the agent subdomains and decided to block the crawling of the subdomains in the robot.txt file until we got the main site “fixed”. We have seen a small decrease in organic traffic from google to our main site since blocking the crawling of the subdomains. Whereas with Bing our traffic has dropped almost 80%. After a couple months, we have now got our main site mostly “fixed” and I want to figure out how to handle the subdomains in order to regain the lost organic traffic. My theory is that these subdomains have a some link juice that is basically being wasted with the implementation of the robots.txt file on the subdomains. Here is my question
If we put a ROBOTS rel=NOINDEX on all pages of the subdomains and leave the canonical (to the corresponding page of the company site) in place on each of those pages, will link juice flow to the canonical version? Basically I want the link juice from the subdomains to pass to our main site but do not want the pages to be competing for a spot in the search results with our main site. Another thought I had was to place the NOIndex tag only on the category pages (the ones that seem to change every day) and leave it off the product (property detail pages, pages that rarely ever change). Thank you in advance for any insight.0 -
HELP! How do I get Google to value one page over another (older) page that is ranking?
So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
I have 2 keywords I want to target, should I make one page for both keywords or two separate pages?
My team sells sailboats and pontoon boats all over the country. So while they are both boats, the target market is two different types of people... I want to make a landing page for each state so if someone types in "Pontoon Boats for sale in Michigan" or "Pontoon boats for sale in Tennessee," my website will come up. But I also want to come up if someone is searching for sailboats for sale in Michigan or Tennessee (or any other state for that matter). So my question is, should I make 1 page for each state that targets both pontoon boats and sailboats (total of 50 landing pages), or should I make two pages for each state, one targeting pontoon boats and the other sailboats (total of 100 landing pages). My team has seen success targeting each state individually for a single keyword, but have not had a situation like this come up yet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanMaster0 -
What things should I consider if I am doing a 301 redirect on only 1 page/blog post?
I wrote a blog post on one of my websites and it got picked up by reddit and I got a bunch of nice backlinks and now that website got a nice boost overall, and especially that blog post page. I now wish I would have posted the article on a different website of mine. I would prefer if this other site was getting the traffic and the good backlinks that I've acquired. What are the pros and cons if I move the content over to my other website, and 301 redirect just that one article to the article location on my other website? The blog post I wrote almost instantly began ranking for certain terms in Google. Ideally I would like my other website to rank for those terms, but I realize there will be some differences as search engines look at the website as a whole and take many factors into consideration. I know there are tons of case studies and information about moving entire sites etc but I couldn't find much on this. Any advice, questions or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bradbowman
Brad0 -
Optimized page titles post penguin
Just a quick question to hear a few opinions on page titles in a post penguin/panda world. For example, we are working on a large downloads portal that offers Addons for games called FSX and FS2004... Page titles are currently as follows: Concorde for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads
Quants Airbus A380 for FSX - Civil Aircraft Downloads I thought it would be beneficial to remove the boilerplate "Civil Aircraft Downloads" to stop the template effect in the titles. Yay or nay? Good idea or bad idea? Other ideas? Also, after removing that the titles would be as follows: British Airways Boeing 747 for FSX We still will have "for FSX" boiler plate text...is this okay? Perhaps we should remove the "for" and just have the title as "FSX Concorde" or "Concorde FSX" -what do you guys think? Are there any other title suggestions you guys can recommend? Your thoughts, tips and suggestions are very much appreciated.0