How do I best optimize my on-page SEO for a magazine-style wordpress theme?
-
My Wordpress website is set up with a magazine style theme (Newspaper). Maybe that's the issue overall here. Questions:
1) Pages vs Categories vs Posts
I currently have a category with a few dozen posts under it. The category page itself has a ~1000 word article on it. It paginates every 10 posts or so at the bottom, but most of the page is duplicate because it's only swapping out a few links.
Should I instead make the "category" a page with the posts childed under it? What's the best way to go about that?
2) Canonical and Pagination
I get errors about a ton of duplicate content for paginated categories and my author page (all posts are under the admin account, which has ~40 pages or so. Every page is just a list of posts and it bitches about duplicate Titles and Descriptions on every one of the paginated posts). Should I canonical these back to the root author? Same question regarding pagination for categories, assuming I'm not going to be switching them to Pages.
3) Home Page Links
Right now my home page just shows a few links to the top posts of all time. After that, it shows the 5 newest posts. On the sidebar it lists a few random pages/posts. There are also a few "category listings" which just shows random posts relevant to that category. Do I want something more static/structured? The navbar does list most main content pages under their appropriate category, but the home page itself is pretty much dynamic.
-
Thank you for the response. I ended up disabling pagination on the category pages (as there aren't more than 20-30 posts per category) to fix the duplicate content issues caused by paginating each page 5-10 times with the same 1000 word article on each page.
I then fixed the author page Titles and Description issue by adding some dynamic tags provided by Yoast in the Author page. Simply changing it from "All Posts by (Author) - Site Name" to "All Posts by (Author) - Page 2 of 36 - Site Name" dynamically, it fixed the duplicate titles completely. Same with the meta description..
As for the home page links, I changed the linking structure entirely. Instead of random posts per category, it now has a link to each category page with the 5 most recently added articles per category under them with a link, image, and text snippet so the page will be more "static" for a while and provide some link flow to my new content, but still update as i add content. I then moved the top 5 posts of all time in the sidebar followed by the most trending article from the last 7 days (by view count).
Finally, I customized my 404 page to show the top 3 articles from my top 3 categories after reading an article about keeping your 404 page relevant and helpful to your viewers just in case I have a bad link come in.
I made all of these changes about a week ago and am waiting to see any changes in rankings, but I think, at least from a reader's viewpoint, the site looks much cleaner and easier to navigate. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to just randomly display whatever the theme felt like every refresh.
Thanks again!
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
-
What is the best way to redirect visitors to certain pages of your site based on their location?
One website I manage wants to redirect users to state specific pages based on their location. What is the best way to accomplish this? For example a user enters the through site.com but they are in Colorado so we want to direct them to site.com/colorado.
Technical SEO | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Best way to deal with over 1000 pages of duplicate content?
Hi Using the moz tools i have over a 1000 pages of duplicate content. Which is a bit of an issue! 95% of the issues arise from our news and news archive as its been going for sometime now. We upload around 5 full articles a day. The articles have a standalone page but can only be reached by a master archive. The master archive sits in a top level section of the site and shows snippets of the articles, which if a user clicks on them takes them to the full page article. When a news article is added the snippets moves onto the next page, and move through the page as new articles are added. The problem is that the stand alone articles can only be reached via the snippet on the master page and Google is stating this is duplicate content as the snippet is a duplicate of the article. What is the best way to solve this issue? From what i have read using a 'Meta NoIndex' seems to be the answer (not that i know what that is). from what i have read you can only use a canonical tag on a page by page basis so that going to take to long. Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | benjmoz0 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
When Is It Good To Redirect Pages on Your Site to Another Page?
Suppose you have a page on your site that discusses a topic that is similar to another page but targets a different keyword phrase. The page has medium quality content, no inbound links, and the attracts little traffic. Should you 301 redirect the page to a stronger page?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
What is the best permalink structure for WordPress?
Hi, Does anyone have practical knowledge of the best permalink structure to use in WordPress? I have seen recommendations for just the post name or category and post name and then some who suggest having 3 digits as part of the structure for pick up in Google news. I am left a little confused - does anyone have practical experience of the best structure please?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0 -
Decreasing the size of a site to increase SEO value of remaining pages?
My website has thousands of pages and I have so many keywords on the bottom of page 1 and on page 2 of SERPs. I am considering making the site smaller to lessen the dilution of the overall domain authority and in theory the remainder pages should get pushed up in rank. Do you feel this theory is flawed? Is it better to 301 or remove the pages if they don't have backlinks directly to the internal page? These are pages I would re-enable down the road once overall domain authority is increased. thanks, David couponcactus.com
Technical SEO | | CouponCactus0 -
Local SEO Optimization
hi, Looks for advices,tips, links ressource to improve local seo optimisation in google places for domain "google. fr" as website business is in France ! Tks a lot in advance..
Technical SEO | | mozllo0