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
-
Unsolved Duplicate Content
We have multiple collections being flagged as duplicate content - but I can't find where these duplications are coming from? The duplicate content has no introductory text, and no meta description. Please see examples:- This is the correct collection page:-
Technical SEO | | Caroline_Ardmoor
https://www.ardmoor.co.uk/collections/deerhunter This is the incorrect collection page:-
https://www.ardmoor.co.uk/collections/vendors How do I stop this incorrect page from showing?0 -
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Hi There! (i am beginner in seo) I have dynamic and static pages on our site. I created a static page for a specific keyword. Fully optimized it, (h1, alt, metas, etc.....maybe too optimized). My problem is that this page is alive for weeks, checked it in GWT and it is in robots.txt, google sees it, and indexed it. BUT whenewer i do a search for that keyword, we still appear with the dynamically created link in the google listings. How could i "redirect" google, if sy make a search for that keyword than shows our optimized page? Is there a tool for that? I cant delete the dynamic page... Any ideas? Thx Andrew
Technical SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Premium Content
Hey Guys I woking on a site that publishes hundreds of new content a day and part of the content is only available for users for 30 days. After 30 days the content is only accessible to premium users.
Technical SEO | | Mr.bfz
After 30 days, the page removes the content and replaces it with a log in/ sign up option. The same URL is kept for each page and the title of the article.
I have 2 concerns about this method. Is it healthy for the site to be removing tons of content of live pages and replace with a log in options Should I worry about Panda for creating tons of pages with unique URL but very similar source /content - the log in module and the text explaining that it is only available to premium users. The site is pretty big so google has some tolerance of things we can get away with it. Should I add a noindex attribute for those pages after 30 days? Even though it can takes months until google actually removes from the index. Is there a proper way for performing this type of feature in sites with a log in option after a period of time (first click free is not an option) Thanks Guys and I appreciate any help!0 -
How to make my good sub-page rank ahead of my generic home page?
I have an ecommerce site for the clothes drying racks my family business makes, and it sells a few other laundry items also. It's about 5 years old. We used to rank on the first page for basic phrases like "clothes drying rack" and "umbrella clothesline". About 1.5 years ago we fell hard in the rankings. Since then "umbrella clothesline" has moved back to the first page, but "clothes drying rack" is stuck on the 3rd page and always with the result being the generic homepage instead of the good sub-page (which used to rank on the first page) that really shows-n-tells about our drying rack. Here are the three pages I am talking about. Home page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/ Drying rack page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html and umbrella clothesline page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/umbrella-clotheslines.html Any ideas on how to get the drying rack page to start ranking well again? (hopefully better than the generic homepage ranks) A little technical background: the Moz campaign on this site says that the home page has a PA = 42 with 190 LRD's and 344 external links. Both the umbrella clothesline page and the clothes drying rack page have almost equal statistics of PA = 35 with 20 LRD's and 23 external links. My anchor text distribution is maybe unbalanced. The drying rack page has 15 external links with the anchor of "Clothes Drying Rack". But the umbrella clothesline page has 14 external links with the anchor of "outdoor umbrella clothesline" and it ranks on the first page for that search. I can't figure out how to get OSE to tell me anchor text stats for just the homepage and not the whole site since www.bestdryingrack.com/index.html 301's to the plain www.bestdryingrack.com (if you know how, please share) What's wrong with my poor neglected clothes drying rack page? The only way I can get it to show up on the first page is to do a real specific search like "round wooden clothes drying rack" Your help could save a faltering family business. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Duplicate Content Issues on Product Pages
Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Do multipe empty search result pages count as duplicate content?
I am writing an online application that among other things allows the users to search through our database for results. Pretty simply stuff. My question is this. When the site is starting out, there will probably be a lot of searches that will bring back empty pages since we will still be building it up. Each page will dynamically generate the title tags, description tags, H1, H2, H3 tags - so that part will be unique - but otherwise they will be almost identical empty results pages until then. Would Google Count all these empty result pages as duplicate content? Anybody have any experience with this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Secondary Pages Indexed over Primary Page
I have 4 pages for a single product Each of the pages link to the Main page for that product Google is indexing the secondary pages above my preferred landing page How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | Bucky0