Wordpress-related warnings

[MarkWill]

As proposed by a number of people here, I have moved from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress blog. I have also installed the SEO All in One plugin. This has been up and running for a month or so.

My problem is that it is generated many (thousands) of warnings through my PRO Dashboard for Crawl Diagnostics. Specifically, I have a huge number of "Overly-dynamic URL" warnings. A typical URL is as folows:

http://www.wednet.com/blog/2011/10/07/do-us-a-favor-dont/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=do-us-a-favor-dont

This has three querystring parameters, all generated by WordPress automatically.

Here's another significant issue. With the SEO All In One plug in I can control the SEO-related parameters for each post (title, meta description, etc). However, WordPress generates a ton of virtual URLs which I can't (as far as I know) directly control. For example, the following page is a category page with all the posts for a single category. This is generating warnings because the meta description is missing. However, I do not know how to control such parameters since the page is automatically generated.

http://www.wednet.com/blog/category/ceremony/

These type of warnings dominate the stats I have through my dashboard. How can I resolve these?

Thanks.

Mark

[AlanMosley]

I dont know why wordpress is so popular, i have scaned many word press sites and they really are a mess SEO wise, yet so many boggers want good SEO.

I delveop websites in ASP.MVC that is perefect for SEO, I have never used a CMS untill a few days ago so I am no expert on them, but a client wants a blog. Its not the sort of work i normaly do, and he not going to pay for one to be made from scatch, but i found one that is SEO friendly, not perfect but not bad. nice clean code, Orchard CMS, It is made by programmers from Microsoft and sponsered by Microsoft but it is open souce its still quite new.

[MarkWill]

Thank you Alan. Ironically, I use a CMS for the majority of my web site pages (except the blog) that is also very ASP.Net centric, namely DotNetNuke. I am very happy with it. I use WordPress just for the blog component.

There are many reasons I went went with WordPress but - although I am an "amateur programmer" (OK in C#, ASP.Net) I much prefer the simplicity and richness available with such a popular product. For example, it installed in 10 mins and within an hour I had the blog on my site, had configured permissions for a bunch of bloggers we have and so on. I also just grabbed a theme I liked and it "just worked". All that without a single line of code.

That said, this particular SEO issue is a problem for me. I was told by numerous folks here that switching to self-hosted WordPress was the way to go from an SEO perspective. I made that change, implemented an SEO-focused plug in (didn't need to develop anything myself :)) and then found what I agree is a "mess". However, the very fact that WordPress is a mature and massively used platform is what gives me confidence that there's a solution here. Hundreds of thousands of web sites use it and I'm pretty sure this sort of issue isn't just "accepted" by all those web sites.

Anyway, those are some of the reasons I use WordPress but my real question is how to resolve them while still using WordPress.

Thanks again.

Mark

[AlanMosley]

What are you hosting on, Appache or IIS.

Your own serer or hosted remotly

[MarkWill]

I am hosting WordPress on IIS 7.0. I have a virtual server from the cloud (GoGrid) so while not technically my own I have full and complete control over the virtual machine, so no constraints there (full admin rights, can reboot whenever I like, etc).

What's on your mind (what does that change)?

Thanks.

Mark

[AlanMosley]

On iis you can install the url-rewite modeolif it not already on there, then you can rewrite the urls.

they have some examples on iis.com you would ned to write a outbound rule, and look for utm_source in {QUERYSTRING} then rewite {URL}
somthing like that.

You can also install orchard cmd in a fe minutes using web platform installer though IIS. might be easer

?are these duplicates urls or just have the query string has been added.

[MarkWill]

The problem is I have no idea what these URLs are, whether they are necessary, where I should redirect, etc. I'm looking to understand their purpose and whether there is any way to determine whether WordPress generates them.

What concerns me most is that this is a relatively new blog (just a couple of months old) with a little over 40 actual posts. This is turning into thousands of URLs. I'm struggling to believe that all WordPress sites tolerate this type of "URL noise" so eager to learn what others have done.

Thanks.

Mark

[EricaMcGillivray]

Hi Mark,

You can control URL writing in the Settings > Permalinks part of WordPress. There you can set what directories (if any) you want to list in the URL.

As for meta descriptions, All-in-One SEO has a section to add a meta description. And as far as tags and categories go, you can set them in those sections on Wordpress.

Hope this helps!

[MarkWill]

Thank you for the response, Erica. I am aware of the Permalinks settings but, as far as I can tell, these only help with the structure of the initial part of the URL (before the ?). The issue I am seeing - as reported by SEOMoz - are hundreds/thousands of URLs with multiple querystring parameters after the ?. See the example in my original post for an illustration.

Thanks again.

Mark

[EricaMcGillivray]

I'm surprised it's pulling anything after the ?. Usually those parameters are saved for things that aren't a real page. In your example, it's GA's tracking code for your RSS feed.

So I went into my own Wordpress sites in my SEOmoz account, and I'm not getting the same warning for the overly dynamic URLs. (In fact, I'm running 3 Wordpress blogs on my domain.) This to me says there's something up with your Wordpress.

Do you have the latest version up and running? Do you have a plug-in that's causing problems? Is there something not on the correct setting in your robots.txt?