Page content not being recognised?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This post is deleted! -
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.
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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.
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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>
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's great! I'm glad to hear that.
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