Wordpress pagination and SEO

[SirMax]

Hello Mozzers,

We have incorporated Wordpress blog in our website. The blog has a fair share of what we believe is a valuable content both for the users and SEO. We have reached the point where our content is getting pushed out to pages 2, 3 and etc. 99% of the older content is still relevant and useful.

However it does get less traffic from the users because it is not on the front page. I am dealing with it by showing "related posts" and get some traffic through that.

I feel that the content that got pushed from the front page of the blog gets less love from search engines as well.The my permalink structure is /%postname%/ only, however when Wordpress adds page/1/ the SEO ranking appears to drop.

Is it because Wordpress adds page/1/ to the address? What is a good way to optimize is? I have 15 posts showing on the front page should I increase it?

[BeanstalkIM]

Hello SirMax.

Removing the "/page/" is easy enough with Mod Rewriting or I'm sure some plugin or another but the issue will have more to do with the weight the post is being given by the engines than the URL as the final URL is the same.  To illustrate, there's an article on Search Engine Watch at http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2179376/internal-linking-promote-keyword-clusters that outlines how the math of internal links work (simplified).  Essentially what's going on is that your homepage is the strongest page (at least I assume you're part of the 99.99% of sites like that) and even in a blog, the blog homepage will be the strongest page within the blog, so pages it links to get the most weight.  When one of your posts moves onto page 2 it's not the URL that causes the drop it's that the link to that post is now on a weaker page.

The related posts plugin is a solid idea but won't fix the specific issue you're having (though it will help in other ways).  What you probably want is something like this plugin that displays the most popular posts.  What you can do is place a widget on your homepage and set the posts to a reasonable number (10 or 20 max) and it'll display always your most popular posts on the homepage (read: blog homepage) helping insure their internal link weight is maintained.  This will weaken slightly the actual post links as they stand today by adding more links to the page but it should help you address the issue you're having.

One concern to be aware of here is that you do need to review these pages.  Some posts are popular simply by age and won't give the highest value for current traffic.  You'll want to occasionally review which pages are appearing and if there are posts with low current traffic that are blocking other posts (those just below the post number threshold you set in the plugin) then you could be losing traffic so you'll want to exclude them.

Hope that helps.

[SirMax]

Thank you Dave,

Your response makes sense.

Great caveat about being aware that older posts are more popular by the nature of them being older.

I will look into logs to see what posts I want to "promote" through the popular post plugin that have the highest engagement percentage wise.

[BeanstalkIM]

I really hope it helps and wish you luck.