On-Site Optimization Issue!

[dinabrokoth]

Hello,

I have some confusion about how to structure my site to better in on-site optimization.

I am using WordPress. Therefore, there are many things that I need to consider as following:

1. Static Page for homepage OR Latest posts?
2. Archive, Category, Author, Attachment and Tag pages - To put meta robots (no index, follow) or not to prevent duplication?
3. If I use Static Page for homepage, do I need to add meta robots (no index, follow) to POINT 2 above or not?
4. If I use Latest Posts for homepage, do I need to add meta robots (no index, follow) to POINT 2 above or not?
5. To have breadcrumb or not?
6. To have recent posts, comment, tag clouds or popular posts/comments widget or not?
7. To have social sharing icons and related posts in single post or not?

If you don't mind adding more tips that I don't know it would be very great!

Thanks!

[FedeEinhorn]

Hi,

1. Whatever you think is more interesting to your visitors.
2. Archive, category, tags, author should be noindex, follow. Attachments index and follow (no robots tag basically).
3. No, if the content is different, you don't
4. Same as above.
5. Is it better to your visitors if you add breadcrumbs?
6. Same as above, depends on your site and how "attractive" it gets if you add/remove those widgets. I would probably put the latest posts only.
7. YES, totally. Sharing buttons are a MUST nowadays. Related posts will keep your readers in your site if they are interested in finding more on whatever topic they were reading.

Hope that helps!

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! Federico's provided some good advice that I'd like to take a bit further. In order to help you answer Q1, would you mind providing some more details about your site's primarily goals? Regarding Q2, you may want to consider adding unique static content to your category archives and indexing them once you get a solid number of posts build up for each one.

I look forward to hearing from you! In the meantime, here's a great post by Dan Shure about setting up Wordpress sites: Are You Setting Up WordPress for SEO Success?

Cheers,
Christy

[TommyTan]

Hi Dina,

1. Depending on wordpress theme and whether you have enough useful contents on the HP, I would suggest using a static page for Homepage.  If you simply have a blog with different articles, I would use the latest posts as homepage.

2. I use categories as the top navigation header so i wouldn't use no index/follow on that but i would put no index/follow on archive and tag pages to prevent duplication.  Furthermore, pages on archive/tag pages should already be under Category so it doesn't provide search engines anything useful/unique so it makes sense to make it no index/follow.

3. If you use static page for homepage, it will have unique contents and provide visitors with useful information so you shouldn't put no follow/index.

4.I say depending on how much of the latest post it is showing.  If it only show snippets, i wouldn't put no index/follow since you do want your HP to be found/crawled.  However, if it displays the whole post for all of your latest posts, then yes.

5. I like to have breadcrumb so that visitors and even bots can track the path to a certain page.  but for user experience purposes, i would include breadcrumb.

6. I would put recent posts/popular posts if it is useful for visitors.  If it helps visitors find more related posts that they are interested.  go for it.

7.  Yup, social sharing helps your posts get more visibility and increase traffic.  Recommend using it.  Once again, if putting related posts help reader navigating the site / finding useful contents.  Go for it.

Rule of thumb, provide good user experience

[dinabrokoth]

Those are kind of small sites which are having 30-40 pages of articles. The sites are mainly for review the products or services but also have informational articles, too.

I have 4 or 5 main keywords to target, and I heard that static page for homepage ranking better than using latest posts for HP.

[dinabrokoth]

My main concern is content duplication. WordPress has several kind of pages such as category, archive or tag etc.That's why I am confusing how to prevent duplicate content.

P.S: How to check my site for duplicate content?

[FedeEinhorn]

Moz does it for you if you have a PRO+ account

Anyway, the thing here is that archive, tag and author pages (pagination) do not provide ANY value to the user or Google itself, therefore it should be better no noindex while leaving the follow tag to let the pagerank flow to the pages that DO matter: POSTS.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Dina,

Federico is correct, Moz Analytics will flag any duplicate content issues it finds on your site. While it is impossible to prevent creating duplicate content altogether on a smaller Wordpress site that contains tag, category, and archive pages, the easiest way to prevent duplicate content issues is to follow Federico's recommendations (not because these pages are not useful to your users, but because they can create duplicate content).

I would also make sure that you only include excerpts of your blog posts on the front pay of the blog (vs. the full posts), and take care that pagination does not create duplicate content issues for you as well. While no-indexing paginated pages is not the ideal method for preventing duplicate content issues (in my opinion), it is the easiest for many people. (You can read about alternative ways to handle pagination here.)

Finally, it sounds like you are not offering any of the brand's own products and services on the blog. If this is the case, I would make the blog's home page the front page (that is, the home page for the website.)

I hope that helps!

Thanks,
Christy