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Hello!

Generally, the only value tags hold would be to provide and extra detailed internal navigation on the site. Categories are for the broad topics, and if you wanted, you can also tag posts with more detailed topics or with some other categorization convention (ie: you could classify trail types - "fun", "challenging", "scenic" etc). And then provide a way to navigate to them by linking them in a sidebar, etc

Other than internal navigation though, tags really hold no value - so you can totally just delete them and rely on categories.

Hi Allie

Yes, that sounds correct. You basically don't want to default category pages indexed, because you have custom ones now.

Also - if you don't even want users to find the default category pages at all (because it might confuse them etc) I would also make sure they are not linked to or otherwise accessible. There's no need for users to find them and for Google to be even crawling them. This might not be technically possible depending on your theme, and it won't be a huge detriment, but something to think about if you have control over it.

That's right it depends on goals. If it's a single service / single product website targeting only one main keyword/topic, one page might be OK. I would definitely check out the article linked to!

Hi Chuck

As Donna also mentioned, there was a small update which was finally just confirmed by Danny Sullivan of Google: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-small-search-ranking-algorithm-update-this-past-week-306103#.W7AVMNe0y5g.twitter

So that is the most likely reason for the drop you saw.

As with any traffic change, I would recommend segmenting your traffic data by both queries and landing pages (this can both be done in search console) - to isolate which/if specific pages and keywords saw drops. If so, you can then determine if it was a site-wide drop, or specific to a set of pages and keywords. If site-wide, perhaps it is more technical related, but if keyword/page specific it could be more closely tied to the algo changes.

Hi Sharon

Is there specific content or pages you're not seeing indexed that should be?

I checked with a site search and see that about 282 pages are indexed right now. I crawled the site, got about 578 active URLs, and subtracting /wp-content/ URLs and subpages, that leaves about 280ish URLs (correction, 380ish), which is the number indexed in Google. which is only 100 more than the number indexed in Google.

Perhaps things caught up, let me know if there's a URL not indexed that you expect to be.

Thanks!

-Dan

There's a way to create jump links in the link dialogue box, does this work for you?

https://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/page-jumps/

I also found this plugin:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-anchor-links/

It might help to search "anchor links" as that's what some people call them too.

Hi Simon!

As John said, a link to your site or a little more detail would be helpful here.

There's a lot of reasons a site's visibility could be low (a technical issue, low-quality content, poor keyword/page alignment, high competition etc). I know you're saying these things check out, but it's better to be able to take a direct look at things.

It could also just be a metrics/data issue or misinterpretation. For example, visibility percentage can be impacted artificially by the keywords added to a rank tracker.

A better way to look at it might be - have you seen a major change/drop in clicks in search console? If so, can you narrow it down to a specific date or segment it out to find specific keywords or pages that lost visibility?

Mike and Dmytro answered this really well. It should be blocked in robots.txt

But also, you might be linking to your login page publicly. I often see links to login or for "admin" in wordpress themes in a sidebar, widget or footer. You should probably remove those as well (unless you allow public users to create their own account and log in).

Hi There

Doing a little research, I understand s.w.org is for emojis. This can be disabled if you don't want to use emjois:

• https://wordpress.org/support/topic/disable-dns-prefetch-of-sworg/

It seems like the Google Fonts one is nothing to worry about:

• https://generatepress.com/forums/topic/dns-prefetch-fonts-googleapis-com/

Hi

This can vary depending on how often Google crawls your site, but I've seen Google crawl and update the rankings in just a few days on some moderately popular sites.  I've heard the most popular sites, like the NY Times, are being crawled and updated many times a day.  For some really low traffic websites I've seen it take maybe 10 days, but never longer than two weeks, which is just my personal experience of course.

You can go into Google Webmaster Tools to see how often they crawl and how many pages deep they usually go.  If the content you're trying to get updated is deep into your site it could take longer.  But the homepage much quicker.

Hope this helps.

-Dan

Hi David

You can probably leave the pages as-is and allow Google to crawl them. But you may want to update the part of the content that's triggering the duplicate errors. In other words - are your title tags and meta descriptions unique for each page? Or maybe the H1's are duplicates? Since the pages do have slight differences, I would use those differences to make the content unique.

Hello!

You should check the actual status code of your custom 404 page - does it actually return a 404 Not Found?

You can check in a variety of places:

• https://urivalet.com/
• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

Or install the Redirect Path plugin and it will show the status code in your browser.

Hey Pete

I'm seeing 6-pack also.

At the SEMNE (searche engine marketing new england) event the other night, Jordan Rost from Google did the presentation, and he said that as far as he knew the 12 pack has always just been a test, and he wouldn't be surprised if it went away or changed somehow.

-Dan

From what I know, they are getting that data straight from the facebook API, which is always current. This is totally different from when they update their linkscape index which provides the link data.

-Dan

Hello!

As far as the indexation - let me answer that first. Does what you see here in a site: search match more to what you'd expect? The WMT numbers can tend to lag behind. I would generally look at the site: search for the "real" number.

Also, have you tried a "fetch as Google" and then "submit to index" for pages that still may not be indexed?

-Dan

Hi

Three pop out immediately.

1. You do not need the keywords meta tag at all.

2. The description should be in sentence form, not a list of keywords. It should be written as a 1-2 sentence sales pitch.

3. You can put your brand name at the end of the title tag to give more weight to the keywords. Just keep it under 70 characters so it doesn't get cut off.

Some more things on second glance...

• You have a bit of CSS and JS in the source code. Get that into an external file.

• The canonical tag is missing.

• Maybe you want to use some social sharing buttons, and include the FB open Graph meta tags (i see you have them on the blog, that's good)

-Dan

Dan says I need the FB API which I looked at and it seemed confusing

Hi, in the first answer above I said: "you need to install the facebook open graph meta tags" - this is different from the API.  You do not need to use the API for anything. OSE uses the API for their data.

More info on open graph tags here, on the like button page

Open graph tags are meta tags you insert into the of your website on every page, so that when someone uses your share/like buttons, it sends information about your website over to Facebook, thus "counting" it as a share.

Do I need to install or connect properly with the FB API or just expect a discrepancy between what my site shows and OSE reports?

To reiterate, the action you need to take is to add the open graph tags to the of your website. You are running on WordPress so I suggest looking for a plugin that will do this for you.

Hope that helps! I know, it was a little confusing when I first tried to wrap my head around it.

To quote from facebook:

"The Open Graph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page, makes your page equivalent to a Facebook Page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile"

-Dan

If Google is currently ranking both, I would actually leave it and let both of them be indexed and rank. I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

I've seen this happen quite often where Google will rank two results from the same domain. Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Since they are doing this already, they are technically not cannibalizing one another because Google seems to have decided they are not duplicates and are not filtering one out of the results.

Instead, I would be sure you're cross-linking between the two, and focus on user engagement for the traffic you are already getting (ie: goal completions, time on page etc) and focus on really satisfying the users who are landing on each result.

Hey, thought I'd chime in! Those are all great ways of selling SEO.

I try to show the prospect a real pain point in their specific situation.

For example, for one local business I actually took a screenshot of a search for their brand, where they were not even showing up, and printed it and brought it to them. When they saw a search for their own business didn't even bring a result, that was motivating!

Or I'll do a really quick competitive analysis (nothing very scientific, just a real good guess at a desired keyword) and find where they don't rank well but a competitor does, and show them that.

Or, if a slightly more tech savvy prospect, I'll find a few things really wrong with the website, some 404s or crawlability issues.

If you can present these things in a way where you don't alarm people too much but generate that reaction of "wow, we need to do something about this". Present them in a way where you're also helping, educating and can provide a solution.

So my angle sometimes isn't "here's why SEO is important" it's "here's why YOU need SEO".

-Dan

You should run a "Who can grow the best Rand Fishkin style beard" contest.

I'd win.