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Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week.

And then there's this weeks report.

For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared.

I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared.

FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect.

I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you for the response, Linda. So, this is a slightly tricky one because I don't have a specific deadline per se, but also want to build a plan that gets me over to the new server as soon as possible, without falling into a trap of the switchover date just "floating". Let me put it this way.

I have the following "phases" for each of the articles (as reminder, I have around 200 such articles):

1. Create all articles: Using the planned titles, categories and URLs but with no content.
2. Move content across from old site to the new articles. Done with straight cut-and-paste (don't ask about importing - long story :)). This gets the data into WordPress posts as-is, but includes HTML markup from the old CMS, doesn't correctly use styles (some articles look pretty messy) and doesn't have a consistent use of H2 tags (H1 is the title). Most articles look "OK" but a) some are messy but readable for the human eye and b) the lack of H2 tags means there's no structure from an SEO-perspective.
3. Clean up article HTML/structure. Review each article, cleaning up the HTML and ensuring the content still makes sense and reads well. HTML clean-up includes removing HTML relevant to the old CMS and making sure I have article structure through use of H2 tags
4. Review each article for SEO. Will be using the Yoast SEO plugin and making changes recommended. The keywords are already decided (the URLs and titles in step 1 reflect those decisions) so for each article I will be reviewing the rest of the content and making sure it looks acceptable from an SEO perspective,

I am currently done with step 2 (all articles moved across, albeit some looking somewhat untidy and without any document structure). I am starting to work through step 3 now, but this is a time-consuming process.

I guess what this all boils down to is if I switch across will search engines "catch up" later, when I revise the content for structure and SEO changes. The existing site is not good - so, as it stands, search engines don't look on the site kindly.

One option is to just bite the bullet and move across (I'd see benefits from the title and URL changes, with the associated 301 redirects in place) and subsequently do steps 3 and 4. I'd actually like to do that but ONLY if I can be confident the search engines will end up in the same place as they would if I just waited till step 4 is done.

Another option is to finish step 3, move to the new server and then start updating articles for SEO (step 4).

Thanks.

Mark

I am in the midst of moving my site to a new platform. As part of that I am reviewing each and every article for SEO - titles, URLs, content, formatting/structure, etc, etc. I have about 200 articles to move across and my eventual plan is to look at each article and update for these factors.

I have all the old content moved across to the new server as-is (the old server is still the one to which my domain's DNS records point). At a high level I have two choice:

1. Point DNS to the new server, which will expose the same content (which isn't particularly SEO-friendly) and then work through each article, fixing the various elements to make them more user friendly.
2. Go through each article, fixing content, structure, etc and THEN update DNS to point to the new server.

Obviously the second option adds time before I can switch across. I'd estimate it will take me a few weeks to get through the articles. Option 1 allows me to switch pretty soon and then start going through the articles and updating them.

An important point here is the new articles already have new (SEO-friendly) URLs and titles on the new server. I have 301 redirections in place pointing from the old to new URLs. So, it's "only" the content of each article that will be changing on the new server, rather than the URLs, etc.

So, I'd be interested in any suggestions on the best approach - move across to the new server now and then fix content or wait till all the content is done and then switch to the new server.

Thanks.

Mark

Donna, thank you so much for the response and my apologies for the delayed response (I read as you replied but forgot to thank you). I believe I am on the right track and your responses give me confidence that the changes make sense.

Thank you again.

Mark

I am in the midst of a major redesign of my site, including revamping existing articles . I have a couple of hundred articles and I am reviewing all aspects of these articles, including titles, URLs, content, etc. I am putting together a process as I move each article across to the new site and have SEO very much in mind. I'd appreciate any feedback on this.

First off, let me be clear that I consider the quality of the content paramount. Anything suggested below is considered "supporting" (that content) from an SEO perspective. But, since I am moving this content across, I may as well take the opportunity to clean things up.

The existing articles don't have particularly good SEO-related attributes, in terms of their titles, URLs, use of keywords and so on. So, I plan to do the following for each article. For illustrative purposes (our site serves the wedding industry), I will use an article about how to involve children at a wedding. Questionsunder each bullet.

1. Use the "Keyword Difficulty" feature on Moz Pro to research a specific keyword for each article. In the example case I used "involving children in our wedding".

• Honestly, I am not really sure what to do with this feature I've read everything from "focus on the long tail" to "don't fear highly competitive keywords". So, my current thinking is merely to use it as interesting information for they keyword I choose but not actually make any specific decisions from that ie. make sure the keyword is relevant to the article as the first priority and use the tool to check out search volume.
• Not sure what I should read into a zero for recent Bing searches. Is that really an important factor? I'm assuming the Google information is not available from Google (it would be displayed here otherwise, I'm guessing)

3. Use a title that uses these keywords. In this case, I simply went with "Involving children in our wedding".
4. Same for URL - /wedding-guests/involving-children-in-our-wedding

• If I have a reasonable, short and human-friendly term like this (I can do this with virtually every article quite easily), is there any reason why the URL and the title should not be the same? In short, the title and URL are both a relatively concise "mini-sentence"

6. Make sure the meta description of the article is easy-to-read (for humans) and uses the keyword (sentence)
7. Make sure that the theme (we are moving to WordPress) uses H1 for the page header/title and H2 for sections within the document
8. Implement 301 redirects from the old URL (old site) to the new URL

• This seems like a pretty obvious approach for articles where the URL has changed (which will be most of them). But what do I do with articles that I am going to remove. Should I redirect (301) to a related article (so at least the visitor ends up on a page that is generally relevant) or just let this "fall through" as a non-existent page (401)?

As I say, I have 200+ articles to go through I want to make sure I am taking this advantage to clean things up.

Anything leaping out as missing/problematic?

Thanks in advance

Mark

This absolutely helps - a lot Thank you, Donna.

So, I am narrowing in on the following:

• Navigation (across the site) links to four or so "topic" pages, which are flagged as categories in WordPress. These would be something like "Planning", "Your Wedding Day", "Love and Marriage", etc. They are the "big buckets"

• I have tags like cakes, dresses, rings, guests, etc. Note: I didn't understand your comment that tags should be mutually exclusive. If I have an article about saving money on flowers, why would I not tag that with both "budgeting" and "flowers"?

• Articles

• All articles belong to one and only one category, as implied by their URL structure. This creates some challenges because some articles may have some relevance to more than one category but I think I can live with this

• URLs would be of the form <category>. So, for example \your-wedding-day\choosing-your-wedding-ring</category>

• I can flag articles with one or more tags

• For each of category

• The term I expose on the page (visually) will be "human friendly". What I mean by that is I will use a natural terminology that reads well and is NOT focused on SEO-specifically. So, the navigation menu might simply be "Planning" (as opposed to "Wedding Planning", given that the whole site is about wedding)

• The URL to the category page will be SEO-friendly (so, \wedding-planning, not just \planning)

• The category page will be SEO "aware" (decent title, keyword focused, etc) but also a darned good read for the visitors (quality of content being a factor in SEO anyway)

• The thinking here is that the URL relays the essence of the page for URL but I don't need to clutter the visual expression of this (what the visitor sees) by prepending "Wedding..." to everything.

Am I making sense?

Thank you again.

Mark

Thank you, Donna. So, I've been doing some more thinking about this and it's a difficult balance. I have two ways to look at the whole issue.

• Through the aforementioned "big buckets", such as Planning, Looking Good, Your Wedding Day, etc. I see 4, maybe 5, of these.
• Through the "topics" (cakes, dresses, etc). We have quite a number of those.

The first one is best suited as the second tier ("folders" under the root) numerically - there are, say, 4 of them. However, they are pretty broad and I don't know how successful we'd be in what are very competitive SEO areas (wedding planning, for example, is right up there). Also, apart from the article/post lists (which would be featured in those pages), I am not sure how often they would change.

The second ones are more specific, but are numerically probably too broad for the second level. But the

So, still not sure how to structure this. But one thing I would like to clarify is that if I go with the former (big, broad areas) then having them as second-level entities is no worse, presumably, than just having /blog at the second level, right? It would seem to me that /blog has very little SEO value, whereas even something broad like /wedding-planning has at least some value, right?

Thanks.

Mark

OK, here is something else that is on my mind. We're starting to get into IA at this point and comments are very much appreciated.

So, as I have mentioned I have a number of topics and all of my articles will be associated with one or more of those topics. I plan to use WordPress categories (and maybe tags) to represent those, with the ongoing discussion about URL hierarchy on my mind.

I see the categories as the "meat and potatoes" of how I structure my content. (Since the cat is out the bag) This means cakes, dresses, flowers, etc.

But there's another way to look at the wedding - more along the lines of Planning, Looking Good (dress, makeup, etc), Love and Marriage, etc. These are additional buckets through which a bride might view her wedding.

I'm trying to get my head around whether these concepts are superfluous and/or unnecessary. My worry is that the categories are too granular - though still meaningful - and don't present a simple "roadmap" to the visitor.

Anyway, the reason I am asking is that there may potentially be more than one way to present all this. I like the idea of the "big buckets" above because that first impression is important (I'm taking about the human response here, not search engines) and a list of 15-20 "topics" can be overwhelming. Many of the web sites I used have a first impression that is simple, direct and easy to "consume" - a "1, 2, 3" step process, etc.

I don't know how that maps to SEO-related factors though.

Still chewing on this.

Mark

Thank you. Ryan. I had seen articles like this. It's tempting to see an article that is so old as outdated - but there's also the idea that there are some basic, common sense "primitives" that are just as true today That's a good list and I appreciate the pointer.

So, the flatting is something I have convinced myself is worthwhile. The open issue now is "how flat" See the other comments in this thread.

Thanks again.

Thank you Donna. Yes, I'm finding this issue of "flatness" to be somewhat tricky because I'm getting plenty of alternative opinions - the nature of this while thing, I guess

You are right about the number of articles, which will run into the hundreds. I've been looking at some successful sites and find very little consistency in this area - some are very flat and some have well-defined structure in their URL schemes.

Can you expand a little on why placing the articles under /blog would be better than having them under one of the topics like /wedding-cakes (I am referring specifically to the URL now, not just from where they are linked)?

Your comments have clarified one aspect (and I'm asking here in case there are some contrary thoughts on this). The topic pages may initially be a simple listing (perhaps auto-created by WordPress, based off of categories). For those I could ensure they are not indexed. Eventually, though, I plan to make these more than mere link pages - I'd like to have useful content on them, pertinent to the topic. So, while the page would hopefully be a "darned good read", that content - once done - would be relatively static. If I achieve that goal (the page has useful but static content), would that be the point to have it indexed? If so, that gives me a framework I can work in and one I can move towards over time.

Thanks.

Mark

My site serves a consumer-focused industry that has about 15-20 well recognized categories, which act as a pretty obvious way to segment our content. Each category supports it's own page (with some useful content) and a series of articles relevant to that category. In short, the categories are pretty focal to what we do.

I am moving from DNN to WordPress as my CMS/blog. I am taking the opportunity to review and fix SEO-related issues as I migrate. One such area is my URL structure.

On my existing site (on DNN), I have the following types of pages for each topic:

/ <topic>- this is essentially the landing page for the topic and links to articles</topic>

/<topic>/articles/ <article-name>- topics have 3-15 articles with this URL structure</article-name></topic>

With WordPress, I am considering moving to articles being under the root. So, an article on (making this up) how to make a widget would be under /how-to-make-a-widget, instead of /<widgets>/article/how-to-make-a-widget I will be using WordPress categories to reflect the topics taxonomy, so I can flag my articles using standard WordPress concepts.</widgets>

Anyway, I'm trying to get my head around whether it makes sense to "flatten" my URL structure such that the URLs for each article no longer include the topic (the article page will link to the topic page though).

Thoughts?

Thank you - this is very helpful. I did some basic investigation around this.

The number of these vendor pages that have had at least one hit in the last year is 590. Across these pages I have had a total of 2249 hits. One of the pages (for some reason) accounts for 410 hits, but the vast majority (> 570 of these pages) have less than 20 hits for the entire year. Collectively, these pages have resulted in < 0.5% of our total page hits for the year.

So, they are meaningless in terms of volume of traffic but form a large percentage of our page count.

I am not really sure about the impact of a panda hit (or how to verify) but it does seem that the data above just points to deleting them. Since I think I can 301 redirect with a regular expression to the appropriate "topic page" that seems like the most appropriate approach at this stage.

By the way, I not sure how easy this is to answer, but how would I best assess "a significant rankings boost". Would that manifest itself in remaining pages being ranked better or is this as simple as looking at the domain authority after these pages are removed?

Thanks again.

Thank you for the prompt response. These pages are there specifically to show lists of vendors (links to their web sites). We do identify the relevant topic from the URL and, from the vendor list page, link to relevant content elsewhere on our site, in a sidebar. A typical page like this would link to 5-10 articles elsewhere on our site.

But the primary content is the list of vendors.

Thanks again.

I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way.

Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority.

Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines.

The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage So, not good.</topic></state>

We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective.

• Is this as simple as that - just removing these page?
• How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic>
• I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO?

Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something.

Thoughts?

Thank you for the response. I should have been more clear. It is the weekly SEOMoz crawl that is showing such inconsistent behavior, not Google. Sorry I wasn't more clear.

We have very few (if any) broken links, errors, etc.

Thanks.

Mark

I am seeing huge fluctuations in the number of pages discovered the crawl each week. Some weeks the crawl discovers > 10,000 pages and other weeks I am seeing 4-500.

So, this week for example I was hoping to see some changes reflected for warnings from last weeks report (which discovered > 10,000 pages). However, the entire crawl this week was 448 pages.

The number of pages discovered each week seems to go back and forth between these two extremes. The more accurate count would be nearer the 10,000 mark than the 400 range.

Thanks.

Mark

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

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

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

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