Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Crawled – currently not indexed

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This is a creative use of Google Search Console I’ve come up with for some easy SEO wins

And it’s been working really well on all my testing sites.

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s official stats system for organic search, and has the most useful data about your site’s ranking, visits, clicks, etc.

They changed the interface for it some time ago and keep adding more data in it. One new page will show you all the pages in your site they’ve crawled, but chosen not to include in search results.

So they know about these pages, but don’t think they’re worth including in their results pages. The effect of that is these pages are not actually helping with your SEO at all. From an SEO viewpoint they may as well not be there.

There are two main reasons I’ve found why otherwise useful content is being ignored by Google:

  • It’s just too short
  • It’s not on-topic enough

Your content might just be too short

This is fairly self-explanatory. Unless you’ve got 300+ words of text on a page it will often be ignored.

Your content might not be on-topic enough

The best way to explain this is with an example, let’s think about a digital marketing firm. Perhaps when they started they offered a variety of services from social media content to web development and SEO.

Well now they just focus on the latter. Their homepage is about it, all their services pages are too – but they have old blog posts about their older services.

Google knows what a site’s core service offering is. And things that might fall outside that – either because they’re just off topic or simply old and reflect what a business *used* to be about – they’re likely to get ignored as well.

Re-purpose old content to get it indexed and working for your SEO!

Here’s my recommendation. Have a look through the list of crawled but not indexed pages and see if there are any you can fix.

Doing this myself I found any short pages I fleshed out, or outdated ones I re-tooled to reflect what I’m doing now – every single one got picked up again by Google.

In some cases it was just a matter of adding an extra paragraph to an existing post. That’s not nearly as cumbersome as writing an entirely new one but essentially gets a whole extra page indexed.

Fill in your social media profiles

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Far too many WordPress sites end up with empty social links

I see this all the time; in the header or footer of WordPress sites, a series of little social media icons that links to – nothing.

A lot of WordPress themes have sections for you to fill out your social profiles, so those little buttons can link to them correctly. But a lot of those themes will show them regardless of whether or not you’ve entered proper URLs. Some go a step further, and by default will have a link entered as #. That just means it links back to the page you’re on, but it’s enough to get the buttons showing and essentially linking to nothing.

It’s an easy enough oversight to make. But it means you have dead links which isn’t great for your SEO, and if visitors notice then it just seems wildly unprofessional.

If you have social buttons, they really need to link to social sites. It’s not hard to do – these sorts of WordPress themes are intended to make everything as simple as possible – but at the very least have a quick check of your own site and make sure your social button links, well, link.

In all honesty I see this in perhaps a third of WordPress sites overall, so there’s a good chance it affects your’s.

Google authorship in the code

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It goes without saying that we love Google Authorship, and the snippets produced by having it set up.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s all you need to know in one photo:

Having this set up grabs peoples’ attention.

Part of the process of setting these up is to have a link on your pages back to your Google Plus profile. All the guidance from Google, and therefore most online sources, is to have an icon or short piece of text that links to your profile.

Not everyone wants to link to their Google+ page. And for good reason; a lot of website authors only have G+ accounts for the sake of getting these authorship snippets working. They certainly don’t want to drive visitors to a social profile they aren’t actively using.

Here’s a solution I worked out myself. As far as I know, I’m the first to be publishing this.

Simply drop this code into your website, anywhere at all. It doesn’t display anything on the site—it just sits in the code, but works 100% as a Google Author link.

<a href=”your-profile-url?rel=author” />

So for example mine is:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/1/110002801838494280534?rel=author” />

It’s that simple!

Gwibber and the new Twitter API

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I noticed Gwibber, my social networking app for Ubuntu, stopped updating my Twitter status after the API was updated. Basically, it was broken.

And as of yet, it’s not been patched.

Here’s a fix I used to get Ubuntu updating my Twitter account again.

[sourcecode]pkill gwibber
sudo gedit "/usr/share/gwibber/plugins/twitter/__init__.py"[/sourcecode]

Then search and replace “api.twitter.com/1” to “api.twitter.com/1.1”

Tada!

For the sake of honesty, I’ll admit I didn’t find this fix myself, I found it here.

Facebook adopts hashtags

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How does this affect us, other than seeing lots of ironic #heresahilariouscommentaryonmyownlife links flash on our Facebook walls?

It gives Facebook a feature that it’s been lacking, the ability for us to see a stream of activity based around a single theme, site-wide.

It’s a great way to build your audience, by joining in threads that reach people far outside your own friends/subscribers list.

And while in a really busy hashtag search your comment will be replaced pretty quickly by the slew of other commentators, if you write the right thing at the right time, you’ve the potential to massively grow your sphere of influence.

Facebook has announced plans to introduce clickable hashtags for users.

The tool is already widely used on other media, such as microblogging site Twitter, so users can find out what others are discussing.

Facebook users have long-adopted the hashtag, often using it as an addition to comments and status updates. But they will now be able to click on the hashtagged words as a search term and view a feed of discussions relating to that topic.

via Facebook to introduce clickable hashtags | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Search Engine Optimisation, primer complete

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On Friday I published part five of my five part primer series on search engine optimisation.

For your convenience, you can get to each piece of the SEO puzzle here:

  1. Code
  2. Site speed
  3. Social integration
  4. Blogging
  5. Back-links and all other things link oriented

The series will give you an understanding of SEO, how to approach it conceptually and practically, and contains some easy to replicate tips and tricks.

And if you need help with any of it, let me know.

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