Hi Peter

thanks for that advice. I’ll look into int. I was just looking at Google Console and noticed that in the ‘Coverage’ section there are a few URLs marked ‘noindex’ – do we need to worry about this in terms of it negatively impacts our SEO or anything else?

Thanks.

Thanks for checking – those are all pages we want marked as noindex!

They’re the ‘Stock’ pages I referred to in my initial report when I delivered your SEO. In this case they are all just policy pages, terms & conditions and cookie policy pages.

I’ll re-paste that section at the bottom of this message in case that’s helpful.

The reason they’re marked as ‘submitted but not indexed’ is because they used to be submitted before I marked them otherwise. So really this is just Google letting you know about that change – eventually they’ll stop reporting these because they’ll see they are in fact not being submitted anymore.

I hope that’s helpful!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

5)
A couple of pages on your site were “stock” pages, for example policy information. In order to make sure your site is compliant with the latest Google update, these were marked as “noindex”.

The reason those sorts of pages are considered “stock” is they’re essentially standard pages (also known as ‘boilerplate’) that don’t reflect what your site is actually about.

A lot of sites use standard content for those, copied and pasted from elsewhere. So there can be duplicate content issues – but at the very least they don’t reflect the main purpose of your site, so they water down the message so-to-speak.

Google and Bing both recommend these sorts of pages be marked as “noindex”, meaning they won’t scan them and add them to the body of data about your site.

Do you add all the below to each pages? if so is there a set number of pages you do and is it different descriptions for each page?

Page titles, Keywords, Description

What your turnaround at present?

Thanks for contacting me, it’s great to hear from you again.

My turnaround is the usual up-to-three business days.

Your other questions actually have quite a bit to unpack though. So I’ll go through them all in turn.

1)
Up to 40 pages per site is usually considered fair. But that just refers to the number of pages you might want to have tags crafted for manually. You don’t always want that for all types of content.

So, the main pages on a site should always have manually strategised and written tags. But the same isn’t always true for other types of content. Sometimes for posts, and nearly always for products, you want those to be created on-the-fly (when a visitor loads the page) based on a series of rules, or schemas, that Google recommends.

There are several reasons for that, but the two main ones are:

AUTOPILOT
When those more dynamic content types can be set up to create tags for you, it saves you having to worry about that going forward. You’re free to focus on creating new content, posts, products, etc.

RELEVANCY
This is the biggie. Google cares a lot about the ‘relevancy’ of your SEO settings and tags. Does the content in the tags match the content on the page? This sort of setup gives a 100% relevancy for description tags which is awesome.

And of course search engines don’t just judge each page by itself, they look at the site as a whole and ascribe SEO authority to the domain too.

So let’s imagine a site has 10 static ‘Pages’ in WordPress, but 100 ‘Posts’. If all those posts have a full, 100% relevancy score then we have a bit more leeway with the main Pages. So we can make them more keyword rich without risking triggering a ‘lack of relevance’ problem.

2)
On to keywords. Those keyword meta tags haven’t been used in a very long time, well over a decade. Google confirmed in 2009 they didn’t (and hadn’t) used them:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Bing never used that tag, and Yahoo stopped around ten years ago.

In fact while the Yoast SEO plugin does have an option to use keyword meta tags, but it actually has a comment next to the option:
“I can’t think of any reason you’d want to use this.”

There’s even strong evidence (from Bing) that using them incorrectly will get you penalised!

It can be confusing because in the industry people do still talk about keywords, but they mean it in a different context. You can read about that here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/a-few-key-words-about-keywords/

That’s rather a lot of information about on-page SEO – but I hope it’s helpful!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert