Some of the pages of your site serve a purpose, but that purpose isn’t ranking in search engines or even getting traffic to your site. These pages need to be there, as glue for other pages or simply because regulations require them to be accessible on your website. If you regularly read our blog, you’ll know how noindex or nofollow can help you deal with these pages. However, if you are new to these terms, please read on and let me explain what they are, and what pages they might apply to!
What is noindex nofollow?
noindex means that a web page shouldn’t be indexed by search engines and therefore shouldn’t be shown on the search engine’s result pages. nofollow means that search engines spiders shouldn’t follow the links on that page. You can add these values to your robots meta tag. The robots meta tag is a piece of code in the head section of a web page. It tells search engines how to crawl and whether to index a page.
The robots meta tag looks like this in most cases: <meta name="robots" content="[VALUE1,VALUE2]">
VALUE1 and VALUE2 are set to index, follow by default, meaning the page at hand can be indexed by search engines and links on that page can be followed to crawl the pages they link to.
VALUE1 and VALUE2 can be set to noindex, nofollow or another combination like index, nofollow .
But don’t let this code scare you away. Yoast SEO helps you out! If you want to know how to noindex a post in WordPress, in a super-easy way, you should read this post: How to noindex a post in WordPress: the easy way.
But when should you use which value?
Pages to set to noindex
Author archives on a one-author blog
If you are the only one writing for your blog, your author pages are probably 90% the same as your blog homepage. That’s of no use to Google and can be considered duplicate content. To prevent this kind of duplicate content you can choose to disable the author archive entirely. Here’s how to enable or disable it easily with Yoast SEO. If, for some reason, you’d like to keep it on your site, but out of the search results, you can noindex it. Fortunately, with Yoast SEO, this is not very difficult either; just check how to noindex an author archive.
Certain (custom) post types
Sometimes a plugin or a web developer adds a custom post type that you don’t want to be indexed. At Yoast, for example, we use custom pages for our products, as we are not a typical online store selling physical products. So, we don’t need a product image, filters like dimensions and technical specifications on a tab next to the description. Therefore, we noindex the regular product pages WooCommerce outputs and are using our own pages. Indeed, we noindex the product post type.
Relatedly, we’ve seen eCommerce solutions that added specifications like dimensions and weight as a custom post type as well. These pages are considered to be low-quality content. You’ll understand that these pages have no use for a visitor or Google, so need to be kept out of the search result pages too.
Thank you pages
That page serves no other purpose than to thank your customer/newsletter subscriber/first-time commenter. These pages are usually thin content pages, with upsell and social share options, but no value for someone using Google to find useful information. Therefore, those pages shouldn’t be in the search results pages.
Admin and login pages
Most login pages shouldn’t be in Google. But these are. Keep yours out of the index by adding a noindex to it. Exceptions are the login pages that serve a community, like Dropbox or similar services. Just ask yourself if you would google one of your login pages if you were not in your company. If not, it’s probably safe to say that Google doesn’t need to index these login pages. Luckily, if you are running WordPress, you’re safe as the CMS noindexes your site’s login page automatically.
Internal search results
Internal search results are pretty much the last pages Google would want to send its visitors to. If you want to ruin a search experience, you link to other search pages, instead of an actual result. But the links on a search result page are still very valuable, you definitely want Google to follow them. So, all links should be followed, and the robots meta setting should be: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
Yoast SEO makes sure your internal search pages are set to noindex by default. It’s one of Yoast SEO’s hidden features. This is not an editable setting, because it’s simply how it should be done according to the Google Guidelines, and we fully agree with them on this.
For developers only: If you do want to change this, this can be done by using one of our filters. An example can be found here.
Pages to set to nofollow
For all the examples mentioned above, there is no need to nofollow all the links on these pages. You don’t want to show them in the search results, but you do want Google to follow the links on the page. Now, when should you add a nofollow to your robots meta tag?
If you set a page to nofollow with a robots meta tag, none of the links on that page will be followed. Google came up with nofollow to be able to distinguish links to untrusted content (or, later on, paid for, like advertisements). On a regular website, there are probably very few pages you’d want Google not to follow any link.
An example: if you have a page that lists SEO books, with a surplus of Amazon affiliate links, these could be of value to your site for your users. But I’d nofollow that entire page if there’s nothing else that matters on the page. You might have it indexed, though. Just make sure you cloak your links the right way.
Nofollow single links
If you have a post or page with multiple links you might want to help search engines qualify them. Nowadays, you can nofollow a single link to, or even set it to sponsored or UGC. Adding the right rel attributes to your link allows you to do so. For instance, a link to an advertisement would look like this: <a href="https://www.example.com" rel="nofollow sponsored">example link</a>. With Yoast SEO adjusting these rel attributes is super easy, as you can see in this video:
Conclusion
As we have seen, whether or not to noindex a page or nofollow a link boils down to two questions: do you want this page to show up in the search results pages and should search engines follow the links on this page? For ‘thank you’ pages or login pages, for example, the answer to the first questions is “no”. For a page with loads of affiliate links, the answer to the second question is “no”. Keep the examples from this post in mind and you shouldn’t have any more trouble deciding the answers for your own site!
Two words you often hear together are mobile and site speed. And that’s not without reason because these two go hand in hand. Mobile-friendliness and site speed are some of the most pressing matters we have to deal with. Measuring page speed has always been something of a dark art. The site speed tools we use today are fairly adequate, but with the new Web Vitals metrics Google is trying to come at it from a different, more realistic angle, taking page experience into account. Here, I’ll take a closer look at how to check your mobile site speed and SEO with Google Lighthouse.
Lighthouse is a page experience tool built by Google and was initially meant to audit Progressive Web Apps (PWA). The tool executes five audits for accessibility, performance, SEO, Progressive Web Apps and an extended list of best practices. Powered by the new Core Web Vitals, these audits together give you an excellent overview of the quality and performance of your mobile website as well as your desktop site, or web app.
Site speed is all about perception and user experience. Speed in numbers means nothing if your site still feels slow. Loads of users around the world are on rather crappy mobile connections of 3G or less. Even with lightning-fast 5G connections, a site can simply feel laggy and slow. And we all know what a devastating effect a slow site can have on your conversion. Shaving milliseconds of the time needed to load your site could make a world of difference. Not to mention the frustration that happens when a slow-loading ad pushes down the button you just wanted to click.
You can run a Lighthouse audit straight from the Developer Tools in Google Chrome — or install the Chrome extension
While testing, Google Lighthouse simulates visiting your mobile site via a flaky 3G connection on a slightly underpowered device. Packets are lost in an attempt to simulate real-world conditions as authentically as possible. These insights are combined with other data. After running the test, you’ll get a report with a score and actionable advice with issues to tackle.
PageSpeed Insights vs. Google Lighthouse
PageSpeed Insights is probably the most used site speed analysis tool out there. It gives you a nice score and a list of possible improvements, plus it gives you an idea of the perceived loading speed of your site. Also, PageSpeed Insights gives recommendations and identifies opportunities to improve the performance of your page. Some of these do tend to be hard implement, so getting a 100/100 is a pipe dream for most sites.
PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse used to be two different tools for the job. They both provided valuable insights, but were hard to combine. With the advent of Web Vitals and the page experience update, Google improved the metrics across the board. Not only did they become easier to understand, they were also shared metrics. Of course, each tool is made for a specific subtask and offers specific metrics. These metrics come from different environments.
Field data vs. lab data
Web Vitals introduced new ways of determining performance. Some of these metrics can be calculated in a lab setting — simulated, so to say, while other metric only make sense if their are tested and collected in the field. In addition, some metrics work well in both settings. Google page experience tools use a variety of the metrics to provide you with the data you need to improve your site.
If you look closely, you’ll notice that some metrics only work in lab tools like the Developer Tools and Lighthouse. The field metrics appear in tools like the Web Vitals report in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. The Core Web Vitals like LCP, FID and CLS will work everywhere.
Core Web Vitals
The brand-new Core Web Vitals will appear in all Google tools that measure site speed, performance and experience — even in the new Web Vitals report in Search Console. Now, you simply have to understand three basic metrics to get a sense of how your site or specific pages are performing. These Core Web Vitals are:
FID, or First Input Delay: Or, how long it takes for a browser to respond to an interaction first triggered by the user (clicking a button, for instance)
CLS, or Cumulative Layout Shift: Or, how much of the screen is affected by movement — i.e. does stuff jump around on screen?
These new Web Vitals take a much more practical approach and put user experience front and center. The tools visit your site over a throttled connection on an average device so it can emulate what a real visitor in the real world might experience. Instead of just loading your site like the classic speed tools used to do, these Web Vitals-powered tools check how and when it responds to input — and if stuff happens after the initial load. It finds the exact moment when your content is ready to use, so you can try and optimize that when it feels too slow. Plus, you can find annoyances that hinder a good page experience.
Also, keep in mind that Lighthouse not only measures performance, but also checks SEO, various best practices and accessibility. It is a complete tool that helps you improve your site holistically.
PageSpeed Insights gives slightly different scores. You’ll also notice a difference between Field Data and Lab Data
What to look for in Lighthouse results
The whole concept of speeding up your mobile site is two-pronged; your site must be fast, and it must feel fast. You, therefore, need to get your content on screen as fast as possible. Don’t let people wait. Also, users must be able to interact with your content as soon as possible. Since Google announced that page speed and page experience are ranking factors for SEO, you need to fix these issues.
What should your priority be? Load your content first. Awesome graphics and killer animations can wait. Your message – and what people are looking for – is most likely in the content. You can load the rest of the content in the background and ease it on the screen later on.
Performance metrics used by Lighthouse 6.0
While measuring the performance of your site, Lighthouse 6.0 uses the following metrics:
First Contentful Paint: FCP measures how long it takes the browser to render the first piece of DOM content after a user navigates to your page. This includes, images, non-white <canvas> elements, and SVGs but excludes stuff inside an iframe.
Speed Index: The Speed Index measures how quickly content is visually displayed during page load.
Largest Contentful Paint: The LCP is all about how long it takes for the largest content object (for instance, an image or a block of text) to load. This is one of the most important new metrics. Here, having a good score means users perceive your site as loading quickly.
Time to Interactive: TTI measures the time it takes from loading the page to when it is capable of reliably responding to user input quickly. The page might look quick to load, only to find that pushing some buttons doesn’t do anything yet.
Total Blocking Time: The TBT measures the time between the FCP and TTI where blockades can happen, preventing responsiveness.
Cumulative Layout Shift: The CLS looks at the number of layout shifts that happen during the full loading process of the page. Every time an element jumps around on the screen from frame to frame, this counts as a layout shift. Remember those nasty ads that load at the last moment?
You can see how your score is calculated by going to the Lighthouse Scoring Calculator:
The Lighthouse Scoring Calculator shows the weight of the difference metrics
The Lighthouse report also features some opportunities to improve the site speed of your mobile site, including how much loading time they will save. These include reducing render-blocking stylesheets, render-blocking scripts, properly sizing images and fixing offscreen images.
Lighthouse identifies the largest contentful paint element so you can easily optimize that
All in all, Lighthouse gives you a tremendous amount of insight into the performance of your page. Use these insights to your advantage.
The Lighthouse SEO check
Lighthouse doesn’t do just performance, it also has an accessibility test, suggestions on improving your site based on best practices and a PWA analysis. Another cool Lighthouse features is the basic SEO check. With this check, you can run a simple SEO audit to uncover basic SEO issues a site may have. It gives you suggestions to fix them as well. Since Lighthouse runs locally in your browser, you can run the checks on your staging environment as well.
Does the document have a valid hreflang implementation?
Does the document have a valid rel=canonical set up?
Are there any unwanted plugins like Java or Flash?
Although basic, the Lighthouse checks will alert you of any SEO problems to fix.
How to install Google Lighthouse
Getting started with Google Lighthouse is very easy as it is built into Chrome’s Developer Tools Audit panel (Mac: Shift+Cmd+I. Win: Ctrl+Shift+J or F12). From there, you can run the test and get the full report. In addition, there is a separate Chrome add-on for Lighthouse that adds a button to your toolbar, though using it stays the same with a few restrictions : you can’t validate sites on your local server and authenticated pages also won’t work.
You can also run Lighthouse as a Node package. This way, you can incorporate the test into your build process. When using the Node package, you will also see that there are a couple of audits that only work in a Node environment and not in the Audits panel of the DevTools.
To install Lighthouse globally from the command line use:
npm install -g lighthouse
If you want to run a test for https://example.com use:
lighthouse https://example.com
The full results of the audit will be available in the terminal, but also in a separate HTML file.
You can fine-tune the test as you see fit
Testing Yoast.com in Lighthouse
It’s time to put Lighthouse through its paces. Let’s see what happens when I shine the spotlight of the lighthouse on yoast.com — as seen by a mobile browser. Today, we’re only focussing on the Performance tab. This tab shows how your site or app performs currently and shows you ways to improve it.
In the screenshot below, you can see the results for yoast.com. The initial loading of the mobile site is visualized by a number of screenshots showing when the content first appears onscreen. The metrics show how long it takes for the content to become visible. The faster, the better.
You get the most important metrics in one screen
In the metrics section, you’ll find the most important information, with a green, orange or red dot to show how good the performance is. When you want to optimize the performance of your mobile site, you need to watch the figures for first contentful paint, largest contentful paint and time to interactive, as mentioned earlier. Also, try to improve the speed index and make sure that nothing jumps around on screen.
From the grades, you can see that yoast.com does pretty well with a 78 overall score. The first contentful paint could be a bit better, but the speed index and total blocking time are good. Luckily, there are no elements found shifting in the layout. There’s still something to gain by eliminating render-blocking resources, like some JavaScript and CSS. In other words, the site appears to be rather fast but still could use some speeding up in the appearance part.
Implementing site speed fixes
There’s a lot you can do to improve your site speed. While explaining all the fixes is beyond the scope of this post, many optimizations can be found in the critical rendering path. The critical rendering path is formed by objects – like CSS and JavaScript – that have to load before the content can show up on screen. If this content is blocked, your page will render slowly or not at all. Pay attention to this and keep the path free of obstacles. Google’s Ilya Grigorik wrote a great guide on how to understand and improve the critical rendering path. And please, optimize your images! Last but not least, don’t forget to read up on Google’s new Web Vitals.
Try it!
Google Lighthouse isn’t the one site speed tool to rule them all, but it is a very valuable addition to your toolkit. The SEO checks are basic, but welcome nonetheless. Lighthouse is more fine-grained and gives you immediate feedback based on real-world usage. You should definitely use it along with your other page speed test tools, like PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest and GTmetrix.
Are you using Google Lighthouse? How do you find it? Please share your experiences and tips in the comments. I would love to hear from you!
Last Friday, May 29th, Yoast celebrated its 10th anniversary, and we invited everyone to join us! And what better way to celebrate than with an awesome, interactive webinar? We had multiple talks, Q&As, live site reviews, all with loads of SEO tips, insights and practical advice. Of course, we understand that not everyone could join the live webinar. So, here’s a quick recap of the sessions, plus the links to all the videos, so you don’t have to miss out!
Wondering what you’ll learn from the talks in this webinar? Here’s an example of someone’s takeaway from one of the sessions:
Pretty cool, right? Here are all the videos, so let’s dive right in!
Joost on 10 years of SEO for everyone
Remember what your world looked like in 2010? Joost takes you on a trip down memory lane and shows you some highlights of the past 10 years. What did Google (literally) look like back then? And how did this search engine evolve? But also: what didn’t change? Lots of advice we gave 10 years ago, still stands today. How’s that possible? Joost walks you through 10 years of Google and Yoast! Plus, if you want to have a peek at Joost’s first official Yoast desk in his attic 10 years ago, you need to watch this video:
Marieke on the importance of readability
In this talk, Marieke explains why we feel readability is important for both your users and your SEO. She gives a few useful tips to improve the readability of your text and gives an insight into the readability analysis of our plugin. So, are you curious about why we would not recommend our plugin to literary heroes such as Dickens and Shakespeare? And what we site owners can all learn from children’s books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar? Watch the video to find out:
Three parallel live site reviews
Live site review – Technical SEO
Ever wanted to see how experts pick apart websites to offer advice on technical SEO? Here’s your chance! Joost de Valk and Jono Alderson tackle three websites — a horse ranch in the US, a shop making artisan leather bags and a self-help site —, and come up with a boatload of tips to improve these sites. You’ll get insights into international SEO, crawling, site structure, taxonomies, schema improvements and a lot more. Go check it out!
Live site review – User experience (UX)
What do clear call-to-actions, readable fonts, an intuitive design, useful videos, and high-quality copy all have in common? They’re essential for an excellent user experience on your site. In this webinar, Michiel, Thijs, Annelieke, and Judith walk you through a couple of websites and point out some common UX issues that happen on many sites and which you’d want to prevent on yours. Of course, they’ll highlight the great things about these websites too! In need of some examples of what (not) to do when it comes to the usability of your site? Check this out:
Live site review – SEO copywriting
During this review, Marieke, Willemien, Edwin and Fleur, discuss the content of a few different sites. And although the feedback they give is specific to these sites, these can be very helpful for any site owner out there. So watch their review if you want to know why it’s so important to keep a goal in mind while you write, how site structure can help your visitors and what our opinion is on stock photos:
Jono on how to use schema to build your brand and boost authority
Our resident SEO wizard Jono Alderson has been advocating the use of schema structured data for over 10 years. Over the years, structured data has been getting more and more important, but not really easier to implement — although the results of implementing it can get you great rewards. But why is Google pushing this so hard? And how does the Yoast SEO schema structured data framework fit into this story? Listen to Jono explain why this next frontier is now within reach for everyone. You can also learn how Yoast SEO makes implementing structured data a whole lot easier.
That’s it for this webinar – stay tuned!
That’s it for this recap! We hope you enjoyed it and got some great takeaways for your site; we really had an awesome time with all of you! This definitely won’t be our last webinar, so keep an eye on Yoast.com, social media, or just sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know!
We all want to increase our sales, lift engagement, and get the best possible result out of our website. That’s why it only seems right to give you a three-step rocket of SEO quick wins to kick-start your website. In this post, I will show you three things you can do right now to improve your website for your visitors, and for Google in the process. Let’s dive right in with number one.
#1 Optimize speed
It doesn’t matter whether you want to improve your mobile website or your desktop website, speed is something you need to monitor and improve all the time. These are fast times, and speed is definitely what you want to optimize for.
In a simple breakdown of speed optimization, we have images, browser caching, and script optimization. Both PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom will tell you that. Another factor that plays a role in speed optimization is text compression with GZIP. But in my opinion, that should be enabled by default. Let’s have a look at the other three:
Image file size optimization
Optimizing your file size can increase the speed of your site and is also an important part of image SEO. So let’s start there. Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your file size:
Optimize the image file size in Photoshop (or any other image editing program you use). Usually, just exporting the image in a lower quality will do the trick. I usually check whether reducing the quality to around 80% of the original still gives me a crisp image.
Download an application like ImageOptim or use a web app such as Squoosh and further optimize your file size before uploading.
Last but not least, make sure that the image dimensions of your image fit the image ‘space’ that you reserved for it on the page. Don’t display a 1200×400 pixel photo as a 300×100 pixel image by adding CSS or whatever.
Browser caching
Browser caching is the way your browser stores files of a website, so it doesn’t have to load them from the internet every time you visit another page of a site. An example on our own site is the logo you see at the top of the site. Storing these files obviously saves time.
There are many ways to go about this, but if you have a WordPress site the easiest way is probably using a plugin. Most speed optimization plugins support browser caching and set them to the right time for you. Among some of my favorite speed plugins are WP SuperCache, which is free, and WP Rocket, which is a premium plugin and awesome.
Optimize script handling
You can load a gazillion JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files to enhance your website, but in the end, all these extra files just slow your website down. Please ask yourself the following questions to optimize your script handling:
Are you sure you need that enhancement? JS and CSS usually target design and user experience. In some cases, you just don’t need that enhancement. Like JS and CSS loaded for sliders, for instance. There are alternatives to sliders that work better and don’t require extra files.
Is there a way to reduce the file size of your scripts/styles? We call this process ‘minifying’ and explain this further in an Ask Yoast video. Google has some great pointers on how to approach this. Simple scripts and handy websites can help you minify your files, for instance by stripping comments. Most platforms have plugins or extensions that help with this. To give an example, Magento has the Fooman Speedster (free and paid) for that.
Is it possible to combine a number of these scripts into one file? That way, there only has to be one call to the server to retrieve all the scripts. Again, there are plugins for that, but if you have small pieces of JS, you might as well combine these yourself. Of course, HTTP/2 changed some of these optimization practices. Make sure to test this!
It’s quite tempting to copy our ultimate guide to mobile SEO here, but let’s focus on the quick wins. An important reason to focus on mobile SEO these days is Google’s mobile-first index. Since July 2019, Google determines rankings based on the quality of the mobile version of a site instead of your desktop version. So, let’s get that mobile version up and running, right?
Task-based design
Have a look at your mobile website. Imagine you are a fresh, new user of your website. What would that user want to do here and is your site ready for that? Focus on a task-based design. If someone visits a mobile website, they might need opening hours or an address. Just a while ago, I purchased tickets for the Nederlands Openluchtmuseum on my mobile phone. Saved a buck and didn’t have to get in line for tickets. I did this, walking from my car to the entrance. One needs to be able to complete these basic tasks without any problem. Ask yourself what the four, perhaps five, main goals of a visitor on your site are and make sure these can be achieved on your mobile website.
Performance-based design
Are you loading any huge images on your site? Do people have to scroll for ages to read what you have to offer them? On a mobile website, we want to find what we need and get out as fast as possible – unless it’s, for instance, a news website. Loading time is a factor on mobile sites, especially with mobile connections usually being slower than most desktop connections. Make sure your design and content don’t depend on large images too much. And yes, of course, there are exceptions to that rule. If I visit a photographer’s website, I can assume that I’m in for longer loading times. When visiting this type of website, I want crisp images and that’s the price I pay. So be sure to optimize to an acceptable level for your target audience.
Write great content
This goes for the mobile and desktop version of your site: they need great content. A quick win for mobile content is to add a to-the-point first paragraph on every page. If you tell your visitor what’s on your page, they can decide for themselves if they want to scroll down or not. This is easily done and definitely benefits the experience of your visitor.
And of course, the content that comes after this first paragraph needs to be awesome as well. To tackle that, you’ll need to do keyword research, set up a great site structure and decide on cornerstone content. But you can imagine that this is a slightly lengthier process, and we’re talking quick wins here :)
#3 Serve your content in the right format
There are so many ways to serve your content to Google, Facebook and your visitors. Your task is to investigate which formats you should invest in. Some take a bit more time to implement; others can be added to your website by the push of a button, like with a plugin. Let’s go over a few important ones.
Better social sharing: Open Graph
Forget about Twitter Cards for now, as Twitter has a fallback to Open Graph. So, add Open Graph to your website if you haven’t done this already. It’s like a social summary of your website. To give you an example, for our homepage it reads (among other things):
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" />
<meta property="og:title" content="SEO for everyone • Yoast" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Yoast helps you with your website optimization, whether it be through our widely used SEO software or our online SEO courses: we're here to help." />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://yoast.com/" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Yoast" />
<meta property="article:publisher" content="https://www.facebook.com/yoast" />
<meta property="article:author" content="https://www.facebook.com/jdevalk" />
<meta property="article:modified_time" content="2020-02-18T13:24:20+00:00" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://yoast.com/app/uploads/2018/03/SEO_for_everyone_FI.png" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="628" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@jdevalk" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@yoast" />
There’s a page/site title and a summary plus link, which tells Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter all it needs to know to create a great post on your visitor’s timeline. The og:image creates a richer experience. Be sure to add this. Again, use a plugin like Yoast SEO for TYPO3 to automate the process (and add these Twitter Cards along with Open Graph in no time).
Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP, aim to strip your website to the bare necessities to deliver your reader the best mobile experience they can get. If they want to read your article, AMP will give them just your article in basic design. If you want to check a certain product, AMP will strip much of the heavy loading stuff from the store to deliver something more focused. Is this a bad thing? I think not. Every way you can help your visitor get a better experience increases the chance of them coming back to your content and site. It might even increase sales because it’s so focused. I suggest reading up on AMP and getting your site ready — if you want. Again: plugins will help you out with this!
Tell Google what your page is about: Schema.org
I will end this list of quick SEO wins with something we’ve been telling you about for quite some time: add Schema.org to your website. Structured data, like Open Graph and Schema.org, create a convenient summary of your website for every other site or search engine that wants to use your content. Schema.org data is one of the main types of structured data. JSON-LD gives us a convenient way of adding it to our website.
Yoast SEO does a lot of work behind the scenes and automatically adds a broad spectrum of Schema.org structured data. In addition, the free structured data content blocks in Yoast SEO help you build FAQ pages and how-to articles with valid Schema.org structured data. Our Local SEO plugin adds the right Schema.org so that Google can add your company to Google Maps as well, for instance. Add Schema.org data to your website and see your company appear in the knowledge graph as well.
Serving your content in the right format is essential in delivering it to other ‘places’ on the website. Be sure to use it. And if you’re not sure what structured data you should use to optimize your pages, be sure to enroll in our structured data training which is part of our Technical SEO training.
Bonus tip! Don’t forget internal linking
I know I said 3 quick wins, but I have another bonus tip that I want to share with you. Internal linking makes your site easier to understand for users and search engines. That’s why the right internal linking strategy can boost your SEO. And an easy and quick way to improve your internal link structure is by using our internal linking suggestion tool, which gives you suggestions for related internal links on every page or post!
Recap: the 3 SEO quick wins
There’s a lot you can do that benefits SEO. And this article gets you started with a few quick wins to increase your chances of ranking high in Google. Let’s summarize what we discussed.
First of all, you can improve the speed of your site by optimizing your (image) file sizes, being smart about browser caching and optimizing script handling. Secondly, it’s important to focus on your mobile site by having a task-based and performance-based design and writing great content for your mobile version. Thirdly, make sure to serve your content in the right format by using Open Graph, making good use of AMP and adding Schema.org to your site. Lastly, a bonus tip is to get started with internal linking. That’s it, you’re all set. So let’s get optimizing, good luck!
It’s been years since the beginning of the age of the smartphone. With it came the era of native apps. Apps continue to play a massive role in our daily life, and many business owners have asked themselves multiple times: should we have an app? Of course, the only answer to that is — it depends. Building and maintaining a native app is cumbersome and often quite expensive. Luckily, there is another option. This option combines the joys of a native app with the technology we use on the web: the progressive web app, a.k.a. PWA.
What is a PWA?
Twitter.com is a PWA
PWA stands for progressive web app. This is an app built from the web technologies we all know and love, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but with a feel and functionality that rivals an actual native app. Thanks to a couple of smart additions, you can turn almost any website into a progressive web app. This means that you can build a PWA rather quickly, in regards to a native app that’s pretty difficult to develop. Plus, you can offer all the features of native apps, like push notifications, offline support, and much more.
Many sites you find online are actually a progressive web app. Take twitter.com, for instance. If you visit that site on your smartphone, you can install it to your home screen. Now, on opening the saved Twitter site, you’ll notice that it looks and performs just like a native app. There’s no browser window or nothing. There’s no difference in running it from an iPhone or an Android smartphone. Simply log in and you’re good to go. That’s a major benefit of building your web app with a PWA in mind.
PWAs are gaining popularity. Many big sites are PWAs, like Starbucks.com, Pinterest.com, Washingtonpost.com and Uber.com are actually installable on your home screen and offer a comparable experience to their native apps.
What’s the difference between a native app and a PWA?
A native app, like the ones you download from Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store, is often built in a programming language specific to that platform. So for iOS apps, that would be Swift and for Android apps, Java. If you want to build an app for those platforms, you need to know the technology. Yes, there are shortcuts, but these come with their own limitations. If you want to have an app on all the mobile platforms, you need to know all the different technologies. There’s no easy way to build one and publish it to all the stores out there.
Of course, there are ways to get the best of both worlds. A progressive web app, for instance. This runs in the browser and — once saved to the home screen — functions like a native app. It even gets access to the underlying hardware and software that the browser can’t access for safety reasons. If the PWA performs great, users will never know that they are using a web-based app instead of a native one.
There are some caveats, of course. While browsers have been quick to adopt the technology for this, there are still some limitations. On iOS, the technology needed works spotty in Safari. Apple doesn’t (want to) support everything yet, making it a bit of a chore to get the same exact experience everywhere.
What are the benefits of a PWA?
The main reason why everyone is chasing after apps is because they offer greater engagement. Users who install your app are your biggest fans and they are more likely to turn their usage into sales or signups. Thanks to push notifications it’s much easier to re-engage with users. Apps can offer an excellent experience that can do well for a brand.
We talked about some of the plusses of PWAs in this article, but here’s a short overview:
You don’t have to go through the process to get into different app stores
You can build PWAs with common web technologies
They are often cheaper to build
Since you’re turning your site into an app, you’ll have fewer code-bases to maintain
PWAs are responsive and work with many different screen sizes
PWAs are smooth, fast and lightweight
No need to hand off big chunks of money to Google and Apple
They work offline, unlike your regular site
PWAs are discoverable via search engines (which have a lot larger audience than app stores. Plus, if you want you can still get your PWAs distributed via app stores)
You can use push notifications to re-engage users
Installing a PWA can lead to higher engagement
Still, native apps win out sometimes. PWAs get deeper and deeper access to the operating system of a smartphone, but a native app can go deeper still. Plus, there are limits to what a PWA can do. For instance, PWAs are not the best choice when you want to build high-performance games.
All in all, it makes a lot of sense to think about having a PWA in your mobile strategy. But, the main question you should ask yourself is: does my audience want this?
Who’s this for?
Should everyone simply build a PWA and be done with it? No, consider your business and — more importantly — your target audience. Are they even using apps? Isn’t this an overly complex way of getting to what you want to achieve? Again, like everything, you need to research the needs of your audience. Ask yourself, what do you want this technology to do? Where are your users? Do they have a good data connection and solid hardware? How and where are they using your content? And do you think an app can help them do their job better?
PWAs are awesome and implementing them doesn’t have to be all that hard. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should do it. If your audience has no need for it, why would you build one?
What are the SEO concerns of a PWA?
The PWA is inherently web-centric. It was born from the web and developed with search engines in mind to make discovery easy. Of course, you can make a progressive web app out of any-old site and it doesn’t take much to do so. However, many PWAs use JavaScript to build more complex functionality and while search engines have become apt at rendering JavaScript, it can still be a cause for concern.
When setting up a PWA, you have to make sure your JavaScript is accessible. Don’t block files for bots and make sure that links are available. To improve the rendering process you can make your JavaScript framework use server-side rendering.
Turning your site into a PWA doesn’t mean you directly improve the SEO of that site. If it makes sense to turn your site into a PWA, do so, but don’t do it for any perceived SEO benefits. If you have a great PWA, you are offering your users a fantastic user experience, which might make you one-up your competition. In this regard, it’s a good idea to take a look at them for your mobile SEO strategy.
What are the three main building blocks?
It doesn’t take much to set up a PWA. There are three things you need to provide before your site turns into a valid PWA.
A secure connection (HTTPS): PWAs only work on trusted connections, you have to serve them over a secure connection. This is not only for security reasons, but it’s also a very important trust factor for users.
A service worker: A service worker is a piece of script that runs in the background. This helps you determine how to handle network requests for your PWA, making it possible to do more complex work.
The manifest file: This JSON file contains information on how your PWA should appear and function. Here, you determine the name, description, icons, colors, et cetera.
It doesn’t look too hard, right? A couple of interesting things in this listing:
start-url: this determines where your app should start. It’s better to let users land on a specific page for you PWA.
display: this helps you determine what type of browser UI you want to show. Options are fullscreen, standalone, minimal-ui and the standard browser interface.
These three things listed above are the minimal requirements for running a PWA. You can expand the functionality via JavaScript (frameworks).
How to set up a PWA?
There are plenty of resources to try your hand at building a simple PWA. This allows you to get a feel for the process. Google has an excellent, easy to follow tutorial on PWAS on the web.dev site. Mozilla has lots of documentation on building progressive web apps. Microsoft also has rich developer docs on building PWAs. Microsoft even built a tool called PWABuilder that’ll help you turn your site into a PWA. Of course, there are WordPress plugins that help you make a PWA of your site. In addition, Google is working on bringing base-support for PWAs to WordPress Core.
Engage your users with a progressive web app
Progressive web apps can be a great addition to your mobile toolkit. Done well, they are fast, work offline and perform like a native app. All in all, they can offer your users an awesome user experience. Engaged users are happy users, right?
Your site needs to be up and running if you want to be found in search engines. If you aren’t blocking anything — deliberately or accidentally — search engine spiders can crawl and index it. You probably know that Yoast SEO has lots of options to determine what does and doesn’t need to be indexed, but did you know it also has a tool that monitors your site’s indexability? This is the indexability check, provided by our good friends at Ryte.
Update: In Yoast 13.2, we moved the Ryte indexability check from the Yoast meta box on your Dashboard. You can now find the Ryte indexability check in the WordPress Site Health tool! In WordPress 5.4 the site health status widget also appears on the Dashboard.
The indexability check checks if your site is indexable and does so on a weekly basis. You can find the Ryte indexability check in the Site Health tool in WordPress. The Site Health tool groups its checks into three sections:
critical issues
recommended improvements
and passed tests.
The Ryte check will be displayed within one of these groups. When your site can be found by search engines, the Ryte check appears in the Passed tests section of the Site Health tool. If something is wrong and it needs your attention, the Ryte check appears with an SEO tag next to the issue.
The Ryte check in the WordPress Site Health tool
When you see a Ryte check warning among the critical issues, it means that your site cannot be found by search engines. You need to act on this issue quickly if you want your content to appear in the search engines.
In some cases, an error occurs while checking whether your site can be found by search engines. Or Ryte might not be able to determine if your site is findable. When this happens, we recommend you check what is causing those issues.
What do I have to do to get it?
We add this check automatically when you install Yoast SEO. You can find it by going to the WordPress admin menu item Tools > Site Health. In WordPress 5.4 you can also find a Site Health Status widget on the Dashboard.
We advise you to keep the Ryte check turned on. But we do give you the option to turn it off. Learn how to do this by following the steps in this post.
Error: your site cannot be found by search engines
Your homepage cannot be indexed by search engines. This is very bad for SEO and should be fixed.
Are you getting the error message shown above? When Yoast SEO reports your site as not indexable by search engines, this can be caused by several reasons. However, it is an issue of the highest priority, assuming that you want your site to be indexed by Google.
First of all, test your URL in Google’s mobile-friendly test here. If Google can run the mobile-friendly test for your domain, Google can also crawl the domain. In that case, the Ryte warning is wrong.
If Google cannot run the mobile-friendly test, our advice is to follow this Go to Ryte to analyze your entire site link, create an account on Ryte (formerly OnPage.org) and see what they have to tell you. One possibility is that you have a robots.txt file that’s blocking indexation. Or perhaps your theme has some code in it that’s blocking search engines. Ryte can tell you what the problem is and how to fix it!
Indexability check fails
If your indexability check fails, your server is not able to connect to the ryte.com servers to retrieve the indexability status for your domain. This can happen for several reasons:
Your server can’t connect to other servers at all.
Your server has a whitelist of servers it’s allowed to connect to. In this case, adding ryte.com would fix that.
A myriad of other server configuration reasons.
Usually, your hosting party can tell you the cause of the issues and will also be able to help you fix it. If not, go to Ryte where you can create a free account and have access to all of the benefits without having to change anything on your server.
The Yoast Ryte check
Ryte & Yoast SEO
Ryte offers a free indexability check for Yoast SEO users. This way, you can quickly see whether your site is still reachable for search engines and visitors. If you need help fixing technical SEO issues or if you are in need of a suite of SEO tools to help you fix or improve your rankings, sign up for the free Ryte introductory plan. Just go to Ryte and follow the instructions!
Sometimes, branding, technical or business decisions mean that you need to change your domain. If you’re not careful, a poorly managed move can really hurt your SEO. Thankfully, WordPress makes things pretty easy – here’s everything you need to do.
10 steps to move WordPress
This guide assumes that you’re moving from one domain to another. If your migration is more complex (e.g., a subdomain on one site, to a folder on another), you may need to adapt the instructions.
Take a backup of everything
There’s a lot that can go wrong if you’re not careful when you start moving files and databases around. If you run into problems, it’s best to make sure that you can hit a ‘reset’ button and restore a backup.
Add a robots.txt file to the new site
Upload a robots.txt on the new domain (or edit it through your Yoast SEO plugin settings), with the following contents:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Copy everything across
Get a copy of your files and a copy of your database, then move everything across to your new hosting environment. You may need to configure your storage and database settings!
Configure your wp-config.php file
Make sure that you have the right database settings for the new hosting environment, and add the following lines (replacing example.com with the new domain).
Now everything should be accessible on the new website; but you should definitely double-check, and make sure that all of your settings are correct.
If you have a caching plugin or system, don’t forget to empty out all of the old data.
Find and replace old domain values
Install the Search and Replace plugin, and do a search and replace for your old domain name with your new domain name.
Remove the robots.txt file on the new site
Now that your website is set up and ready to go, you can remove the robots.txt file which is preventing Google from seeing it.
Set up a redirect on your old site
Use your tool of choice to set up a redirect on your old site, so that all requests to your old domain trigger a 301 redirect to (the same page on) the new domain. Test this thoroughly!
Remove your old code and database
Apart from whatever code or tools you’re using to power the redirect from the old site to the new one, you can remove all your old code, content and databases.
Update external services
Don’t forget to change the settings on all of your third-party accounts which reference or integrate with your website. They’ll need the new domain name!
That should be it, you’ve moved WordPress to a new domain. If you have any suggestions or spot things that I’ve missed, please note them in the comments!
Search engines like Google have a problem – it’s called ‘duplicate content’. Duplicate content means that similar content appears at multiple locations (URLs) on the web, and as a result search engines don’t know which URL to show in the search results. This can hurt the ranking of a webpage, and the problem only gets worse when people start linking to the different versions of the same content. This article will help you to understand the various causes of duplicate content, and to find the solution to each of them.
Duplicate content is content which is available on multiple URLs on the web. Because more than one URL shows the same content, search engines don’t know which URL to list higher in the search results. Therefore they might rank both URLs lower and give preference to other webpages.
In this article, we’ll mostly focus on the technical causes of duplicate content and their solutions. If you’d like to get a broader perspective on duplicate content and learn how it relates to copied or scraped content or even keyword cannibalization, we’d advise you to read this post: What is duplicate content.
Let’s illustrate this with an example
Duplicate content can be likened to being at a crossroads where road signs point in two different directions for the same destination: Which road should you take? To make matters worse, the final destination is different too, but only ever so slightly. As a reader, you don’t mind because you get the content you came for, but a search engine has to pick which page to show in the search results because, of course, it doesn’t want to show the same content twice.
Let’s say your article about ‘keyword x’ appears at http://www.example.com/keyword-x/ and the same content also appears at http://www.example.com/article-category/keyword-x/. This situation is not fictitious: it happens in lots of modern Content Management Systems. Then let’s say your article has been picked up by several bloggers and some of them link to the first URL, while others link to the second. This is when the search engine’s problem shows its true nature: it’s your problem. The duplicate content is your problem because those links both promote different URLs. If they were all linking to the same URL, your chances of ranking for ‘keyword x’ would be higher.
If you don’t know whether your rankings are suffering from duplicate content issues, these duplicate content discovery tools will help you find out!
Causes of duplicate content
There are dozens of reasons for duplicate content. Most of them are technical: it’s not very often that a human decides to put the same content in two different places without making clear which is the original – it feels unnatural to most of us. There are many technical reasons though and it mostly happens because developers don’t think like a browser or even a user, let alone a search engine spider – they think like a programmer. Take that article we mentioned earlier, that appears on http://www.example.com/keyword-x/ and http://www.example.com/article-category/keyword-x/. If you ask the developer, they will say it only exists once.
Misunderstanding the concept of a URL
No, that developer hasn’t gone mad, they are just speaking a different language. A CMS will probably power the website, and in that database there’s only one article, but the website’s software just allows for that same article in the database to be retrieved through several URLs. That’s because, in the eyes of the developer, the unique identifier for that article is the ID that article has in the database, not the URL. But for the search engine, the URL is the unique identifier for a piece of content. If you explain that to a developer, they will begin to get the problem. And after reading this article, you’ll even be able to provide them with a solution right away.
Session IDs
You often want to keep track of your visitors and allow them, for instance, to store items they want to buy in a shopping cart. In order to do that, you have to give them a ‘session.’ A session is a brief history of what the visitor did on your site and can contain things like the items in their shopping cart. To maintain that session as a visitor clicks from one page to another, the unique identifier for that session – called the Session ID – needs to be stored somewhere. The most common solution is to do that with cookies. However, search engines don’t usually store cookies.
At that point, some systems fall back to using Session IDs in the URL. This means that every internal link on the website gets that Session ID added to its URL, and because that Session ID is unique to that session, it creates a new URL, and therefore duplicate content.
URL parameters used for tracking and sorting
Another cause of duplicate content is using URL parameters that do not change the content of a page, for instance in tracking links. You see, to a search engine, http://www.example.com/keyword-x/ and http://www.example.com/keyword-x/?source=rss are not the same URL. The latter might allow you to track what source people came from, but it might also make it harder for you to rank well – very much an unwanted side effect!
This doesn’t just go for tracking parameters, of course. It goes for every parameter you can add to a URL that doesn’t change the vital piece of content, whether that parameter is for ‘changing the sorting on a set of products’ or for ‘showing another sidebar’: all of them cause duplicate content.
Scrapers and content syndication
Most of the reasons for duplicate content are either the ‘fault’ of you or your website. Sometimes, however, other websites use your content, with or without your consent. They don’t always link to your original article, and therefore the search engine doesn’t ‘get’ it and has to deal with yet another version of the same article. The more popular your site becomes, the more scrapers you’ll get, making this problem bigger and bigger.
Order of parameters
Another common cause is that a CMS doesn’t use nice clean URLs, but rather URLs like /?id=1&cat=2, where ID refers to the article and cat refers to the category. The URL /?cat=2&id=1 will render the same results in most website systems, but they’re completely different for a search engine.
Comment pagination
In my beloved WordPress, but also in some other systems, there is an option to paginate your comments. This leads to the content being duplicated across the article URL, and the article URL + /comment-page-1/, /comment-page-2/ etc.
Printer-friendly pages
If your content management system creates printer-friendly pages and you link to those from your article pages, Google will usually find them, unless you specifically block them. Now, ask yourself: Which version do you want Google to show? The one with your ads and peripheral content, or the one that only shows your article?
WWW vs. non-WWW
This is one of the oldest in the book, but sometimes search engines still get it wrong: WWW vs. non-WWW duplicate content, when both versions of your site are accessible. Another, less common situation but one I’ve seen as well is HTTP vs. HTTPS duplicate content, where the same content is served out over both.
Conceptual solution: a ‘canonical’ URL
As we’ve already seen, the fact that several URLs lead to the same content is a problem, but it can be solved. One person who works at a publication will normally be able to tell you quite easily what the ‘correct’ URL for a certain article should be, but sometimes when you ask three people within the same company, you’ll get three different answers…
That’s a problem that needs addressing because, in the end, there can be only one (URL). That ‘correct’ URL for a piece of content is referred to as the Canonical URL by the search engines.
Ironic side note
Canonical is a term stemming from the Roman Catholic tradition, where a list of sacred books was created and accepted as genuine. They were known as the canonical Gospels of the New Testament. The irony is it took the Roman Catholic church about 300 years and numerous fights to come up with that canonical list, and they eventually chose four versions of the same story…
Identifying duplicate contents issues
You might not know whether you have a duplicate content issue on your site or with your content. Using Google is one of the easiest ways to spot duplicate content.
There are several search operators that are very helpful in cases like these. If you’d want to find all the URLs on your site that contain your keyword X article, you’d type the following search phrase into Google:
site:example.com intitle:"Keyword X"
Google will then show you all pages on example.com that contain that keyword. The more specific you make that intitle part of the query, the easier it is to weed out duplicate content. You can use the same method to identify duplicate content across the web. Let’s say the full title of your article was ‘Keyword X – why it is awesome’, you’d search for:
intitle:"Keyword X - why it is awesome"
And Google would give you all sites that match that title. Sometimes it’s worth even searching for one or two complete sentences from your article, as some scrapers might change the title. In some cases, when you do a search like that, Google might show a notice like this on the last page of results:
This is a sign that Google is already ‘de-duping’ the results. It’s still not good, so it’s worth clicking the link and looking at all the other results to see whether you can fix some of them.
Once you’ve decided which URL is the canonical URL for your piece of content, you have to start a process of canonicalization (yeah I know, try saying that three times out loud fast). This means we have to tell search engines about the canonical version of a page and let them find it ASAP. There are four methods of solving the problem, in order of preference:
Not creating duplicate content
Redirecting duplicate content to the canonical URL
Adding a canonical link element to the duplicate page
Adding an HTML link from the duplicate page to the canonical page
Avoiding duplicate content
Some of the above causes for duplicate content have very simple fixes to them:
Are there Session ID’s in your URLs? These can often just be disabled in your system’s settings.
Have you got duplicate printer friendly pages? These are completely unnecessary: you should just use a print style sheet.
Are you using comment pagination in WordPress? You should just disable this feature (under settings » discussion) on 99% of sites.
Are your parameters in a different order? Tell your programmer to build a script to always put parameters in the same order (this is often referred to as a URL factory).
Are there tracking links issues? In most cases, you can use hash tag based campaign tracking instead of parameter-based campaign tracking.
Have you got WWW vs. non-WWW issues? Pick one and stick with it by redirecting the one to the other. You can also set a preference in Google Webmaster Tools, but you’ll have to claim both versions of the domain name.
If your problem isn’t that easily fixed, it might still be worth putting in the effort. The goal should be to prevent duplicate content from appearing altogether, because it’s by far the best solution to the problem.
301 Redirecting duplicate content
In some cases, it’s impossible to entirely prevent the system you’re using from creating wrong URLs for content, but sometimes it is possible to redirect them. If this isn’t logical to you (which I can understand), do keep it in mind while talking to your developers. If you do get rid of some of the duplicate content issues, make sure that you redirect all the old duplicate content URLs to the proper canonical URLs.
Using links
Sometimes you don’t want to or can’t get rid of a duplicate version of an article, even when you know that it’s the wrong URL. To solve this particular issue, the search engines have introduced the canonical link element. It’s placed in the <head> section of your site, and it looks like this:
In the href section of the canonical link, you place the correct canonical URL for your article. When a search engine that supports canonical finds this link element, it performs a soft 301 redirect, transferring most of the link value gathered by that page to your canonical page.
This process is a bit slower than the 301 redirect though, so if you can just do a 301 redirect that would be preferable, as mentioned by Google’s John Mueller.
If you can’t do any of the above, possibly because you don’t control the <head> section of the site your content appears on, adding a link back to the original article on top of or below the article is always a good idea. You might want to do this in your RSS feed by adding a link back to the article in it. Some scrapers will filter that link out, but others might leave it in. If Google encounters several links pointing to your original article, it will figure out soon enough that that’s the actual canonical version.
Conclusion: duplicate content is fixable, and should be fixed
Duplicate content happens everywhere. I have yet to encounter a site of more than 1,000 pages that hasn’t got at least a tiny duplicate content problem. It’s something you need to constantly keep an eye on, but it is fixable, and the rewards can be plentiful. Your quality content could soar in the rankings, just by getting rid of duplicate content from your site!
Sometimes Google does announcements about new features and we go “huh, why did they do that?” This week we had one of those. Google introduced a new set of robots meta controls, that allows sites to limit the display of their snippets in the search results. There is a reason for that, but they buried that reason far, far away.
With their newly introduced robots meta controls, you can “say” things like: I don’t want you to show more than 200 characters from my site! Or: I don’t want you to show images from my site. None of this made sense to us. Why would anyone who truly wants to optimize for Google’s search results, do any of that?
A French copyright law
Suddenly, we make a dramatic plot twist: France turns out to have introduced a new copyright law, which is the first implementation of Europe’s new copyright law. I am not a lawyer, but as Google explains it in this blog post, it requires for publishers to opt in to a display of their snippets, whereas in the past you had to opt out. Note that that blog post is in French, on their French blog, but there’s an English version in the bottom of that post.
It turns out that you can also use these new robots meta features to opt in to all those displays. Basically, use the meta robots to opt in to have your snippet text, videos and images being displayed at all.
robots meta?
Robots meta is hard enough as it is, read our ultimate guide to understand what you can do with it.
Because this French law implements the new European law, chances are that the other implementations of this copyright law across Europe are going to require similar action. This would mean more countries would need to opt in if they don’t want to loose their snippets. We don’t know that, of course, but of course: better safe than sorry.
A simple change to Yoast SEO
Because this potentially affects so many countries, we’ve decided to make a change for all Yoast SEO users. Every page will have the following robots meta bit added to its robots meta string if that page was not already set to noindex or nosnippet:
This makes sure that nobody runs into unexpected surprises and we’re ready for implementations of this law around Europe.
I want to change that robots meta value
If you want to change that robots meta value, we have a filter in our code that allows you to programmatically change that. That filter is called wpseo_robots, should you want to play with it.
You are opting in by using Yoast SEO
We realize that this means that we’re opting you in to all of these snippet features in Yoast SEO. I think it’s fair to say that if you use Yoast SEO to optimize your search results, we can assume that that’s what you want. At the same time, you might want somewhat more granular control over these values, if that’s true, please let us know in the comments!
The Yoast SEO release containing this change will be 12.2. This will be released next Tuesday, October 1.
WordPress is huge. According to the latest stats, WordPress powers almost 35% of the web — and growing quickly. With so many sites using the CMS and so many new sites bursting onto the scene, there’re a lot of new users taking their first steps in the wonderful world of WordPress. People from all walks of life and many of them are bound to ask the same questions about using WordPress. That’s one of the reasons why we launched a free WordPress for Beginners course. In addition, you can quickly get answers to common WordPress questions in this big guide.
New to WordPress? Don’t worry! Our FREE WordPress for beginners training is here to help. Find out how to set up your own site, learn the ins and outs of creating and maintaining it, and more. Soon you’ll be able to do it all by yourself!
So you’ve decided to start your own blog. Hooray! Before you start blogging away, you’ll have to take some steps, like setting up your own WordPress site. But there’s more to starting your own blog! Here, we’ll give you some more pointers on how to hit the ground running.
A purpose, niche, but don’t forget to have fun!
While years ago you’d follow blogs because of the person behind them, nowadays it’s all about answering people’s questions, a purpose for your blog and link building. Or that’s what it might look like. Don’t forget that blogging should be fun, as it is fun! There’s no such thing as too many blogs, as there’s no one like you. It’s cliche, but it’s the truth.
Before you start your blog, you need to decide whether you just want to write for fun or to help others and get high rankings. In the first case, you can start a personal lifestyle blog with everything you love. In the second case, you might need to find yourself a niche as this will increase your chance of ranking tremendously.
What to look for in a WordPress host? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of WordPress hosts. How to pick one that’s perfect for you? Check out this curated list of WordPress hosts that we’ve gathered, and consider the following aspects when making a decision.
Speed and stability
Are you going for a small travel blog? Or are you planning to cater to the clothing needs of half a country? Based on what you’re planning to do with your website, you should pick a host that has reliable uptime and keeps running during busy hours. Make sure they can provide a seamless way for you to grow. Because as you gather more daily visitors, you will need to upgrade your hosting at some point.
Accessibility and services
It is good to know if your host provides a support crew that is willing and able to help you with both your financial and technical questions. The following services might also be useful:
Alternative ways to access your data in case your WordPress website breaks.
A user‑friendly control panel that suits your needs.
The service to register and/or maintain domain names.
Security
Even if you don’t know much about the internet and security, you want your websites’ visitors to be safe. Go for a hosting provider that, at the very least, offers the following:
The option for a 1-click staging environment: this makes building and maintaining a site much easier.
Data retention and regulation protocols: based on your country’s laws, make sure you know where the data is stored and how it is handled.
Backup services: if something breaks, you will want to be able to restore it quickly.
A decent firewall (sometimes provided as an additional service, like CloudFlare).
3. How to get to the WordPress dashboard
The WordPress dashboard is the first thing you see when you log into WordPress. From there, you see an overview of various dashboard widgets with relevant information. For instance, our Yoast SEO dashboard widget gives you a quick overview of the SEO health of your site.
But if you’ve never logged into your WordPress dashboard before, finding it can be a little tricky. When you installed WordPress, you were guided into the WordPress dashboard automagically after the installation process. However, if you haven’t saved the URL of your WordPress dashboard, logging back in is not that easy.
Luckily, there’s a solution that works for all WordPress sites. When you add /login/ or /admin/ to the URL of your site, you will be sent to the login screen. Upon logging in, you’ll be sent to your WordPress dashboard. So what does that look like? If your domain, for example, is everydayimtravelling.com, the login URL would become everydayimtravelling.com/admin/ and this will prompt you with the login screen. For future convenience, bookmark that page as soon as you’re logged in so you’ll even have a quicker way to log in.
4. How to install and activate a WordPress theme
A theme governs the layout of your WordPress site. That includes, among other things, the appearance of your posts and pages, and the location of the menus and sidebars. Not surprisingly, finding the right theme is quite important for your website as it makes your site stand out from the masses. But, with so many choices out there, that may be harder than it seems. So, make sure to spend some time and effort and choose the best WordPress theme for your site.
Once you have chosen a theme, installing and activating it is easy. There are two ways to install a new theme in WordPress.
A. Installing a theme from the WordPress directory:
You can install a theme from the WordPress repository. In addition, it is also possible to buy premium themes from a variety of sellers. To install and activate a theme, follow these steps or check out the free WordPress for beginners course.
Open the Themes overview screen In the admin menu in your WordPress Backend, click on Appearance, then Themes. The Themes overview screen will open.
Click the Add New button or the Add New Theme area At the top of the screen, you’ll find the Add new button. Alternatively, in the themes overview area, there is an Add New Theme square. Click on either one, to open the screen with available themes.
Preview the theme Before you install a theme, it is a good idea to see how it looks on your site. You can do this by hitting the Preview button. Note, this is not an exact match of your site, but it does give you a really good idea if the theme fits your goals.
Install the theme Hover over the theme you want to use and click Install. The Install button will transform into an Activate button.
Activate the theme Click the Activate button. The theme will be activated, and it will change the appearance of your website.
Go check what your site looks like on the front end!
B. Upload a theme
You can also add a theme that you’ve downloaded from outside the WordPress directory, this could be from one of the many online theme shops out there. The theme will have to be in a .zip format! To install and activate it, follow these steps or check out the free WordPress for beginners training.
In the Themes overview screen, click Add New Once you have accessed the Themes overview screen through the admin menu, you’ll see the Add New button at the top of the screen as well as the Add New Theme square in the area below. Click either one to open the screen with available themes.
Click the upload theme button At the top of the screen with available themes is the Upload Theme button. Click the button. You’ll see the new option to upload a .zip file.
Click the Choose file button Once you click the button, a dialogue box will appear, that will allow you to choose files from your computer. Find and select the .zip file that you previously downloaded.
Install the theme Click the Install Now button. Your theme will be installed and added to your themes overview.
Activate the theme In the themes overview screen, hover over the theme, and click Activate. The theme will activate, and it will change the appearance of your website.
Go check what your site looks like on the front end
Plugins can change or improve the functionality of your site in various ways. As a WordPress user, you’ll surely need to install a plugin at some point. How do you do that? Easy. You can do it in two ways. Either install a plugin from the WordPress plugin directory or upload a plugin you have downloaded from a third-party. Please note that only free and approved plugins are featured in the WordPress plugin directory.
A. Install a plugin from the WordPress directory
Let’s start by installing a plugin from the WordPress directory. Just follow these simple steps:
Access the WordPress plugin directory In the WordPress backend, go to the admin menu. Hover over the Plugins menu item, and select Add New from the fly-out menu. The WordPress plugin directory will appear.
Find the plugin you want Use the filter tabs in the toolbar, or search for plugins by typing in a keyword, author, or tag in the search box.
Check the quality of the plugin Each plugin is featured in a box with basic information. A good quality plugin will have good reviews, a high number of active installations, frequent updates, and it will be compatible with your version of WordPress.
Install the plugin Click the Install Now button in the plugin box. Once the installation is complete, the Activate button will replace the Install button. In addition, the plugin will appear on the Installed Plugins screen.
Activate the plugin Clicking Activate is crucial for the plugin to work. You can activate the plugin in the plugin box by clicking the Activate button when the installation is complete. Alternatively, you can click the Activate link in the Plugins overview screen.
B. Upload a plugin
The WordPress plugin directory has a lot of plugins, but it does not have all of them. You can also find some cool plugins on third-party sites like, for example, Yoast SEO Premium. But no worries, you can still easily add these plugins to WordPress. To upload a plugin to WordPress, follow these steps:
Download the plugin from the third-party site Note that you will need to download the plugin in a .zip format. Otherwise, the upload may fail. If the plugin is not available for download in that format, contact the plugin provider.
Access the WordPress plugin directory In your backend, go to the admin menu. Hover over the Plugins menu item, and select. Add New from the fly-out menu. The WordPress plugin directory will appear.
Upload the plugin In the WordPress plugin directory, click the Upload Plugin button at the top of the screen. A new option will appear to add a file. Click the Choose file button, which will trigger a dialogue box to open. Find and select the file from your computer and click Open.
Install the plugin Click the Install Now button, and the plugin will be installed.
Activate the plugin Remember, you always need to activate a plugin after installing it. Go to your plugins overview, locate the plugin, and click the Activate link.
6. How to change the site title in WordPress
Setting your site title is an important step when creating your website. Your site title is the name that will show up at the top of the browser window, in bookmarks, and when people share your site on social media or via messaging apps.
To set your site title, select Appearance > Customize from your admin dashboard menu.
This will open the Customizer, which offers a lot of options to customize your site — as you may have guessed from the name. The option we need is right at the top, under Site identity > Site title.
Enter the name you have chosen for your website, and if possible, try to keep it short. You’ll want to have plenty of space left in the search results to also display the title of your post or page. You can learn about why titles are important here.
And, while you’re there, make sure that you change your site’s favicon, which is called a site icon in WordPress. Find out how to do this in our step-by-step guide on changing your favicon.
7. How to add a page to WordPress
Pages form the backbone of your site structure. Naturally, it is quite important to know how to add a page in WordPress. Luckily, it’s quite easy. Just follow our instructions, and you’ll be adding pages to your WordPress site in no time.
Access the Page editing screen To access the page editing screen, hover over the Pages menu item in the Admin menu and choose the Add New tab from the flyout menu.
Add a title In the editing screen, you will see a block with the text Add title. Add the title of your page there. Click enter to create a new block.
Add content Add the content of your page by choosing the appropriate block. If you want to add text, choose the Paragraph block. To add a subheading, choose the Heading block. Choose an appropriate new block for each new type of content you want to add. For example, add an Image block for an image, or a Video block to add a video to your page.
Preview the page When you’re done adding content to the page in the editor, we’d advise previewing what the page will look like on your site. To do that, click the Preview button in the top right corner of the screen.
Publish the page When you’re satisfied with the preview, all you need to do is click on the Publish button. Your page will be published.
You might think deleting a page from your site is as easy as just hitting that delete button. But with deleting a page, you’ll also delete one or more URLs. This usually results in a ‘404 not found’ error… Which isn’t great, neither for visitors, nor Google.
So, think before you delete a page. You have two valid options after deleting a page: redirecting it to another page or showing search engine spiders a 410 header, which indicates the page is deleted intentionally. Redirecting a deleted page is the best choice when you have other content on your site that is similar to the deleted content. The goal still is to provide the user with the information he or she was looking for. If there’s no other page that answers the user’s question, you need to decide if you want to improve the existing page or show a 410 header instead. You can set such a header in code, but it’s much easier to do with one of the many redirect plugins for WordPress.
Redirect a page There are different kinds of redirects, but a 301 redirect is what you should use when you redirect the deleted page to another one. This redirect, called a permanent redirect, makes sure the link value of the old page will be assigned to the new URL. You can redirect posts or pages easily with the Yoast SEO redirect manager, as it will ask you what to do with a URL when you delete a page. Just enter the replacing URL and you’re done!
Show a 410 Content deleted header Is there no other page on your site that will give the reader the information he or she is looking for? Then it’s better to delete or improve that page. In case of deleting, you’ll need to send a ‘410 content deleted’ header. By using this HTTP status code, you’ll let Google know that you removed the URL on purpose and that Google can remove the URL from its index faster. In the Yoast SEO redirect manager, you can also choose the option to show a ‘410 content deleted’ page after you’ve deleted a page.
9. How to change the font size in WordPress
What if the WordPress theme you’ve chosen is perfect — except for one little thing? The font size is just a little bit off. Do you need to find yourself a completely new theme because of this? Of course not! Changing the font size in your WordPress theme is relatively easy, but it does involve a little bit of CSS coding. We’ll help you! These are the steps you need to take to change the font size in WordPress:
First, you’ll have to identify what the current font size is. You can do this by opening the Inspector of your browser. When you right-click on the text you’d like to see in a different font size, you’ll be greeted with a menu that will have a direct link to your browser inspector tool. They look different from browser to browser, but they all work in a similar fashion. In Chrome, the menu item is called Inspect and in Firefox Inspect Element. Go ahead and click on that.
Next up is finding the relevant CSS code that dictates the current font size. You’ll be looking for a section inside the Inspector you’ve just activated on the right-hand side of the screen called Styles.
Below that, you’ll see lines of code that match the element you’ve clicked on. You’ll see a line that has something like font-size: 14px or font-size: 1rem.
You can manually change the value of that line of code to, for instance, font-size: 16px. You’ll immediately see that change reflected in the open screen of your website. This is how you can check which value works best for you.
Once you’ve made up your mind on what you’d like to change it to, it’s time to write that down. You’ll also have to save the CSS element in which you changed the value. Most of the time this will be either a p or an h2 or h2 if you’ve selected a title.
You’ll need to entire CSS code snippet for our next step, but it will look like something like this: p {font-size: 16px;}
The next step is to navigate to your WordPress dashboard and find the Customize menu option inside the Appearance menu.
Click that and you’ll see a preview of your site on the right-hand side of your screen and a menu on the left-hand side. Inside this menu, you’ll find the Additional CSS menu.
Click on that menu option and you’ll see an input field. Here, you can paste the CSS snippet you saved earlier. As soon as you’ve pasted it, you’ll see the effects reflected on the right-hand side of your screen.
If it has the desired effect, go ahead and save your settings by clicking the Publish button inside the Customizer section. Afterwards, you click on the plus ( + ) sign in the top left-hand side of the Customizer to close the customizer screen. That’s it — you’ve now successfully changed the font size of your WordPress site.
10. How to add a footer
Many themes have a so-called footer. The footer at the bottom of your pages is a good location to add some links to the less prominent content on your site, such as your address and contact information, terms of service and privacy policy. Not every theme has one, and the ones that do, often have different ways of activating and filling the footer. The Genesis theme, for instance, uses the Customizer settings to get this done, while other themes have a different setting for it. So, you best look around in the settings to find it. Here’s one of the most used ways of adding a footer to your theme.
Go to Appearance > Widgets from your admin dashboard.
On the left of this page are widgets that you can add to various places in your site’s theme. Those locations are listed on the right.
Find the widget that you want to add, and drag it to the location called “Footer”.
That’s it!
11. How to embed Youtube videos in WordPress
To really engage your audience, making your content visually appealing is key. One of the easiest ways to do this is by adding some images, or even a video. Embedding video hasn’t always been easy, but thanks to the block editor in WordPress 5.0, it is now! When you are editing a post or a page on your site, here’s how to do it:
Go to Youtube and find the video you want to add to your content.
Click the Share icon and copy the URL it displays.
Open the post or page on your site you want to add the video to.
Press the + icon where you want the video to appear to add a new block.
Paste the URL of the Youtube video, and it should automatically convert to an embedded video!
If you want, you can change the styling of the video to make it stand out.
12. How to do SEO on WordPress
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your site and content to reach a high position in the search results of Google or other search engines. WordPress itself is already pretty SEO-friendly, but it still pays off to do WordPress SEO. Let’s look at a few important SEO aspects.
An important first step to take when optimizing your WordPress site, is to make sure everything ‘under the hood’ of your website is in good shape. Technical SEO encompasses many things, such as:
At Yoast, we believe in holistic SEO: ranking by being the best result. That’s why, in our opinion, flawless user experience (UX) should be part of your SEO strategy. We also believe that websites should be usable for everyone, which is why accessibility matters.
There are also outside factors that affect your (WordPress) SEO, such as link building, social media, and local SEO. We call this off-page SEO. While it can take some effort, working on this aspect of SEO for your WordPress site is also part of a holistic SEO strategy.
Yoast SEO
As you can see, there are several sides of SEO, and it’s a lot of work to keep everything on track. Luckily, the Yoast plugin will help you work on many aspects, from site structure to content optimization to technical settings. That’s why every website needs Yoast SEO!
(@delans) 
