Lack of SEO Capabilities… Robots.txt, for one
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Having some difficulty using this platform for an actual business.
I don’t have any access to real SEO capabilities even at the Business account level. We have a lot of 404s that need to be redirected but, nope, can’t do that. A lot of our directories have uneditable meta descriptions. All of the internal traffic from our admins gets counted in the traffic on WordPress… what the hell.
Are we missing something? Are there ways to actually do these things or is this platform – the #1 Platform for Bloggers – really that limiting?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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As long as Admin users are logged in to their account, no stats are being counted for those users on a Public site. They will be counted on a site whose privacy settings are Private. https://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/#additional-info
If you are on the Business plan upgrade, you have access to several additional SEO tools including adding meta tags to your site, posts and pages. Here’s more on that: https://en.support.wordpress.com/seo-tools/ If you are using those tools and have specific issues on specific pages, please give us a detailed description of the problem.
Concerning redirecting 404’s it is not possible using htaccess because we users do not have access to it.
However, please be patient for Staff to reply to your questions as this thread has also been tagged for their attention. As a Business plan user, you also have access to live chat when you are logged in to the account that purchased the upgrade. https://en.support.wordpress.com/live-chat/
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Hi there,
@justjennifer has already given you a link to our SEO tools support document. There is also a video course on SEO on WordPress.com that you can view here:
https://wordpress.com/help/courses
We have a lot of 404s that need to be redirected
On WordPress.com, if you delete anything, that link is going to cause a 404, as it’s not possible to add internal redirects on a WordPress.com site. For that type of functionality you need to use the self-hosted open source WordPress software instead.
A lot of our directories have uneditable meta descriptions.
Can you please be more specific? Are you referring to pages? Author archives? Category archives?
For posts and pages the post/page excerpt should be used for meta data. For categories and tags, you can set a description text when you edit the category/tag in WP-Admin that should be used, and all other links on your site will use either the tagline, or the custom meta description set under My Site ->Settings ->SEO.
You can edit categories and tags here:
https://sttechdotblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category
All of the internal traffic from our admins gets counted in the traffic on WordPress
As @justjennifer said, views by logged in admins on a public site are not counted. If they view your site while logged out, however, we have no way of knowing that they are admins and should be excluded.
Your Business Plan also allows you to use Google Analytics on your site, and there you can set up filters based on IP address and other criteria to exclude certain views. You can find instructions how to install Google Analytics here:
Are we missing something? Are there ways to actually do these things or is this platform – the #1 Platform for Bloggers – really that limiting?
I understand that you’d like to have more granular control over this, but WordPress.com is intended for users who want a website without having to worry over all the technical little details. And there are many actual businesses included among those users. Even without the granular SEO tools WordPress.com has some of the best SEO on the web, and all else being equal sites hosted with us consistently outperform sites using plugins like Yoast and All in one SEO and others of that kind.
In the end, the quality of your content has an exponentially bigger impact on your SEO than meta tags and key words and all the other stuff. You can do everything “right” in SEO, if people don’t read and link to your content, you won’t appear at the top of search results.
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