Problems with external links

  • Unknown's avatar
    taxiarchis89 · Member ·

    Hi all, sorry I am new to wordpress.

    I am trying to perform some SEO to my website gen89gamer.com. After crawling with seobility, it says that there are problems with external links and as I can see there are a lot of redirects to and from gen89gamer.wordpress.com, gravatar.com and wp.com (shortlinks i presume?).

    I currently have 2 domains, 1 is gen89gamer.com (set as primary) and the other is gen89gamer.wordrpess.com

    How can this be fixed without a plug in?

    WP.com: Yes
    Jetpack: No
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    I’m not familiar with Seobility but it’s been our experience that tools like these can be overly sensitive about links like these, which in practice are not things that search engines attach a lot of importance to. They’re great for getting the nth degree of optimization out of your site, but tend to be optimized for SEO professionals working with custom-coded sites. They often don’t consider specific software platforms, like WordPress.com, or tools required to keep your site looking and running well.

    For example, Google PageSpeed Insights often recommends removing render-blocking Javascript and CSS. However, doing so would have a minimal impact on speed and prevent your site from looking and functioning correctly.

    I can see there are a lot of redirects to and from gen89gamer.wordpress.com, gravatar.com and wp.com (shortlinks i presume?)

    You are correct that these links are built into our hosting (Gravatar is our service for serving and displaying profile avatars for comments and author pages, for example) and they can’t be easily changed. If you wish you can upgrade to our Business Plan so that you can install plugins, access site source code via SFTP, as well as access our advanced SEO tools that come with that plan.

    That said though, I’m not sure it’s necessary in this case, sites on WordPress.com enjoy excellent SEO since our code is well organized and set up so search engines can crawl it easily. Even thought it’s rare for two WordPress sites to look alike, under the surface the millions of sites we host are very consistent and optimized for search. It is not uncommon for free sites to rank very well in search even if the author of the site is unaware of SEO principals, so as long as you are publishing interesting content that people want to read, you’re headed in the right direction!

    You seem to be on a good roll with regular posts on your site so far, so kudos there!

    If you’re interested, we do have a free self-guided SEO course that is specific to WordPress and might be a good place to start with your optimizing your site, and specifically optimizing how you (as site author) write and publish content so it is also fully optimized. https://wordpress.com/learn/courses/intro-to-seo/

    Also we had a webinar recently on how to do keyword research using free tools, and it’s a really nice way demystify that process, which is critical for showing up for things that people are actually searching for. You can catch the recording on our YouTube channel, it’s a good session. :)

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.

  • The topic ‘Problems with external links’ is closed to new replies.