SEO-related questions
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I have a couple SEO related questions:
1. When I Fetch a page as Google in my WMT account, it says that the page has been “redirected” (even though it does submit the page to index). Is there a reason for this?
2. Why won’t Google’s data highlighter (in WMT) work on my site? As I’m well aware, my WP blog does not support structured data (like Schema). It doesn’t seem to support data highlighting, either. When I try to data highlight a new page (for instance, this post: http://inharshlight.com/2014/12/08/vikings-season-1-2-review/), Google does not recognize my primary domain. Is it because my blog’s root URL is skavinger1984.wordpress.com? (I can provide screenshots if needs be).
3. Given that I don’t have access to my site’s source code, I can’t implement Google Analytics javascript into the master header file. Is there a way for you to do this on my behalf? Or is there a way to access the header file on my own?
UPDATE:
Sorry, I have one more question:
4. Why is my blog’s title (In Harsh Light) formatted as an H1 tag? The reason this is a problem for SEO is because the blog post titles are also formatted as H1 tags, so every post on my site has at least two H1 tags, which isn’t aligned with best SEO practices. Shouldn’t the blog-post titles be automatically formatted as H2 tags?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Regards,
Richard
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi Richard!
When I Fetch a page as Google in my WMT account, it says that the page has been “redirected” (even though it does submit the page to index). Is there a reason for this?
When we serve your site content, it’s from the *.wordpress.com version of your site and search engines read it as a redirect to your custom domain.
Like you mentioned, your custom domain still gets reindexed; but you’ll see that notice.
Essentially, Google reads your sites as two sites with the custom domain (the redirect) as the higher priority.
Why won’t Google’s data highlighter (in WMT) work on my site? As I’m well aware, my WP blog does not support structured data (like Schema). It doesn’t seem to support data highlighting, either. When I try to data highlight a new page (for instance, this post: http://inharshlight.com/2014/12/08/vikings-season-1-2-review/), Google does not recognize my primary domain. Is it because my blog’s root URL is skavinger1984.wordpress.com? (I can provide screenshots if needs be).
It would make sense that our setup of serving through wordpress.com and adding the custom domain on top that would cause this issue, but to be honest I’m finding it difficult to troubleshoot. If you could provide screenshots that would be much appreciated so I can have a developer take a look.
This forum doesn’t support attachments, so please just add the images to your media library and I’ll take a look.
Given that I don’t have access to my site’s source code, I can’t implement Google Analytics javascript into the master header file. Is there a way for you to do this on my behalf? Or is there a way to access the header file on my own?
WordPress.com does not currently support Google Analytics tracking. However, we do offer built-in statistics showing you most of the same types of information as Google Analytics would display. You can read more about what our stats measure here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/You can view your site’s stats here:
https://wordpress.com/my-stats/Why is my blog’s title (In Harsh Light) formatted as an H1 tag? The reason this is a problem for SEO is because the blog post titles are also formatted as H1 tags, so every post on my site has at least two H1 tags, which isn’t aligned with best SEO practices. Shouldn’t the blog-post titles be automatically formatted as H2 tags?
While the blog site title and the post title are both h1 tags, one is within a ‘header’ and one is within a ‘div’. We’ve seen no ill effects on SEO with this setup.
You could customize this programming with your own self-hosted site running the WordPress.org software.
Best,
-Alex G.
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Hi Alex, thanks for the thorough reply!
As requested, I uploaded two screenshots related to the data-highlighting redirect issue to my media library. The first is a screenshot of my Fetch as Google WMT page, where all submitted pages are redirected from the host domain (as you noted). The second screenshot shows the “start highlighting” pop-up window where my custom domain isn’t being recognized when I submit a page’s URL for highlighting. It seems like the redirect causes this; just wanted to pass the image along.
Thanks for the update on the H1 tags. I uploaded a third screenshot to my media library. A Chrome plug-in that I use, SEO Meta Inspector, reads every page/post that I publish live as containing two H1 tags. Of course, this is a third-party plug-in and I can’t be certain that it crawls pages like Google would, in terms of SEO signals.
Overall, I am planning to move my site to a self-hosted WP .ORG site, which could resolve the “redirect issue.” In SEO terms, if not I’m not mistaken, redirects sacrifice a small amount of link equity, but not 100% sure. My biggest concern is migrating my site to a whole new platform/template (likely by Theme Forest), which is a process that I’m not familiar with.
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Hi Richard!
Thanks for those screenshots. :)
The second screenshot shows the “start highlighting” pop-up window where my custom domain isn’t being recognized when I submit a page’s URL for highlighting. It seems like the redirect causes this; just wanted to pass the image along.
So actually the error appears to be that you’ve verified “www.inharshlight.com” but not “inharshlight.com” (without www) within WMT — then the link you submitted used inharshlight.com without www.
I’d recommend adding inharshlight.com, without www, as a verified site and you should then be able to data highlight without issue. (I just tried it out on one of my sites.)
This doesn’t require an additional WMT meta tag on your site, but you’ll need to go through their “add a site” protocol once more with just inharshlight.com, no www, to allow it to validate. WMT considers the two URLs to be completely separate, and then allows you to select your preference for how the URLS are listed in results as well.
The first is a screenshot of my Fetch as Google WMT page, where all submitted pages are redirected from the host domain (as you noted).
Now that I’m looking at these pages — thanks again for screenshots ;) — I believe this redirect notice is also pertaining to inharshlight.com vs. http://www.inharshlight.com . WMT considers the two uniquely different, but we host all custom domains on WordPress.com as the domain without WWW.
Thanks for the update on the H1 tags. I uploaded a third screenshot to my media library. A Chrome plug-in that I use, SEO Meta Inspector, reads every page/post that I publish live as containing two H1 tags. Of course, this is a third-party plug-in and I can’t be certain that it crawls pages like Google would, in terms of SEO signals.
If I were to build an SEO inspector, I’d likely include a similar search and make notice of it. Using multiple h1 tags within the same section definitely questions priority and could confuse a crawler, but given the header vs. div grouping distinction you will be fine. This inspector likely did not account for that grouping.
Of course if you start seeing search results where Post titles are showing up as Site titles please let me know and we can submit as an issue to the core WordPress project. Thusfar it’s not come up. :)
Overall, I am planning to move my site to a self-hosted WP .ORG site, which could resolve the “redirect issue.” In SEO terms, if not I’m not mistaken, redirects sacrifice a small amount of link equity, but not 100% sure. My biggest concern is migrating my site to a whole new platform/template (likely by Theme Forest), which is a process that I’m not familiar with.
If you’re concerned about the migration process, we do offer a Guided Transfer for a one time fee:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/guided-transfer/
But if you want to DIY it, the steps are outlined here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#moving-to-wordpress-org
Best,
-Alex G.
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Thanks Alex! Very in-depth response and extremely helpful :).
I went ahead and added/verified the non “www” version of my custom domain to GWMT and the data highlighter now works! I also set the non “www” WMT URL as the preferred domain. However, one point of confusion had to do with this:
This doesn’t require an additional WMT meta tag on your site, but you’ll need to go through their “add a site” protocol once more with just inharshlight.com, no www, to allow it to validate. WMT considers the two URLs to be completely separate, and then allows you to select your preference for how the URLS are listed in results as well.
In order to add the non “www”, it requires that I implement the meta tag via WP Admin (Tools >> Available Tools, etc.), and actually hit the Verify button in WMT. That is to say, only after switching out the meta tags (so to speak) in WP was I able to set the preferred domain in WMT and start using the data highlighter. I uploaded a screenshot of my two WMT accounts as a visual. According to one of WMT’s support pages:
You may need to verify ownership of both the www and non-www versions of your domain. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you’ve removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you’ll need to repeat the verification steps.
In terms of Redirects, even within the non “www” WMT account for my site, the Redirect issue still seems to occur when I fetch a page as Google (I uploaded a second screenshot to my media library as a visual).
Overall, I’m able to data highlight now so that’s great :).
Thank you for the Guided Transfer/Migration links. I’ll look into it! And yes, so far I think Google reads only one h1 on the page level since my listings display the page’s title in SERPs rather than the site title.
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Hey Alex,
Update: My mistake, I wasn’t submitted the URL extensions correctly in WMT, which is why they were Redirecting. Sorry for the confusion there.
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Hi Richard,
In order to add the non “www”, it requires that I implement the meta tag via WP Admin (Tools >> Available Tools, etc.), and actually hit the Verify button in WMT. That is to say, only after switching out the meta tags (so to speak) in WP was I able to set the preferred domain in WMT and start using the data highlighter.
In my previous experiences in WMT, the meta-tag was the same code for both a www and non-www version of a domain so long as you were using the same WMT account. I apologize if Google has changed that in the meantime, if that was the case then yes I suppose you’d need to change the meta-tag’s content within WordPress.com for the verification process.
As the support doc you mention states, you can typically verify using the same method — by this we mean you can normally click Verify via meta tag without having to change the meta tag, assuming it was not modified on WordPress between when you verify the www version and non-version of the URL.
Update: My mistake, I wasn’t submitted the URL extensions correctly in WMT, which is why they were Redirecting. Sorry for the confusion there.
Glad you were able to clear it up. :)
Please let me know if you find further issues.
Best,
-Alex G.
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