How to improve SEO on a WordPress.com site…

skellermwd1 · Member · May 29, 2015 at 11:35 pm
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Do I need to use, or buy something like a 301 Redirect for a WordPress.com site, which already has the Premium upgrade package and a custom domain? I have a client who has been approached by a guy claiming to be an SEO expert, who says he can “undoing the damage that has been done to the search engine rankings for FishingOregon.net.”

I think he is off-base, because WP.com is supposed to do about 80 – 90% of necessary SEO, but I am curious what WP.com would advise about how to deal with such offers.

Thanks,

Steve Keller

The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
lizthefair · Member · May 31, 2015 at 5:17 pm
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He’s off base. If your client has a custom domain mapped to a WordPress.com site, he doesn’t need anything else to make the domain work correctly for SEO purposes.
auxclass · Member · May 31, 2015 at 5:53 pm
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I get those left in the comments section all the time, I send them to spam. I have also had them sent to me via email, I don’t bother to reply.

They are a scam –

See below for SEO ideas, one secret is to make sure you have lots of Posts and mention the areas your client fishes and what fish – Posts are good.

How long ago did he bring over the custom domain name?

That can cause a bit of a drop in search traffic for a short time as search engines get use to the new name and or content

Search Engines and Building Traffic

http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/seo-on-wordpress-com/
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/seo-and-your-blog/

The folks at WordPress.com have written an e-book about it! http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/grow-traffic-ebook/
skellermwd1 · Member · May 31, 2015 at 5:53 pm
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Liz,
Thanks for responding and for reassuring me about WP.com. I’d really appreciate it if you could give a quick look at his points, and tell me how I would remove old cached pages from Google, using 301 Redirect vs. the manual route I used yesterday (that seems to have worked, except on a page where I altered the slug, from “larrys blog” to “larry pages blog”-http://tinyurl.com/nlxpx4l).

Here is the pared-down text…
“First, the 301 redirects that you failed to perform when “re-designing” Larry’s source of income, are not “taken care of” by WordPress. It actually takes some knowledge about how search engines work to realize the extent of damage that you have carelessly done with your hack job of copy and paste website (how many times are you going to reuse that tired Twenty Ten theme)?.

The link below is a screen cast of a Google search for all of the indexed pages of the FishingOregon site.

http://www.screencast.com/t/F05yuxYPl

You\’ll notice that the top results after the home page result in a error page – Google thinks the page is still there, but it’s not, because you didn’t do a 301 redirect. That kills search engine rankings, period.

Thanks,
Steve
auxclass · Member · May 31, 2015 at 6:07 pm
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it looks like you change some page names from the old site to the new site, the type was a bit small for my old tired eyes. but if you changed the page names you should expect trouble for a while, can you put the old page names back in some way?

There is no access to individual single page 301 redirects for pages from an outside site, sorry – that was an issue when I moved here from a site with a non-standard directory structure and different permalinks

Yes it would be nice if there was access to the httaccess file to do individual redirects and show that directories no longer exist here
skellermwd1 · Member · May 31, 2015 at 6:10 pm
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Note that the guy pulled up the old Google pages, about 7 of which I manually removed on Google Analytics, or WM Tools, by using “site:fishingoregon.net” and I think that is why the cached pages were accessed. Last query…if a WP.com site has Webmaster Tools and Analytics hooked up, the only info that Analytics generates is from WM Tools, correct? I realize that is another question, so I can open a new topic…

Auxclass– we moved fishingoregon.net to the site I set up on WP.com back in the first week of March, so it has been about 3 months. I recommended a site address change, to something more closely related to the name of the business, but the client thought he would be damaging biz to do so. I didn’t say that any hits on the old name would be redirected to the new site title…maybe I should have.

Thanks to both of you.

Steve
skellermwd1 · Member · May 31, 2015 at 7:26 pm
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Sorry for the confusing sign-off on the previous post, because I could still use a little input, if you guys have a moment in the next day or so.

Auxclass…I wish the SEO criticism I got had just been spam, but it was from a guy trying to nose his way into the account, by offering to collaborate on SEO matters, when he really just wants to steal the account.

Steve
lizthefair · Member · Jun 1, 2015 at 2:20 pm
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Thanks for the extra info. I misunderstood what the situation was. I thought you had an existing WordPress.com site and had added a custom domain. In that case the URL changes would have been seamless. If you had exported from a self hosted WordPress site and imported into the new site, you also wouldn’t have problems.

Based on where we are now, the only way to fix the broken pages is to create new pages that match the URLs of the old ones. A regular Google search for fishingoregon.net turns up two pages that end in the page not found error.

http://fishingoregon.net/fishing-steelhead.htm
http://fishingoregon.net/fishing-guide.htm

If you fix those two by creating pages that match, you’ll do a lot to mitigate any problems while Google catches up.

As for the 301 redirect plan, as auxclass points out, single page 301 redirects aren’t possible on WordPress.com.
skellermwd1 · Member · Jun 1, 2015 at 4:52 pm
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Hey Liz,

I hope you get this this morning, so I can put this to rest. On the first matter, your first impression was correct…I did build a site on WP.com, and then moved an existing “custom” domain. The urls that yield error/broken pages are urls cached from the former site, or from earlier page titles, which I changed, or edited. There are many more than the two you caught, and many more than I initially thought. I do not want to create pages that match all the old/dead urls, but rather remove those…en masse would be preferable to usig the Webmaster Tools “Remove URLs” function on each one.

Is there a role for the robots.txt Tester in this, which might expedite things? The fact that these random error pages come up when older, nonfunctional urls are used does not affect SEO for the site, does it?

Thanks,

Steve
auxclass · Member · Jun 1, 2015 at 5:49 pm
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The bad news is that we don’t have access to the robots.txt file to exclude things like directories / folders – it has been a sore spot with me since I moved my main site here in 2010 and I first suggested limited access to the robots.txt file to exclude things, I think it could be done without too much of a problem

What about making new pages that match the old page, then have a single line & link “The content has moved to xxx.xxx”
lizthefair · Member · Jun 1, 2015 at 7:03 pm
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The urls that yield error/broken pages are urls cached from the former site, or from earlier page titles, which I changed, or edited.

‘
Because you used the same domain name, Google thinks the new site and the old site are the same. I recommended you fix the two pages in question because those are showing up prominently on this page

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=fishingoregon.net

I do not want to create pages that match all the old/dead urls, but rather remove those…en masse would be preferable to usig the Webmaster Tools “Remove URLs” function on each one.

There is not a WordPress.com function that lets you do this process in en masse.

The fact that these random error pages come up when older, nonfunctional urls are used does not affect SEO for the site, does it?

Google doesn’t like to see broken links, so the situation isn’t great for SEO.
skellermwd1 · Member · Jun 1, 2015 at 8:15 pm
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Hey Liz,

So, what to do when google produces different versions of urls, like with http://www., http://, and/or https://? Is there an efficient way to have different variations land on the target page?

For example…
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:fishingoregon.net&num=30&biw=948&bih=568&ei=97dsVZOXKIm0ogTT2oFQ&start=0&sa=N

Thanks for your help on this!

Steve
lizthefair · Member · Jun 2, 2015 at 1:43 pm
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Urls starting with http, https and www should all redirect correctly to the right page on your new site. If you have a specific example of a link that isn’t forwarding correctly, please let me know.

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