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I haven’t been paying much attention to on-page SEO lately but over the last few days, I had to do a whole lot of cleanup and it was then I realized there were so many issues I left untouched. I love Genesis theme framework and I must say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me since I moved to WordPress. Perhaps you’re a regular blogger or a web designer, Genesis does make life easy for you. I stopped using WordPress SEO by Yoast a while ago and imported the settings to Genesis. I figured out I didn’t need an SEO plugin since my theme has that feature and then, doing away with SEO plugins is one of the most effective ways to reduce resource usage on WordPress.
Anyway, I’ve been using Genesis SEO for over a year now but there are certain things I hope gets fixed by the time Genesis 2.0 gets released. Genesis makes sure your tags, categories and archive pages can’t be indexed but there are still some pages that shouldn’t get indexed appearing on search.
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I would only want to have the homepage, posts and pages indexed but a search for site:doncaprio.com showed me I’ve got so many unwanted pages all over Google which isn’t a good thing.
The Regular Genesis SEO Settings
Here is a screenshot that should give you an idea on how to make the settings work best for you. Of course, there’s a comprehensive documentation over there at StudioPress that lets you get it right but if all you is a graphical guide on how to set it, the screenshot below that shows how I did mine may be useful for you:
But despite the settings above, there are still two major issues Genesis SEO couldn’t fix.
Issue #1: Homepage Pagination
I logged in to Google Webmaster Tools and I was told I’ve got over 100 duplicate meta descriptions on my site. That definitely doesn’t sound like a good thing though some people wouldn’t worry about it. The homepage is paginated and it’s like:
www.doncaprio.com
www.doncaprio.com/page/2
www.doncaprio.com/page/3
www.doncaprio.com/page/4
All these pages are indexed and they all share the same meta description and meta keywords. Though it may sound arguable but I believe this can hurt your ranking in some ways because of duplicate content, especially if you don’t enable excerpts. Right from Page 2, the rest shouldn’t have been indexed in the first place but Genesis didn’t fix this.
What you have to do to solve this is simple:
a. Add noindex meta tag to those pages
To get this done, install Genesis Hooks plugin and go to Genesis > Genesis Hooks. Paste this code in wp_head hook:
<?php if (get_query_var('paged')) {?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>
<?php }?>
<?php }?>
Be sure to mark “Execute PHP on this hook.” This adds a noindex tag to the paginated pages but your homepage is still indexed.
b. Remove those pages from Google search
It’s gonna take a while before Google finally removes those pages from search but you can go ahead and make a URL removal request from Google Webmaster Tools. Log in to GWT, go to Google Index > Remove URLs.
Request to remove your /page directory and these useless pages will disappear from SERP within a day 0r two.
Issue #2: Attachment Pages
Here is another issue that should be fixed if you have your attachment pages getting indexed. This generates loads of pages with little or no content and believe me, Google doesn’t like this. To fix this, here is what you need to do:
Fix: Adding a 301 redirect to all attachment pages.
A 301 redirect tells Googlebot the page has been permanently moved to the post page and this plugin effectively handles that; there’s no need to edit anything on this one. This may take a while to get removed from search but as soon as Googlebot detects a 301 redirect on those pages, they should be removed from search.
Fixing this with URL removal request in Google Webmaster Tools?
I tried doing this like the first issues mentioned in this article through URL removal request in Google Webmaster Tools but the removal type was seen a Site Removal instead of Web Page Removal. I guess it’s because of the URL structure (https://www.doncaprio.com/?attachment_id=4546) and I had to cancel it and just wait till Google removes it automatically which should be a matter of weeks. Don’t want to create any indexing problems.
You should be able to do it through URL parameter handling by going to Crawl > URL parameters and telling Googlebot not to index URLs containing ?attachment_id.
Anyway, let’s hope Genesis fixes in the next release this since Yoast provides these settings and can be changed easily without editing codes or installing extra plugins.