WordPress is such a popular Content Management System that it now powers up to 30 percent of all the websites existing over the Internet. Its popularity as a seamlessly easy-to-use website builder has made it the first choice of inexperienced and non-technical users who want to build their own websites through it.
To top it all, the amazing SEO plugins such as the Yoast SEO and the All-in-One SEO plugin have made it tremendously easy for new users to take care of their website’s SEO. However, the entire journey of handling a website is not a cakewalk, even with WordPress. There are always certain elements that will break havoc onto your site and make things go haywire. So, what are such issues that negatively affect a WordPress site’s SEO even when everything else is in place?
Let’s find out through this blog post where we talk about the most common WordPress errors that negatively affect our site’s SEO.
500 Internal Server Error
Definition: A very general HTTP status code, the 500 Internal Server Error is an indication of an unclear trouble with the website’s server. When the server can’t offer more specific information, it displays the 500 Internal Server Error.
How it affects the site’s SEO: If this error becomes a frequent one on your website, it will affect the reputation of your site for the visitors as well as the Search Engines It can eventually lead to a poor website experience for the users because obviously, no one wants to deal with a website that frequently displays errors.
404 Not Found
A failure to find the requested resource even after communicating with the server results in the 404 status code appear on the website. Visiting a web page that doesn’t exist returns this error to the user. They might not be a technical SEO problem but it is a Client-side Error which can affect the traffic on your website and even damage the reputation of your website. They create a poor experience on your site and can hurt your SEO in the long run.
404 Errors
These fall into the category of errors that don’t impact your WordPress site’s SEO directly but can affect the link equity and user experience over time on the website. These errors show up when there is no matching URL i.e. the content is not found or is unavailable. There are several kinds of 404 errors such as external 404s, Outgoing 404s, and Internal 404s.
If your website is returning these errors, you can try getting rid of them with the help of the Screaming Frog tool. Search Engines look at 404s in a manner that it helps them ascertain if the website is meeting the criteria and is taken care of. A User-Experience killer, 404 errors can decline the search clicks and eventually affect the site’s SEO.
Crawl Errors
Crawl errors do what they say. When your website fails at letting the Search engines bots crawl it i.e. visit each page of the website; this error occurs. Divided into two, these crawl errors are Site errors and URL errors i.e. when the entire site can’t be crawled and when a specific URL fails to be crawled, respectively. These errors do affect the ranking of your website as the bots are unable to crawl them and rank them.
502 Bad Gateway
Causing a little impact on the SEO, the 502 Bad Gateway error is returned when one server receives a bad response from another server. Also might be caused by your network, prompting your browser to think that something is wrong. But, always look out for the error.
504 Gateway Timeout
Fairly impacting the SEO of your site, this error happens when a Server doesn’t get a timely response from another server while trying to send you the page you requested or due to the corrupt databases.
Some tips to keep the errors in check:
- Always check the code in the validator.
- Never disallow search engines to index your site through CMS.
- Always allow your website to be indexed in .htaccess.
- Keep checking your site’s URL at regular intervals so that you can find and fix issues swiftly.
- Always submit the site’s sitemaps to Google Search Console so that your website is not left out from search engines recognizing your sitemaps.
Bonus tips to take care of your WordPress website:
- Always make sure that your website’s loading speed is taken care of and that your website load within 2 seconds from the time the request is made. Have a look at the WordPress speed optimization guide to take care of this aspect. And you need to choose a reliable and competent web hosting provider to take care of your site’s server.
- You can also implement caching on your website to help the website load faster and enhance its user-experience, resulting in better SEO rankings.
- Your site’s design can also kill its rankings and SEO. A minimal, responsive, and mobile-friendly design and improve its overall user experience, driving in more traffic and leads.
- Never ignore WordPress tags if you want to play well when it comes to your WordPress site’s SEO. These tags help the readers and visitors easily find your website and ts articles in the search engine result pages.
- Optimizing the images on the site is quite an untapped SEO move for website owners that can help them improve the SEO of their website.
- The choice of the right themes and plugins can largely impact the appearance and performance of your website that play quite a decisive factor when it comes to the SEO of your website.
Conclusion
There are yet a lot of errors that can pop up on your website and affect the SEO of your WordPress website. It is important to keep them in check and negate their effect as and when they seem to surface. Only by keeping an eye on them and keeping your website together, you can run your WordPress website efficiently and smoothly.
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