66. Indexing and Canonical URLs

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Do you see the advanced menu in your SEO plugin and stay far away? There are a couple of things in this menu you might wanna use. Let's chat about them. Welcome back to the podcast. We are continuing our discussion of some of those check boxes and fields in the SEO plugins that we use that we tend to just overlook.

[00:00:35] We've talked about the search appearance section of Yoast. We've talked about cornerstone content, and this week we're gonna be talking about two things actually, but they are both found in the advanced section, which, you know, we tend to avoid that section because by golly, we don't feel like we're ready for the advanced section at all.

[00:00:57] Let's dive into the episode with an analogy. I want you to think back to your days of writing research papers in high school or college. You likely started the process with a brainstorm or pre-write of some kind where you just dumped all of your ideas and tried to make sense of your thoughts. And then that brainstorm slowly turned into a rough draft that you might have submitted to your teacher

[00:01:23] or shared with a peer for just a quick once over. And then you likely took that feedback and typed up your first copy to turn in. And then depending on your instructor, they might have had some edits that you needed to take care of before submitting that final edited copy. Back when I was in school, we were often asked to attach our rough drafts and previous copies so that

[00:01:52] they could see how we adjusted our papers based on feedback during the writing process. It was important to show, yes, we accepted feedback, yes, we made changes. And so if you ever had an assignment like this, you likely wouldn't have submitted your final copy and just a disorganized pile of drafts.

[00:02:11] Instead, you likely arranged the drafts in chronological order with the most important version, that final copy, on top. Because one of those papers was definitely more important than all of the others. And so you're doing a similar thing when you take care of SEO tasks on your blog post. You're making sure that Google understands what is most important on your website.

[00:02:40] You're putting that at the top. So last week we talked about doing that with cornerstone content. You are linking back to that post from every related post on your website. You're showing how important that piece of content is by linking to it. And so this week we're going to talk about two more things that you can do to help Google prioritize your content in the indexing process.

[00:03:07] And these are both found in the advanced section of the Yoast plugin. Now, if you're anything like me, when I was just starting out with SEO, you likely didn't even open that menu, so we're gonna take a deep breath and dip our toe into these features because it's important to know what they mean. The first thing I wanted to talk about is the canonical URL.

[00:03:30] In the Yoast plugin there is a field where you can put a URL that tells Google where to find the most recent version of a piece of content. So in our analogy, you put the version on top that you want your teacher to grade. You also place the other drafts below so you don't get in trouble for not adjusting your paper based on peer or teacher feedback.

[00:03:55] You also don't want to get in trouble with Google. When you have multiple posts with similar content you could get dinged for having duplicate content on your website. This can send signals that your website is spammy or Google might pay more attention to a less important version of the post. And so when you provide a canonical URL, so you've written a post, you've opened that menu, and you're putting a URL in there, you are showing Google that this post, this piece of content that you've just written is important and it should belong in the index.

[00:04:34] However, there's another post that exists that might be just a little bit more important. And so if they have to choose between two pieces of content to index, let it be the one in the canonical URL field. And so you might be wondering, well, if I have different versions of basically the same post, why wouldn't I just redirect the old post to the new.

[00:05:00] Yeah, that's because a different version of a post doesn't necessarily mean that it's just a straightforward revision of old content. There are many ways that you can end up with different versions of a piece of content, and one that would be the most relevant to you as a teacher business owner is if you create resources for multiple grade levels.

[00:05:22] So let's say you create themed escape rooms for grades three through five and you decide to write a blog post to feature your pirate escape room. It's not really grade specific, it's a really great general post about how to create a pirate escape room. And that post did well and you decided that you'd like to cast a wider net by writing grade specific posts.

[00:05:49] So you decide to write a post for third grade pirate escape room, another one for fourth grade pirate escape room, and then finally a fifth grade pirate escape room post. Now, all of these pieces of content are going to be pretty similar, right? For those grade specific posts, you could put your original general escape room post as the canonical URL.

[00:06:13] That way Google will understand that your third grade post is essentially the same, but with a little more context about third grade. But if there is a choice of which of those four posts to rank, you want it to be the general post because it's more applicable to all grade levels. But then on the other hand, if you work really hard to write very unique posts for each grade level, you wouldn't need to use the canonical URL.

[00:06:42] I've seen a rule of thumb that if 80% of your content is essentially the same between two posts, then you really should identify the canonical URL. And if you're listening to this and you're still thinking, I'm not sure if I should be using canonical URLs or not, you can actually kind of take a look at your existing Google search console data to see

[00:07:05] if any of your content is kind of getting picked up as duplicate content. So if you just go into search console and you go into the indexing section and you look at the reasons your blog posts aren't indexed, you might see some references to canonical URLs. Now, the one you need to be watching for is the one that says, duplicate without user selected canonical.

[00:07:31] That means that you're creating content that Google considers duplicate, but you haven't added the canonical URL. It's unlikely that you have any that meet this criteria, but it is worth keeping an eye on it, especially if you're in a situation where you're writing similar posts for multiple grade levels.

[00:07:50] It's definitely something you can keep track of. The other advanced feature that you should know about is how to no index your blog content. So going back to our analogy of the research paper, you likely don't submit your very first handwritten brainstorm to your professor. That was just for you in the early stages of your writing process.

[00:08:15] If you started your blog way back in the day when blogging was a bit different, you likely have some content that at this point is just for you. It might just be memories from the classroom, you know, your pictures or those blog posts that read like journal entries, what your class was up to that week.

[00:08:36] That blog content is exactly what blog visitors were looking for back in the day before social media. But now those posts are more for you than for Google search results, but I totally understand if you can't bring yourself to delete them due to the memories they hold. And luckily, you don't have to, you can just no index them.

[00:08:59] You can use the no index option in your SEO plugin to tell Google that this information really isn't worth the resources to crawl and index the post. When Google is only crawling and indexing your strong, optimized content, Google will start to view your website as more strong and optimized. So also, when you're sending the bots on a wild goose chase through your old classroom journal posts, you're not pointing them in the direction of your most important content.

[00:09:31] It would be like submitting that disorganized folder full of all of your different drafts and brainstorms. You don't wanna do that. So where can you find the no index option? It's in that same advanced menu near the very bottom of the Yoast section when you're editing your post. You're going to see an option with a dropdown menu

[00:09:53] and that option is for allowing search engines to show this post in search results. And if you don't want it in the index, you'll select no. If you use Rank math, you'll find this feature, the advanced menu, I think it's like a toolbox icon, and when you click on that, you'll see a checkbox for no index.

[00:10:15] The only thing I want you to keep in mind is that this content still takes up storage space on your website, so you might consider eventually transferring those posts somewhere else for your own safekeeping and then removing them completely from your site. But in the meantime, you can no index them to start pointing Google to the most important content on your site.

[00:10:39] I hope that this episode has given you the courage to open up that advanced menu in your SEO tool. We didn't go over all of the fields in that menu, but these two were the most important and most applicable ones for us to discuss right now. Now, was there a point in this episode or other episodes this month when you thought, man, I wish I could see a screenshot of what she's talking about?

[00:11:03] Well, if so, I think you'd love my Tuesday traffic tip. Every week I send a quick tip to help you with blogging or Pinterest, and then when applicable, I do include screenshots to better show you what I'm talking about. So if you'd like to sign up for my weekly newsletter, just head over to stephanie royer solutions.com/tuesday-traffic tip.

[00:11:27] You can also find the link in the show notes.