Do Draft WordPress Posts Unpublished Affect Your SEO?
WordPress Unpublished posts affect SEO? The Yoast SEO plugin is a useful tool for writing SEO-friendly content on WordPress. When you publish a new post using Yoast, both the Free and Premium versions of the plugin will automatically save any drafts, so you don’t have to worry about unpublished posts affecting your search engine rankings. This means you don’t need to make any changes to your Yoast SEO settings.
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Do unpublished draft WordPress posts affect your SEO?
To understand how draft posts impact SEO, it’s crucial to know what they are. Draft posts are blog posts that bloggers write but have not yet published. While some bloggers publish their posts immediately, others choose to hold back posts that need further work or are not yet relevant. In these cases, bloggers save the posts as drafts for later use.
The effect of draft posts on SEO is not a straightforward issue as there are several factors to consider.
The Difference Between Indexed and Published
If you have drafted posts in your WordPress Dashboard, it’s important to note that they are not yet visible to Google’s search engine index. However, once you publish these posts on your website, they become available for indexing. It’s recommended to publish all your pending posts before moving on to new ones, as the timing of publication can impact the search engine rankings of each post.
How Google indexes WordPress
Publishing a post plays a crucial role in getting your page ranked in search engine results. When a post gets indexed, it creates a link in the search engine’s index, which improves visibility. However, it’s essential to note that draft posts can still impact your SEO, but their impact is lesser than that of published posts. Although a draft post won’t appear in search results until a search engine indexes it, once you publish it, the public can see it, and Google will index it.
How Google Views Pages in General
While a website’s content and external links are major factors that impact its search engine ranking, there are additional considerations that play a role in how well it performs in search results. An important factor is the use of internal links within the site’s architecture, which enables users and search engines to navigate easily between pages. Optimizing your site’s architecture can make it easier for Google to crawl and index your pages, potentially improving your site’s overall search engine visibility.
What Does Google Consider to be Duplicate Content
Google identifies duplicate content as either identical or substantially similar pages. This means that if there are two pages on your website with identical or similar content, Google will consider it as duplicate content. Accidentally indexing a draft post as a new page is a common issue. To prevent this from happening, it is important to ensure that your draft posts do not contain any of your website’s primary keywords, as this can cause them to appear in search results. By taking this precaution, you can avoid potential penalties from search engines and maintain the integrity of your website’s content.
Does it make a difference if the Post is Unpublished?
People often wonder whether holding back blog posts is a good strategy. However, experts recommend publishing each post as soon as it’s been written and edited. If you wait to publish, readers may have already seen any errors or issues that won’t be addressed until much later. Additionally, unfinished posts lack optimization for search engines, as they don’t have meta descriptions or relevant keywords and tags. Therefore, it’s best to publish your content as soon as you complete it to ensure your audience has access to it and search engines can optimize it.
The Implications of Multiple URLs
In summary, creating multiple URLs for your website can increase your chances of getting indexed by search engines. However, it is important to consider the implications of having multiple URLs for the same content. While it may seem advantageous to rank for multiple keywords, duplicate content can pose a problem. Google may penalize your website and remove both pages from its index if it detects duplicate content across multiple URLs. Therefore, it’s important to take a strategic approach when it comes to using multiple URLs for your website.
The Importance of Indexation & Citations
To ensure successful search engine optimization (SEO), you must ensure major search engines index your blog posts and external credible websites link to them. Indexation can occur upon initial publication, site updates, or 301 redirects. Securing links on credible external websites as citations can boost visibility, improve SERP rankings, and increase the likelihood of search queries discovering your content.
So What Should I do with my Published Posts?
Once you publish a blog post, search engines will start crawling and indexing it. Therefore, it’s important to ensure your title tags are descriptive and attention-grabbing, as they will be the most visible in search results. In case you need to postpone publishing, you can always save your draft and return to it later when you have more time.
One More Reason to Always Update Your Drafts!
Publish blog posts promptly to maximize SEO. Delaying for perfection hurts rankings as search engines won’t index until publication, wasting opportunities. Don’t let posts languish in drafts; publish them promptly to boost SEO.
Conclusion
If you have unpublished posts on your WordPress website, it is important to ensure they save as drafts or scheduled for publishing at a later date, and not published and then unpublished. In this way, WordPress unpublished posts don’t affect SEO. By doing so, you can avoid any negative impact on your website’s SEO. Additionally, it is always a good practice to regularly review your website’s content and remove any outdated or irrelevant posts to ensure your website is always up-to-date and relevant to your target audience.
