WordPress SEO by Yoast Changing sitemap xml url - wordpress

I want to change the url for the sitemap xml in seo yoast plugin.
from: http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
to: http://example.com/sitemap-something-unique-aqw65643.xml
I know exactly how to change it using rewite rule, but my problem is that I don't know if this is safe.
Is there anyone can explain me what will be the bad effect?

Using a URL rewrite rule for something like this should not impose any negative side-effects. You are simply directing traffic from one URL to another. There are even some benefits of using rewrites when it comes to SEO but those mostly pertain to your page URLs. Since you are using WordPress, I'm sure that's not the advice you're looking for.
There is thread on Google Support here that talks about URL mapping when preparing to migrate to a new domain. I'm sure some of this might be helpful information for your situation. I would lean toward a 301 Permanent redirect for a sitemap that I was submitting to Google or another search engine.

Related

Does Wordpress list all pages for crawlers?

I created a page on a Wordpress site that was for internal use only and triggers some backend code. Within a few days I started seeing hits on that page from "bingbot".
I'm not using any kind of sitemap plugin. How are crawlers finding this page?
I know the robots.txt file can block them but I want to make sure they don't show up for crawlers that don't respect this. I still want to have the page publicly accessible if someone types in the URL.
What needs to be done in Wordpress to make sure a page can't be discovered except by typing in the URL?
Any given URL is potentially "discovered" once the post is published and if there's a link to it from elsewhere on your site. There's no guaranteed way to prevent search engines from indexing a URL.

Redirecting old pages to homepage/index

I have taken over an old domain and put a new site on it, it use to be a membership site so I have thousands of old URLs that now go to a 404 page.
Should I redirect these to the homepage to keep the link juice, it is a relative subject, so the links are useful.
If so how would I do it? This is a wordpress site.
/user/*
/image//
What is the best way to deal with these 404's?
I would redirect them to your homepage. Google (and all other crawlers) will notice the change, so you can provide a better and continuous user experience for your users.
There is a brilliant plugin called Redirection (https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) that will allow you to configure redirects in WP, including logs of 404's that visitors to your site experience to help you know where redirects might be necessary.
A word of caution: there are some major implications to putting redirects in place including effects on your site's SEO. I recommend you read up on the different kinds of redirects and what they do.
Reading on the topic: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Redirections

From wordpress to SPA application - SEO issues

I need to test in terms of SEO a new page which was exported from wordpress to single page application. I want to keep my rank in search results. Unfortunately I am not sure how to do it properly.
Could you please give me any advice?
I know that I need to verify sitemap and broken links. Could you please recommend any tools to do it automatically?
The most important thing to do is to use the same URLs you have from your old website, or use 301 redirect method to redirect the old URLs to the new one.
Regarding the one pages, its not good for SEO since all your content will be in the same page, and here you can't target many keywords.
Still you can use one page website with advanced techniques to rank one many keywords but here it will affect the UX.
Regarding the XML site, since you have one page in your new website, you have to redirect all the pages to the new one using 301 redirect or you will have many 404s in the webmaster tool.

Google URL Crawl error 404 - domain appending to end of URL

I recently built and published my Wordpress site at www.kernelops.com and submitted it to the google index and webmaster tools. Today I logged into webmaster tools and found 60 URL errors all with the same type of issue. The base domain address www.kernelops.com is being appended to all my sites page, category, and post URLs. An example of the failed URL looks like this:
http://www.kernelops.com/blog/www.kernelops.com
Google Webmaster Tools indicates that this weird link is originating from the base url "http://www.kernelops.com/blog" which obviously means the issue is on my end. My Wordpress permalink settings are set to use the post-name; I'm not sure if that could be causing this, i.e.:
http://www.kernelops.com/sample-post/
I can't seem to find any help resolving this weird issue with google searches and thought someone here may be able to point me in the right direction.
The Wordpress plugins that would potentially affect the site's URLs are the following:
All in One SEO
XML-Sitemap
But I can't see any sort of setting within these plugins that would be causing this type of issue.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated - thanks in advance!
This is a long shot, but it may be happening if the Google crawler picks up a link that seems like a relative path and attempts to append it to the current directory. It's highly unlikely that Google would have such a bug, but it's not impossible either.
The closes thing I could find that may be considered a relative path is this:
<div class="copyright">
...
Kernel, Inc.
...
</div>
I doubt that this is the problem, but it may be worth fixing it.
Now, there is yet another possibility and that's if the website serves slightly different content depending on the User Agent string. When Google presents your website with a User Agent string, the SEO plugins detects it and tries to optimize things in order to improve your ranking (not familiar with that plugins, so I don't know what it does exactly). There may be a bug in the SEO plugin that will cause the www.kernelops.com URL to look like a relative path or to actually construct that faulty URL somehow.
You can possibly test this by setting the user-agent string in your browser (e.g. FireFox's user-agent switcher) to Googlebot's user-agent string and test what happens when you visit your website. Look at the page source that you receive and look for any links that might look like the one Google is finding.
However, if the SEO tool is smart enough, it will "realize" that your IP doesn't match one of the valid IPs for Googlebot and it will not make the modifications.

How to integrate hosted blog into website

I would like to integrate a remotely hosted blog into an existing ASP.net website.
I am not looking to host the blog platform itself because I would like to have a low friction solution where the users only have to concentrate on posting content and not maintain the blog engine. (So I do not want to build a workpress, dasBlog, etc. blog engine on my servers.)
The old Blogger FTP solution is kind of what I am after. What is the best way to accomplish this today?
My criteria:
- blog content is updated by users on a remote service (like blogger, etc.)
- blog content is displayed on my asp.net website with my website's look/feel/skin.
Thanks!
I'm actually in the middle of doing the same thing right now. The solution I came up with was to use the Application Request Routing and URL Rewrite modules in IIS7. You can get started here, but there's a couple more things that you'll have to do to get everything working. If you're integrating the blog into an existing site you won't want your rewrite rules to apply sitewide, so surround your ruleset with the element in the web.config and set it according to where you want the blog to appear on your site. Another thing that isn't addressed in Carlos's post is what to do about links that are referenced in CSS or javascript files, as they will not be rewritten. For those you will need an extra inbound rule that will pick up all of the relative urls that the first rewrite rule didn't get. You can look at the ruleset that I'm using (and maybe answer my question) here.
Hope this helps.

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