SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

In the realm of social media platforms, Google Plus was once considered a promising contender.

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However, Google officially discontinued Google Plus in 2019.

For website owners, this means it’s crucial to remove any lingering links to Google Plus from your site. It’s important to take action; here’s the steps you should follow to ensure your website remains up-to-date and optimised.

The End of Google Plus

Google Plus, introduced in 2011, aimed to rival other social media giants. However, despite initial enthusiasm, it failed to gain significant traction. Consequently, Google made the decision to shut down the platform in April 2019. While the platform’s discontinuation has been known for some time, it’s essential for website owners to remain vigilant and remove any outdated links to Google Plus to maintain a seamless user experience and optimise their websites for current search engine guidelines.

The Impact on SEO

As Google Plus no longer exists, any links pointing to the platform on your website serve no purpose and can potentially harm your SEO efforts. Broken or irrelevant links can negatively impact user experience, increase bounce rates, and signal to search engines that your website contains outdated or irrelevant information. To safeguard your website’s credibility and rankings, it’s imperative to conduct a thorough link audit and promptly remove any links associated with Google Plus.

Steps to Remove Google Plus Links

Removing Google Plus links from your website is a straightforward process. Begin by conducting a comprehensive audit of your site, paying particular attention to social media icons, share buttons, and any references to Google Plus in content or footers. Once identified, update your website’s code, content management system, or plugins to remove the Google Plus links. Don’t forget to check your website’s structured data markup and social media profiles to ensure they align with your current social media presence.

As Google Plus has become a thing of the past, website owners must take the necessary steps to remove any remaining links associated with the platform. By keeping your website up-to-date and removing obsolete links, you maintain a seamless user experience, safeguard your SEO efforts, and demonstrate to search engines that your website is current and relevant.

 

Page Indexing in Search Console

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Good morning Peter

When you come to do this month’s checks, please can you take a look at the Page Indexing in Search Console. We have a rocketing number of not indexed pages.

Digging deeper, it seems that a lot of the recent new Posts and Pages I have added have randomly duplicated themselves up to 23 times.

They all have suffixes of /page/ then a number ???

Actually I’m going to look at this for you right now. 🙂

So, a few things. It appears some of those 400+ redirected URLs of made up /page/# go back to 2021! I know during our time together you redeveloped the site at some point…by any chance was it around then?

Essentially Google is finding those /page/# links somewhere, following them and quite right seeing they’re being redirected to where they should be.

WordPress does that redirect by default, even on my site if I head to a blog post and add, say , /page/19 it will redirect to the correct post URL.

So the trouble with your site is that somewhere something is trying to link to those spurious URLs. It could easily be a theme issue and some problem there.

Some good news though – it really doesn’t matter. It’s untidy which I don’t like myself, but from an SEO point of view Google is simply informing us that there are URLs redirecting to other proper pages. It doesn’t hurt you in any way.

Yes I think the new site went live in spring 2021.

Also in the unlisted section, and Alternative page with proper canonical tag, they all have a suffix of ‘am’.

And in the Crawled – currently not indexed, most have the suffix ‘feed’ which has appeared?!?

Good news though, in the last 3 weeks I’ve added content to 270 of the case study pages and internal links incoming and outgoing so there is content there for google to rank now rather than just four or five images per page.

I have a constant stream of ideas and changes I want to do at the moment, it’s finding the time to do them all.  I have built a page cluster around a particular keyword and will follow that with others. Each will have 10 Posts pointing at the main Product page to build topical authority.

Also in the unlisted section, and Alternative page with proper canonical tag, they all have a suffix of ‘am’.
It’s ‘/amp’, which is part of how Google’s own Accelerated Mobile Pages system works. So that’s all doing what it should.

And in the Crawled – currently not indexed, most have the suffix ‘feed’ which has appeared?!?

Some of those date back 8 months – and again this is just how things work with WordPress and Google. There’s no problem though – Google is literally just saying “We’ve found these feed pages that we know you won’t want indexed so we’re not going to.” 🙂

There is something I can do though. The AMP pages we need to leave as is, but if you’re certain you don’t have any posts that are multi page (and would need the /page/#) I can force Google to ignore those in the robots.txt file. Same for feed pages.

It’s purely a cosmetic thing for us though, to make Search Console look as beautiful as possible.

Great news on the case studies – always remember the rule of thumb that you need 300+ words in paragraph format to get indexed.

Your content is really stellar – and you’re one of my few clients who actually commit to it – which is why you do so well!!

Cheers,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert

Case Study: Turning SEO work off

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I had a client recently who (for reasons exclusively to do with the inexperience of their website’s designer) turned off one of the SEO plugins I had installed and configured for them.

It happened shortly after I carried out an initial SEO overhaul on their site, so gives us a valuable insight into the effect of getting SEO done, and the removing it again.

It’s a very small (and brand new company), but you can see the effects in this graph – taken directly from Google Search Console.

Initially after my work their SEO stats began to shoot up, gaining traction and upward momentum. Immediately after deactivating just one plugin it plummeted back to its original position.

This didn’t use to happen so quickly. If you took SEO work off a site, or just fell behind with updates and changes to best practice, things would trail off over time. It now appears not having the very best SEO at all times leads to an immediate decrease in SEO authority. Because so many website owners (your competitors!) invest in SEO these days it means any time you don’t have it working, they can rise above you in the rankings.

But other SEO professionals have tried the same thing (turning off a single SEO plugin on their own testing sites) and see the same result. The drop is nearly immediate.

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Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert blog