In a hangout, during the submitted question and answers portion, an SEO professional asked John Mueller about their website, which has a combination of HTML and WordPress pages.
Their question was: their page is built in HTML and their blog is built with WordPress. They found that the majority of their blog posts are experiencing indexing issues in Google.
How can they fix this?
John answered that he thinks, first of all, it’s important to know that these are really just different platforms at the end of the day, when you’re discussing HTML vs. WordPress.
Essentially, with all of these platforms, you’re creating HTML pages, and the backend side of the site is what ends up creating these HTML pages.
That’s something that Googlebot doesn’t really look at. Or, at least, that’s something that Googlebot doesn’t really try to evaluate.
So if your pages are written in HTML, and you write them in an editor, and you load them from the server, and they serve like that, then Google can see that they are HTML pages.
If they are created on the fly on your server, based on a database in WordPress, or some other kind of platform, and it creates an HTML page, then it’s these end HTML pages that Google is going to see and work with.
So if there are issues with the site overall, especially when it comes to things like crawling, indexing or ranking, then you can exclude the technical elements there.
What happens here is that Googlebot is reading the content, and what remains is the quality side of things.
And this is something that doesn’t rely on the infrastructure that’s used to create these pages, but it’s more so .about the content that you’re providing, and the overall experience that you’re providing on the website.
If you’re seeing something that, for example, your blog posts are not being picked up by Google or they are not ranking well, but your static HTML pages are doing fine, this is not because they are static HTML pages.
It’s because Google thinks that these are actually good pieces of content that it should recommend to other users.
And on that level, that’s where John would take a look and not focus so much on the infrastructure, but really focus on the actual content that you are providing.
And when it comes to content, it’s not just the text that’s the primary part of the page. It’s everything around the entire website that comes into play.
This is something where John recommends trying to take a step back and looking at the bigger picture.
And if you don’t see from a bigger picture point of view, where maybe some quality issues might lie, or where you could improve things, John recommends doing a user study.
To do this, invite a handful of people who aren’t directly associated with your website and have them do some tasks on your site, and then ask them really tough questions about where they think perhaps there are some problems on the site?
Or if they would trust this website, or any other questions about understanding the quality of the site.
Additionally, Google has a bunch of these questions in some of their blog posts that you can also use for inspiration.
It’s not necessarily about asking the same questions that Google asks in their posts, but it’s more along the lines of – you can get some great inspiration on where you can go with your content from these posts.
This happens at approximately the 13:07 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 13:07
Let’s see, our static page is built with HTML. And our blog is built with WordPress. The majority of our blog posts are experiencing indexing issues in Google, how do I fix this?
John (Answer) 13:21
So I think, first of all, it’s important to know that these are essentially just different platforms. And essentially, with all of these platforms, you’re creating HTML pages, and kind of the background or the the backend side of your website that ends up creating these HTML pages, that’s something that Googlebot doesn’t really look at. Or at least that’s something that Googlebot doesn’t really try to evaluate. So if your pages are written in HTML, and you write them in an editor, and you load them on your server, and they serve like that, like we can see that their HTML pages If they’re created on the fly on your server based on a database in WordPress, or some other kind of platform that you’re using, and then it creates HTML pages, we see those final HTML pages. And we essentially work with those.
So if you’re seeing kind of issues with regards to your website overall, when it comes to things like crawling, indexing, or ranking, and you can kind of exclude the the technical elements there, kind of that Googlebot is able to actually see the content, then usually what remains is kind of the quality side of things. And that’s something that definitely doesn’t rely on the infrastructure that you used to create these pages, but more it’s about the content that you’re providing there, and the overall experience that you’re providing on the website.
So if you’re seeing something that, for example, your blog posts are not being picked up by Google or not ranking well by Google, and your static HTML pages are doing fine on Google, then it’s not because they’re static HTML pages that they’re doing well on Google, but rather, because Google thinks that these are actually good pieces of content that it should recommend to other users. And kind of on that level, that’s, that’s where I would take a look and not focus so much on the infrastructure, but really focus on the actual content that you’re providing. And when it comes to content, it’s not just the text that’s like the primary part of the page, it’s like everything around the whole website that comes into play.
So that’s something where I would really try to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. And if you don’t see kind of from a bigger picture point of view, where maybe some quality issues might lie, or where you could improve things, I would strongly recommend doing a user study. And for that, maybe invite, I don’t know, a handful of people who aren’t directly associated with your website and have them kind of do some tasks on your website, and then ask them really tough questions about where they think maybe there are problems on this website? Or if they would trust this website, or any kind of other question around kind of like understanding the quality of the website.
And we, we have a bunch of these questions in some of our blog posts that you can also use for inspiration. It’s not so much that I would say you have to ask the questions that we ask in our blog posts, but sometimes, having some inspiration for these kind of things is useful. In particular, we have a fairly old blog post on one of the early quality updates. And we have a newer blog post, maybe, I guess, it’s like two years old now, it’s not super new–blog posts on core updates. And both of these have a bunch of questions on them that you could ask yourself around your website. But especially if you have a group of users that are willing to give you some input, then that’s something that you could ask them, and really take their answers to heart and think about ways that you can improve your website overall.
