5 replies to this topic

[GF87]

Hello everyone

I have a small Wordpress website which has been doing quite well lately. However, I've noticed in Google Analytics that some searches use a keyword which clearly refers to article A of my website and yet the visitor lands on article B. I looked into this and noticed that this is because of the "Related posts" in the right column. Basically what happens is this:

Person searches, for example, "aquarium design" and gets 3 results pointing towards my site. The first two results refer to articles that have "aquarium design" listed in the related posts plugin, the third result is the actual article on aquarium design. This isn't good for my bouncerate since my visitors land on the wrong page. Can anyone tell me how I can change this?

Cheers,
GF

Edited by Jill, 26 April 2012 - 02:17 PM.
Link to site removed as per forum rules.

[Jill]

Stop using the plug-in?

[OldWelshGuy]

Stop using the plug-in?

Sorry Jill that is a really complicated reply, can you make it a bit simpler for me

[GF87]

Any solution without removing the plugin? My readers like it.

I've noticed that my right column is loaded before the content in HTML. Might this be the problem?

[qwerty]

I've noticed that my right column is loaded before the content in HTML. Might this be the problem?

Probably not. Search engines have gotten a lot better in the past few years at figuring out which part of a page is the content and which is navigation, widgets, etc.so the code that comes up first doesn't really carry more weight.

Try getting more links (internal and from other sites) pointing to the aquarium design page, some of them with "aquarium design" as the anchor text. You want Google to get the idea that that page is more relevant to the keyword phrase than the others are. You could also look at the page and think about how well you've optimized it for that phrase. Maybe you could tweak it just a bit.

By the way, if those two other pages are listing the aquarium design page as related, how are they related? If they're not related enough that it makes at least some sense for those pages to come up in the SERP (even after the page you prefer), then why is the plugin adding the link to the aquarium design page to them? And does this plugin allow you to set up exceptions, so you can tell it not to put that link on those particular pages?

[torka]

There are related post plugins that allow you to specify a "weight" of just how much related an article is to a topic before they show it as related. And there are some that, as Bob says, allow you to specify which related posts show up and which don't. If yours doesn't allow that sort of thing, and your visitors like the related posts feature, you might consider switching to a different related posts plug in.

--Torka