Does a wordpress theme can affect SEO

We installed several WordPress themes from themeforest and wordpress frameworks (Genesis, Avada, DIVI). We think that some themes perform better than others. For example, themes bought on themeforest usually perform well.

The full story

We installed several themes. At first, when a website didn’t get WordPress traffic, we thought that Cloudflare, SEO plugins were the culprits. Then, we discovered something very strange Google indexing behavior with Genesis themes. Once we added a page. The link was available on a category page. The category could be crawled by Google. This new page appeared at the top of the category page since it was the last time. Then, we checked what happened in Google. After several days, the said page wasn’t indexed but its title was indexed through the related page suggestions from other pages.

This means that Google visited other pages and reindexed the content of other pages that existed since a while. Google updated the content of old pages but it didn’t indexed the new page. However, the new page could be seen in the XML sitemap.

Why?

It is really difficult to know why but we think it is related to something in the HTML code.

Don’t forget that wordpress themes can add any attributes to the HREF links of a website. The user will not see those attributes but Google will.

The themeforest themes are really clean. A link of wordpress category page has just a DIV and then HREF. To me, this would explain why “dummy” websites perform better than websites with a complex html code. I think that for Google SEO, it is better to choose a WordPress theme with a clean code.

What could influence the SEO ranking?

Fancy attributes

I suspect that microdata attributes and fancy attributes like rel=”bookmark” are responsible for crawling/indexing issues by google. If you look at A HREF tags of websites like amazon.com you will see that there are no fancy attributes in A HREF tags in it. Rel=bookmark is not recognized by any search engine and it will never do. This can only harm your website rather than improving its SEO.

Microdata

Some themes are stuffed with microdata which are attributes added to some tags like itemprop, itemtype. Google does read those microdata. Google states that “structured data” can be considered as spam by google.

Quality guidelines

These guidelines are not easily testable using an automated tool. Violating a quality guideline can prevent syntactically correct structured data from being displayed as a rich result in Google Search, or possibly cause it to be marked as spam.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/sd-policies

From what I have read on the Google developer website, there would be such a thing as a google penalty when the structured data or microdata is not in compliance with the Google guidelines.

Reference

Cloaking

A wordpress theme can be responsible for cloaking. This is when the server returns a different content whether the client is a browser or a robot like Googlebot. If it is the case, this triggers a penalty and the webpage will be downgraded in the google search results.