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How a WordPress theme can badly impact your SEO

2018-10-21

Here is a topic that I like a lot because I think that many people underestimate its importance. I do think that some themes aren’t well-coded and will never rank as good as they should.

Above-the-fold penalty

Google has an above-the-fold penalty. It means that when there is no text at the top of the website, the website is penalized by Google. However, today, there are many themes with huge sliders or pictures at the top of the theme. I do think those themes will never rank well. The new trend of theme author is to add huge pictures at the top of articles before or after titles. It is a really bad behavior. I think that Google may see those pictures as being meaningless.

Reference

Too many links

Some themes use 3 links for a snippet of a post or page. There is one link for the picture, one link for the title of the post, one link for the excerpt. Those 3 links point to the same post or pages. This is a google leakage. In the initial version of the Google algorithm, a bit of google juice evaporates with every link. The fewer links you have and the better it is. Some theme designers love to add many links on their website pointing to external links (facebook, twitter, linkedin, Pinterest).

On an article, the author may decide to put a link behind the author name, the date. The author may also add a link behind the category. Compare the links that can be found on a theme and the link that you can find on your favorite website. you will see that popular websites have much fewer links than those themes.

Hidden links

Google hates hidden links and when you use in the CSS code: “display:none”, this is really dangerous because the website can be banned because of it. Then, sometimes, some fonts can be hidden when the background color is equal or nearly equal to the text color.

Cloaking

Some wordpress themes don’t deliver the same content to GoogleBot and a user. In this case, it ends up in a proper google penalty. To avoid this problem, visit google search console, and check if the website appears to be the same for googlebot and the user.

Related Posts:

  • The big image header penalty from google
  • How to choose a wordpress theme?
  • Our review of classified ad themes and plugins for WordPress
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