Hi. Love the theme, however since installing it I’ve noticed a drastic drop in my site’s traffic. We’re talking a +30% drop. Has anyone else reported or experienced this issue? Not saying its an SEO issue, but when I purchased the theme I was hoping for a boost in my site’s performance, but not a fan of it being at the cost of actually traffic.
The theme has several SEO issues:
1. No H1 or H2 tags on the home page
2. No H2 tags on archive pages
3. Many missing alt tags on images
4. One user reports that this setting in WordPress SEO doesn’t work: Titles and Meta > Other > Noindex subpages of archives.
5. If you installed 6.2, your site may have been clobbered by a WordPress SEO incompatibility issue that has since been resolved in the current theme version.
You can manually fix some of these issues but I worry there are SEO issues we haven’t discovered yet.
Of note, many of the top selling Theme Forest themes have similar SEO issues.
I think TagDiv should pay Yoast to review their theme. A Yoast verified theme would be a nice selling point. I love the Newspaper theme so much, I would chip in on the cost of the Yoast review (lol). For now, I’m going back to another theme. :-/
I love this theme also. I am loosing my traffic actually. Is it possible to get refund admin? We all try our best and the result does not meet the expectation.
Yeah these issues should without a doubt be the number one priority for tagDiv.
Also even though issues have been brought up by users many times, and in many threads, the issues seems to be dumbed down and pushed to the side as if the problem isn´t very big.
A thorough answer would be greatly appreciated regarding these issues and what the developers expect to do about it. Also love the theme and would like to continue using it, but if it comes with a loss of visitors compared to the previous version 4 of the theme the choice to use another theme isn´t very hard 🙁 (very sad face)
Wellll…..
WordPress does not support alt tags by default, not a theme issue. Most people don’t bother to setup alt tags in their media panel. You can modify WP and/or theme to add them; but WP’s own default themes don’t support them either. This is well known issue to consider in all themes prior to purchase or deployment. Our traffic went UP on one site using TagDiv themes, so not necessarily relevant in all cases.
H1 tags can easily be added to home page to setup a desired blurb about your site, either top of page (not normal), sidebar, bottom home page. Simple to do.
Yoast has had more SEO problems than TagDiv on average the past 2 years, so not always a “benchmark” — you always need to check issues with Yoast prior to any SEO plugin update as THEY often break things every major dot version they come up with. One version had 5 semi-dot updates in one week to fix all the problems.
But always good to test your posts to see what Google is seeing with the debug tools.
The best SEO is still ORIGINAL content, posts between 800-1200 words are the “Sweet Spot” — avoid short posts and copycat of other site content and images; avoid posts with a YouTube video and one paragraph about it, etc.
Also be aware for any sites in Google News, they have been having hiccups again since last month, where sometimes image not shown in GN searches, headlines may pull the (ironically) alt tag from photo vs the headline, and other oddities.
Also be aware Google’s bot has been pulling in “hidden content for mobile” as part of desktop results lately, implying that there is some shift in their scraper to “mobile first” for scraping news sites, desktop as fallback. We had a hidden photo on mobile “tap to view image:” so that the photo wouldn’t be see unless asked for in mobile … that text showed up in Google News in excerpt from story (!!).
Upshot — it’s not just you – Google is messing with the known universe again, and in some very odd ways related to “scraping” your page, separate entirely from the sitemap which SHOULD be pulled first for data but is apparently not. If you’ve noticed traffic oddities and are in Google News, this may be factor in things you are seeing, perhaps not. It’s impacting us, with sites not even running WordPress (!).
WordPress does not support alt tags by default, not a theme issue.
I define alt tags for all of my media files. Newspaper is not using them in all of the thumbnails, which leads to a high percentage of empty alt tags. This IS a theme issue.
H1 tags can easily be added to home page to setup a desired blurb about your site…
True but H1 should not be missing in the first place. Many Newspaper users are unaware that their home pages and archive pages are getting penalized by the theme’s missing H1 and H2 tags.
Yoast has had more SEO problems than TagDiv…
The recent TagDiv page title issue was worst than anything I’ve experienced with Yoast.
The best SEO is still ORIGINAL content, posts between 800-1200 words are the “Sweet Spot” — avoid short posts and copycat of other site content and images; avoid posts with a YouTube video and one paragraph about it, etc.
The best SEO is achieved with content AND with leveraging known signals. By ignoring proper use of H1, H2 and other non-content related on-page SEO, you unnecessarily penalize your own content.
Also, I see one-paragraph posts ranking all the time.
Newspaper is an awesome theme. If I didn’t believe this, I would have just moved on already. These SEO issues need to be fixed, not defended.
You’re welcome to your opinion. As I am to mine. Have a nice day.
Chris S,
It is ambiguous to talk about SEO because Google never expresses clearly what they are doing. However,
I witched back to 6.2 from 6.3 yesterday night. And today, there has been a good signal coming up. All my new posts are indexed roughly immediately after pressing publish button as I used to meet when still using 6.2.
I hope that can be clear somehow the negative SEO impacts versions after 6.2. You should take a careful look on which SEO aspects were improved and modified since Newspaper 6.2.
Cheers!
I agree that h1 and h2 should be possible on the front page!
alt tags – I’ve tested the alt tags and they seem to work. Please let me know where did you encounter missing alt tags and I will fix them. Anyway I will do an audit for this in the following days.
h1 – there are a lot of big news sites that do not have h1 on the homepage.. http://www.theverge.com/ http://techcrunch.com/ http://readwrite.com/ and many more…. I believe this is a strong argument that H1 H2 on homepage is a personal preference not a requirement. Big sites like them have dedicated staff that monitor and analyze this stuff. I’m sure a company like VOX media with over 400 employees (the owners of theverge) would not penalize their site by forgetting to put a h1.
h2 on archives… again the same result. A lot of the big sites do not use such a thing.
the TagDiv page title issue – was a huge mistake on our part and I’ve missed it. Usually I do the final code reviews and I did not notice this one 😐
@Johnny you can add h1 and h2 on the homepage via visual composer.
@kecodoc please contact us via email: contact@tagdiv.com
I uninstalled Newspaper a couple days ago so I can’t show you missing tags on my site. Check out this Newspaper site: “http://wfl.ro/”. SEMRush Diagnosis says 66 of 89 images are missing alt tags on the home page.
The sites you listed (http://www.theverge.com/ http://techcrunch.com/ http://readwrite.com/) ALL use H2 on the home page and category (archive) pages I checked. Thus, I’ll use your argument and suggest that H2 should be on the home page and archive pages in Newspaper.
Also, big sites benefit from other ranking factors such as millions of backlinks and domain authority. For smaller sites, on-page elements such as H1 and H2 are far more critical.
Regarding H1, do you also believe H1 is a preference and not a requirement on posts and pages?
My point about the recent Newspaper title issue was more about countering Chris’ suggestion that Yoast WordPress SEO was more buggy. I don’t consider Yoast SEO or Newspaper to be buggy. Bugs happens sometimes- it’s no big deal. You guys fixed it right was which is the most important thing.
H1 and H2 counts for theverge, techcrunch, and readwrite:
http://www.theverge.com/
H1: 0
H2: 30
http://www.theverge.com/tech
H1: 0
H2: 18
http://techcrunch.com/
H1: 0
H2: 30
http://techcrunch.com/gadgets/
H1: 1
H2: 26
http://readwrite.com/
H1: 0
H2: 28
http://readwrite.com/structure
H1: 1
H2: 20
Also, The Verge has the worse on-page of these three sites including duplicate meta descriptions, excessively long meta descriptions, bad use of H2, no H1 on the archive page, missing alt tags, etc.
FYI,
Yoast SEO has had numerous bugs, check the changelog sometime to see how many bugs they have had. My contention was simply that using Yoast SEO as a “comparator” to anything else related to bugs, is not a good metric.
So, you don’t need to debunk my statement, as it’s well known. Yoast has had numerous bugs which break the site, break other plugins, and major security flaws (where they finally hired a security firm to check them).
H1 is useful on home page; H2 also useful for topical elements such as section heads, but not so much for story heads ad they are ephemeral; meaning, they change daily, so they are not sticky and therefore not relevant to long-term, long-tail SERPS placement.
The “home page” is typically not “critical” for SEO, as you want your “post” to rank higher than your home page for a specific story, including the title and excerpt, so causing them to fight each other is un-wise.
I only speak as an SEO expert having been building websites since March 1995, and widely interviewed on SEO topics by Entrepreneur, PCWorld, Monster.com, etc. And we had a highly successful SEO business for 10 years with over 2 million #1 positions in Google and Yahoo for our clients. And, oh yeah, I have two Harvey Measurement Awards for “most responsive advertising,” and a design award from Apple Computer, Inc. for marketing campaigns for Apple retail products in California, and built Oprah Winfrey’s ecom solution for her “Begin with Love” video series; but what the hell do I know?
TagDiv does provide the tools to add H1 tags to any home page and it should be up to any theme user / site developer to manage their own SEO practices. It could be needlessly confusing to have a built in H1 element on the home page template as there is no default home page template technically, since the presumption is you would be “rolling your own.” So this would require yet another set of code to check if home page and insert something in header, have toggles for on/off, and remove code for those doing their own H1 placement as we have done with WP for 10 years now. Frankly if folks can’t be aware of SEO for their own site, they are generally not that worried about it — and these are often same folk not reading the WP codex to learn how to set permalinks, etc.
One might also argue it’s useful to inspect the demo of a theme before buying it, then using it, then posting numerous times how bad it is or buggy, vs. requesting possible changes politely?
These are just my thoughts, having used Newspaper for almost 2 years now, and have great traffic, great SEO, and placement in Google News, Bing News, and syndicated worldwide through major information systems like LexisNexis, etc.
But that’s just me. Your mileage, as in all things, will vary.
Yoast SEO has had numerous bugs, check the changelog sometime to see how many bugs they have had. My contention was simply that using Yoast SEO as a “comparator” to anything else related to bugs, is not a good metric.
Total number of changelog items is clearly not a good metric for determining how buggy software is. There’s no way for a developer to anticipate how their software will work once it’s installed in a million websites. Without an analysis of the major releases, subsequent point releases, and any discovered negative impacts to the entire user base, you can’t just call WordPress SEO plugin “buggy”.
H1 is useful on home page; H2 also useful for topical elements such as section heads, but not so much for story heads ad they are ephemeral; meaning, they change daily, so they are not sticky and therefore not relevant to long-term, long-tail SERPS placement.
Blocks/modules that contain “featured content” or “most popular posts” can live on the home page indefinitely. I would argue that most niche site home pages do not change daily. If someone adds new content every day, they are likely more “authority” or “news” than “niche”. Niche sites rely on on-page SEO more heavily than authority or news sites.
If my homepage contains an H1 containing “Best Sprocket Reviews – SprocketReview.com” and an H2 link containing “Samsung Turbo Sprocket Review”, does this provide zero SEO benefit to my article in your opinion?
I only speak as an SEO expert having been building websites since March 1995… but what the hell do I know?
That’s all great but in this thread you suggested that short posts don’t rank, missing alt tags I defined are not a theme concern, 800-1200 word original content in lieu of on-page SEO is adequate for “the best SEO”, and H1 & H2 do not provide the benefit on homepages and archives to warrant adding them to the theme. I don’t think SEOs would agree with this.
Having the theme selectively add H1 to the home page is not as hard as you make it out to be. In one of my themes it’s accomplished with a single IF statement.
Having the theme add H1 and H2 to the home page and archive pages will help more users than it would hurt. Almost all of the sites listed on page one of the showcase thread are missing H1 and H2 on their home and archive pages. Sure, we can say that these users are responsible for knowing and correcting their own SEO. Or, the theme can help users who don’t know any better. The latter option is clearly better than the former.
One might also argue it’s useful to inspect the demo of a theme before buying it…
I actually mentioned the header issues to TagDiv before buying the theme (5/4 email). I purchased the theme anyway because I liked it and planned to pursue getting the SEO issues fixed. TagDiv has added the H1, H2, and Alt Tag issues to the list so, so far so good. I’ll be running more SEO tests on the theme when I get time.
…then using it, then posting numerous times how bad it is or buggy, vs. requesting possible changes politely?
I never said Newspaper was bad or buggy. To the contrary, in this very thread I said “I love the theme”, I said Newspaper was “awesome” and I said Newspaper “is not buggy”. All of my replies to TagDiv have been polite. You are clearly mischaracterizing what I said.
All this effort to block adding two HTML tags to a WordPress theme. Geez…
Newspaper is awesome wordpress theme with a lot of features. But it is not good for SEO indeed. In home page, You should have h1 and h2 tags. It is good for a well established site. But not good for beginners. You can’t rank higher in google despite of a lot of efforts to SEO. Specially, When i use this theme home page doesn’t appear in google search. But when i use another theme, Everything seems fine. It is very clear that it has SEO issue. But i don’t know why some peoples are still arguing.
Hi,
AS you know SEO takes a bit of study and effort to get right. Improvements have been made and will still be made in the future with every update. Since the last reply on this topic (since July) there have been a decent amount of updates that improve SEO rankings. Unfortunately not all SEO issues posted here have been resolved but we are getting there. We are working on adding improvements for the next version as well, but as Chris states above, It’s not entirely up to the theme. Most of the optimization needed for SEO can be done manually even if the theme has no specific setting applied automatically. SEO Yoast also has seen some improvements since then and they have even created a very comprehensive tutorial, ‘the definitive SEO guide’: https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/
The bottom line is, the theme itself is not enough for SEO. The theme helps with a few features and these will get improved over time but everyone needs to optimize their own site to obtain better rankings.
Thank you!
@Bogdan B.,
Newspaper is the most functional AND visually appealing theme I’ve ever tested. Most themes are one or the other. Newspaper is both. Unfortunately, until the SEO issues are resolved, I can’t use this theme.
The last time I checked Newspaper’s HTML5 implementation, it didn’t appear to be 100%. In the thread below I suggested some HTML5 changes:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/feature-requests-and-suggested-improvements/
Here’s another thread questioning Newspaper’s HTML5 implementation:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/newspapers-html5-outline-does-not-seem-right/
If these HML5 issues still exist, it’s going to be harder to rank pages with this theme compared to ranking the same content in another theme that implements HTML5 correctly. With the same content and same optimized on-page SEO, Newspaper caused my organic results to drop.
This stuff isn’t hard to fix. You just need someone with proven experience with SEO, ranking pages, and theme development to review Newspaper.
I’m not posting this to give you grief. I genuinely would like to see the SEO improvements done so that I can use this theme again.
Of note, most of the top selling themes on Theme Forest have HTML5, header tag, and/or alt tag issues when I checked last year. One of the top themes was <H1> multiple times on a post and was using <H2> in the sidebar! lol
If you don’t mind me asking, what theme are you currently using which rates highly for SEO?
Our sites rank at top of SERPS with TagDiv themes and we generate $200K annual revenue. So, works for us 🙂
I don’t want to advertise other themes here as that would be rude. 🙂 Send me a message on twitter: @TechRanker.
As others have said, the theme alone doesn’t achieve SEO success for you. You need to know how to do keyword research, how to analyze the competition, how to configure Yoast SEO properly, and how to create SEO optimized articles. This all assumes you have a good niche (i.e. you’re not writing bout Palm Pilots. 🙂 ).
Btw @Kevin,
I see in another post that your site is: https://godhelpusall.com. According to SEM Rush, you aren’t ranking for any competitive keywords:
https://www.semrush.com/info/godhelpusall.com
SEM Rush doesn’t track all keywords but not ranking any competitive keywords could indicate that you should look into your SEO practices.
Hi, it wouldn’t be rude to state the theme that you are using as comparison to Newspaper for SEO!
There have been many claims and counter claims but no one seems willing to state the name of these ‘magical’ themes which Newspaper is compared to.
I am sure tagdiv wouldn’t mind being able to face it’s accuser!
At the least it would allow the tagdiv team to look it’s competition in the eye, so to speak.
Personally I have no issues with Newspaper concerning SEO, but that is just my 2 cents worth.
Kevin
Hi,
Sorry I think you misunderstood the last message.
I am only interested in what theme or themes you are comparing Newspaper to!
Think it is only fair!
Don’t you?
