Try the theme panel under the “posts” options – should be option to turn that on/off ?

and of course my handy dandy suggestions for speeeeed can be found here:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/tutorial-chriss-custom-optimizations-for-functions-php-etc/

@gregy1403
Wonderful! 🙂

Test one of your post pages at GTmetrix.com as this will give you very good beginner instructions on what/how to fix the basic stuff — much better than Google’s help (or lack thereof). 🙂

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.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

FYI… some of what rocket loader does is also built into the next generation of http which is children of mod_pagespeed and mod_SPDY … mod_SPDY is awesome because it also “packages the page” then sends out one file and caches it, vs multiple files and whatnot. Been testing this awhile with our https site and pretty freaking amazing. 🙂

Lots of great solutions out there, but they all need A/B testing to see what works best for you.

Would be great if Radu did a tutorial at some point on how to optimize site with CF since that does seem to be getting to be super popular this year.

@Thalisson

Try my updated thread as good reference:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/tutorial-chriss-custom-optimizations-for-functions-php-etc/

Try rebuilding your permalinks from the wordpress admin panel.
You can also set the specific /path/to/your/media/folder in the wp-config.php file.

It’s in the admin settings for the theme.
See link to documentation, right side this page (on desktop) >>>>

Or, link in top menu on mnobile.

You’re welcome to your opinion. As I am to mine. Have a nice day.

Typically these load in sidebar; so you choose the sidebar under appearance > widgets, add the items to that sidebar, then load that sidebar on the post where it will show the widgets containing in that specific sidebar.

Try disabling the lazy loading option.

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 (!).

Might try
a) clearing chrome cache completely (MUST be done manually)
b) hit F5 / refresh when on your admin screen.

Sometimes works for me with weirdo ajax stuff in Chrome.

Well, A/B testing would suggest you go back to the prior version and see what happens, right ?

Google is constantly messing with SERPS; and simple things like relational links, inbound links, popularity of content, originality of content, paid adwords promoting your site, all can impact the placement.

Losing traffic is one issue; losing keyword placement may not be, as this is now constantly in flux unlike old days where I could keep a top 3 position for 5 years on any keyphrase.

This is also particularly true if you’re in Google News as they are REALLY messing with SERPS related to news items; promoted for 7 days, then seemingly buried in organics for awhile, then they come back up. Weirdness. Regardless of theme or theme version, in our case.

I would try reverting to prior version to do a proper A/B test for the differential if you think the theme version is in any way related to the change.

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

I have this issue with IE11/Win7-64; it’s an issue with ajax overload/caching in some browsers where the “state” seems to be in the browser, but lost on the save phase. Not unique to this theme, sadly.

Seems no issue with Chrome on Windows and Mac, oddly enough.

So you might try using Chrome if not using it already as it seems better able to maintain the transient states and then actually communicate the save to the WP panel.

That is a broad explanation, I’m sure somebody else may have a more technical one if you want it, but that’s the issue I’ve run into updating our news sites regularly. I’ve basically found with some WP admin stuff, only Chrome works consistently.

Did you assign the default sidebar to that page.
Did you drag a module to that sidebar under appearance > widgets ?

Best place to start is to create new blank page, name it something like newhome

then create a simple ‘row’ and do something like

[ 2 col ] [ 1 col ]

then put a module in the 2 col slot, and sidebar in 1 col slot.
Save, preview.

You can move the row up / down later, and add more rows.

To make that live, you would set the page name as the new static page from the WP settings.

You can also watch the tutorial from the theme docs.

That should not cause issues as it simply removes the ? version numbers. Of course if you’re using something like a CDN or cloudflare (no idea never used it) which “requires” versioning, then obviously you would not want to use that.

You might try changing the priority from “10” to something else.

$priority (integer) (optional) Used to specify the order in which the functions associated with a particular action are executed. Lower numbers correspond with earlier execution, and functions with the same priority are executed in the order in which they were added to the filter. Default: 10

So, in your case with your particular setup, you might try changing it to 15 and see if it works.
I’ve not run into any issues with ANY theme using that code, so would be surprised if it breaks the latest Newsmag; unless another plugin is running to ALSO try to remove the “?=123” stuff.

(FYI: I don’t work here; just a ‘friend’ who sometimes lurks around and pokes people virtually when they are not looking …. *POKE!* ) 🙂

For the sidebar I just add a text block above the Google ad boxes with

– advertisement –

I use custom CSS to wrap in div with small size and centered-text.

You don’t have to do this for Google policies. What you CANNOT do is put word “sponsors” ! You will get warning for that.

Hi
I have not yet updated to NM 2.0 …
I will be doing so soon; and will post *updated* code for bottom of functions.php file. Not tested with child them, nor will I. 🙂

Note the things which are “safe” to use are those which modify the general WordPress core stuff, like removing versions, adding warning for those trying to guess login, changing default compression, emoji removal.

Don’t use Thomas’ long winded block of stuff for htaccess; as most of that has nothing to do with me and seems related to his optimization third party service doing stuff – some of which looks redundant to me.

Bryson T’s “slim” summary from July 2 in this thread, above, would be safe place to start.

Always remember to clear *all* your caching couple of times so you’re not loading old/new CSS and functions!

This usually happens if
a) you don’t have enough memory allocated to WP
b) you’re trying to use a file format not supported by WP media manager
c) trying to use local image thumbnail generation at same time as external tool like Jetpack photon
d) trying to use site through a rewrite service like Cloudflare, etc.
e) bad file naming — like more than one dot, spaces, high ascii characters, missing file extension, etc.

Andrei is from TagDiv …

seems like you want to
a) uninstall demo content
b) install demo “styles” and *NOT* the content.
c) then customize for your desired layout.

I had issues with the FV Top Level plugin also, but that’s just me … I like to try to break stuff !!!! 😉