You should contact your hosting provider if you suspect a virus or malware on your website, as that is unrelated to the theme, and should be addressed immediately if your website is compromised in some way.

Also, remove any suspect plugins which are not included with the theme, as some plugins are known to be easily hacked, or are released online outside of the official WordPress.org repository, and may be malware themselves.

Stupid thing about it, is the og tags are expressly there for Facebook to be able to grab the image.

Worth mentioning you need to ensure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking the /uploads/ folder or other folder if you renamed yours (I renamed mine as I hate “uploads”).

Boxed version still works for me.

I think you can do most of that with the YOAST SEO plugin, if you’re asking about rich snippets not already supported by theme, or special tags like category “section” tags and whatnot. Might be good place to start. Don’t know about changing the search URLs, though, since you generally don’t want those to be permanent links. I think the latest YOAST adds the search hinting for Google, but haven’t gotten into that yet.

My pleasure.

When I was learning this stuff a lot of people helped me, so I’m paying that forward as they say 🙂

Simply remove it from the functions.php file.
Pretty easy for a competitor who knows what they’re doing to figure out the theme name unless you’re renaming theme, and all the style classes.

And, also remember that for any such pages to rank, they ideally need to be linked to from external sites/pages organically, and not many people quoting your post would link to interstitial pages which don’t provide as much value.

I think what you’re trying to do will cause more problems, as you want the POST to rank, not stuff SERPS with extra landing pages, generally.

Remember the “new Google” is no longer about “keywords” but about “answers to questions” and short snippets would not be seen as a detailed answer to a question somebody was asking.

Creating multiple categories isn’t a bad thing, but normally a post wouldn’t fit into five or more categories; often a normal practice for a post might be something like
main category (og tag section) – e.g., books
secondary category – e.g., fiction
third category – science fiction

but you wouldn’t add MORE categories like paperback, US publications, ebook, kindle edition, nook edition, etc. — as that only dilutes the experience.

Put another way, you might as well just use “tags” … so as to not compete with the main site categories.

I use custom excerpts all the time; in fact if you use the YOAST SEO tool, you can create custom excerpt which is better for SEO and better summarizes your post, without it being a simple redo of the first paragraph, which sometimes doen’t fully spell out WHAT the post is about.

Hope that helped 🙂

Well, yes, obviously it’s not a good idea to create additional indexes for your content which have different info from the text to try to have those pages rank in search results; this is same issue people have with creating 20 tags for a post also. It creates a ton of content which only competes with the actual post and can sometimes rank higher than the post which is not desirable.

Obviously, you should be using the normal methodologies of having a post be the main focus of your content, and then linking to that from normal home page, normal category pages, and having those category pages linking to the posts.

My answer was based on if you are doing something for a specific reason other than link framing or SERPS “stuffing” simply for ease of use in user access, then YES, doing a no-index for these extra special pages you’re creating to show content excerpts in a different way should be done to avoid SEO penalty, but doing those pages will not HELP your SEO, as the person was saying in that forum.

Ideally, you should follow normal practice for SEO of having categories which highlight the normal “excerpts” for the posts; and then create custom excerpts which get loaded into the normal category structures, home page, date archives, etc.

Hope that made sense.

1) backup data
2) switch to twenty-fourteen theme or similar; clear cache(s), CDN caches, etc.
3) delete the wpbakery folder in the old theme if running pre 4.0 Newspaper theme; delete entire theme folder ideally
4) update to new 4.2+ theme if not already done; upload new theme folder into wp-content/themes/
5) install the VC plugin into the plugins folder; not into the theme folder; activate plugin
6) select theme, activate
7) check site; you may need to reselect widgets to refresh them
8) resave permalinks if needed
9) restart cache/CDN if all working

Anecdotal:
I will be trying to hook my blog up to Google Site Search (paid version), the simple way
1) remove search from menu bar
2) custom widget using code from Google, top of sidebar

If anybody wants to try that the “easy way,” there is help in the forum on “hiding” the search box from the main menu, and then you could simply create a text box widget, and drop in the code from Google Site Search.

QED, as my dad used to say 🙂

Try this link from Facebook, enter your post page URL in box,
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

if you get “502” error, it may be the firewall blocking issue, and you’d likely want to contact your web hosting co. about that.

We have to unblock our CSF temp files manually about once a month for stupid FB port scans!

Additional FB tools
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

If you’re desperate for Pinterest support and can’t code the hack yourself, you can always use something like AddThis, which is a plugin we’ve used quite a bit the past several years, and has support for specifying just the share buttons you want, sizes, and location, as well as a new “cumulative shares” which people seem to like.

Facebook just works that way as their bot gets overloaded; or your server is blocking them, or any of a number of things. I deal with this issue every day; in fact today, to post two news items to our page, I had to manually copy the headline, first paragraph, and manually upload the photo from my PC to get a proper post on Facebook for a new item. Stupid. And all the og tags are in place, right down to advanced tags like image format, height, width and optional https link to image. Still, hit or miss. And this happens with our custom site, Woo Canvas, Newspaper, and another theme. All somewhat randomly.

Suggestion: try to submit item later. Or, if in panic, do the post manually as I did.

Downside to a ‘free’ service like Facebook, there is nobody to complain to our get support from on their end. It’s basically haphazard.

Right now, one page is causing 502 error according to their debug tool… but every other social media site works, even LinkedIn and Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Twitter card with large image support, etc.

Just let your client know it’s nothing to do with the site. Both Google + and Facebook both have intermittent issues of “grabbing” the content due to how busy their servers are (basically the “fetch” is timing out in some way); or in some cases your hosting provider’s CSF/firewall has blocked Facebook for “port scanning” (FB scans your server port for Geolocation on every post to try to locate where your server is; if you do a lot of posts, eventually, your server blocks them for doing this with 30 different IP addresses; and you have to clear the CSF temp block rules to get the stupid FB bot to again be able to read your site!). Stuff like that!

Just and fyi, there is a difference between pages and posts; where “pages” are generally informational about a company, product, site, staff, et al; while “posts” are articles, opinion, and news.

So, generally you can assign a page to any category like “about us” where a new page is a subset of “about us” — meaning, “about us” can by default be a page category once you create child pages of the parent page. This is how WordPress has always worked to make simple PAGE categories, such as

About Us* (*parent page as menu to the pages on the site, where you add those onto page as links with/without images, etc.)
–> About Our Company
–> Business Hours
–> Our Staff
–> Contact Us
–> Locations

For posts you might have a category called
news
–> posts
|–> daily, weekly, monthly archives
|–> author page(s)
|–> tag pages

So, yes, it’s best to have main information pages as PAGES, but traditional posts which are news, articles, opinion, can certainly be done as posts, and still be perfect for SEO.

This is how YOAST does it on their site, also.

They are simply removing the post categories in URLs,
so this post
https://yoast.com/tracking-seo-google-analytics/
is actually not a page, but a post in the analytics category
https://yoast.com/cat/analytics/

Also, ideally you should use categories *or* tags for best SEO, not both.

While this may not help with your specific case, it might provide some more food for thought in case you’re over thinking your site framework.

Official support is sometimes the best support ! 😉

It’s an issue with how Facebook sometimes ‘scrapes’ content from your site, and more often when the “featured” image is outside of the actual “post” area. It’s a known issue, with FB, and comes and goes. It’s not specifically theme related. Meaning, they don’t always read the OG image tag like it’s supposed to.

Correct. If you “no index” a “category” page, they should not be indexed, but will still be “followed” unless you also state “no follow” as well. And yes, the posts linked to will still be indexed, but ideally you should be linking to them from some page which is indexed for best results.

e.g., category page -> link to post (no index)
e.g., sub category page -> link to post (indexed)

Really, you’re just doing the same thing which is common of not having the date archives indexed, eg., NOT indexing the daily “date” index of posts, for example.

I think I would agree that some kind of updated docs on how the responsive layouts work, if the only option now is “responsive” or “boxed if you choose a background color.”

While it’s “simpler” to be always on for responsive by default, it seems like a specific example of how it now works would be helpful (HINT: Marius and Lucian, etc.), if the options have been removed from the admin panel.

In theory the 970/1170 concept from BS3 makes sense, but most of the theme thus far has been built on the BS2 framework to keep the IE8 compatibility which BS3 just throws out the window.

Since this is a big concern for many, likely some kind of “how responsive works now” update to the docs would be super duper helpful!

I think the answer would be “yes” based on what you said above.

Well, something which is hidden based on the viewport shouldn’t be seen when Google spiders a page looking at the “desktop” version if the second menu isn’t active. If both menus are visible on the page then both versions being followed would be an issue; a menu intended for different viewport but not visible on desktop, would not be followed by the desktop spider as it’s not part of the active DOM.

I may be thinking of how v 4.2.2 menus work, not 4.3, so pardon me if I’m entirely missing the point on the concern 😉

Having a mobile menu, and then a completely different desktop menu, is about the only way you can have a mega menu and a slide out mobile menu on same page and also have that switch on a tablet by changing orientation which doesn’t reload the page.

Well, not in my experience with magazine sites the past 20 years, and owner of an SEO firm. If that were the case then CNN, LA Times, NY Times, BBC, etc., would not have duplicate links on their sites.

It’s primarily EXTERNAL links which you might be penalized for or “masked links” to the same pages, or DUPLICATE CONTENT – not duplicate links, and “spammy” links on words/phrases to a page.

For example “best cereal in town,” “world’s best breakfast cereal” as links and additional to a page would be bad for SERPS. Simply linking to “about us” three times on one page will not hurt your ranking, as how else would visitors find that content? If you have 40 pages, you might have 40 links in menu bar and again at bottom of page.

Remember the page being linked to should only exist ONCE, and that page should be the canonical link for that content. Linking to it three or four times from one page will not hurt your rankings.

Of course, you can simply test this, by doing an A/B split test, which is how people actually verify the concern, vs. speculation.

Back in 2009, 100 links per page was recommended limit; but that has since changed due to the fact Google’s bots are more sophisticated, and now use your XML sitemap quite extensively for spidering vs having to manually follow all your links from pages.

If Google divides the juice by the number of links, and you had 100 links, and 3 links to same page from home, then arguably that would be 3% of the juice, or perhaps only 1% for being the same link, or the it would be averaged to 30 links x 3 times each, might be 3.5% per link. But it doesn’t really work that way.

Main focus is great original content for the PAGE being linked to. That is the most important element for SERPS, not how many internal links point to a specific page.

But, your mileage may vary.

Having two sets of links to same items, does not impact search rank when they are internal vs external links. Many sites the past 20 years have had top menu links, then bottom of page or sidebar links to things, and this does not hurt “page rank.”

For example, having an “about us” link in the top bar, or link to “services” then a link at bottom of page to “services” doesn’t adversely hurt your ranking. Internal links are only counted once per page, regardless of how many links there are for any “juice.”

Think of a service page where you have a main navigation with links to your service offerings, then links in the middle for more info, links at bottom of page as roundup of site links. Obviously, Google won’t penalize you for linking to your own offerings for information and services, and/or articles.

This is similar to having a page with current news, and a “most popular” box on the sidebar; those links to the most popular stories don’t kill the value of that content in search.

Just some input on this topic. 🙂

I have a hunch they are moving to Bootstrap 3 break points, but not confirmed. Seems like there should be a setting for “responsive or boxed” … not sure where it is at the moment. I feel stupid 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Right. it’s not that simple. Perhaps Lucian or Marius will have an answer for you.

I believe the tags code can be found in the footer section of the loop-single.php file. This loads a function for the tags, which calls the meta array.

You can’t just call array and change to search since the data being pulled is from dbase and part of the core WP functions, not “created” by the theme.