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. :-/

Thanks Bryson. I will try both plugins you mentioned.

Regarding #4, I know SEOs are mixed on the importance of bounce rate and behavior flow. I like to believe that a site visitor clicking through several pages is a strong user signal to Google. I don’t think it can hurt.

I was also hoping to use some Amazon CPM ads in the slider since Amazon doesn’t forbid this behavior, at least the last time I checked. I don’t know if these ads can be refreshed via java script so I’ll probably use the Theia Post Slider and do a full page refresh. At least I’ll get the BleacherReport.com behavior I’m interested in.

This happens when you use a CDN. I fixed this issue a while back. If I remember, I went to the W3 Total Cache CDN settings page and removed *.css and/or *.js from one of the fields there.

There’s probably a better solution. I never spent time to find out.

Backup your settings before you change them.

The free version of seo friendly images is no longer supported. Many people are saying that it no longer works:
https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/seo-image?filter=1

Alin,

Another theme I use detects when the current page is the home page and uses H1 on the logo image and on hidden/covered text containing the site title and tagline. When the current page is not the home page, it replaces H1 with H2.

I see this code in header.php:

<?php if( is_home() || is_front_page() ) echo '<h1>'; else echo '<h2>'; ?>

Any chance that this can be added to a future theme update? Yes, manually adding a text block is a simple solution but the majority of people buying your theme doesn’t know that they need to do this.

Regarding H2, perhaps the header tag can be a selectable attribute on the VC blocks. Perhaps on your demo stacks, you can by default select the H2 header for blocks on the home page and archive pages. This way, users can get H1 and H2 on the home page and archive pages out of the box. Any thoughts?

I use the Yoast SEO plugin to strip “category” from the URL. On two occasions, a plugin update broke my categories. To resolve, I uncheck this setting, saved settings, re-check the setting, and then saved again.

Be sure to check a few posts and category pages after ever Yoast pluging update (and after any plugin update).

Kecodoc,

I’m guessing the challenge with putting H2 in the home page blocks is that those same blocks are used on other pages where you don’t want them to contain H2.

As Alin suggested, you can add a text block to your home page that contains H1.

Regarding H2 on the home page and archive pages, I personally haven’t decided what to do yet. I want to use Newspaper on one of my money sites but I don’t want to drastically change the on pages SEO of my archive pages, some of which rank in Google.

Can there be an option in a future theme update to allow HTML in the bios? This way we don’t have to re-edit page-author-box.php in the future.

If the setting could be set for specific users (or, turned on by default for admins only) that would be awesome.

Never mind. I found the Formats menu.