A WordPress SEO Infographic That You Should Not Follow

Infographic is one of the latest internet marketing trend to gain exposure and earn quality backlinks to your website. These days, every company is launching an infographic to take advantage of this easiest method of promotion. To create a great infographic all you need is :

• Great design
• A layout
• Stats-Figures and present them in a readable way

From a user perspective, an infographic works like a checklist and very handy for future reference. From a blogger perspective, it’s a free quality content which get lots of social media sharing and bookmarking. So in short, it’s a win-win situation for everyone. At the same time, it’s a blogger responsibility to confirm if the information provided into the infographic is accurate or not. If not, one should always ignore such eye catchy graphical image, because it’s as good as a shining glitter. When it comes to search engine optimization, no information is always better than a wrong information. Today, while stumbling the web, I came across aWordPress SEO infographic, which is graphically appealing, and I find it very interesting to share with you, along with a message. Let me share the WordPress SEO infographic which caught my attention, and made me write this post.

Now, you must be wondering what’s wrong with this elegant looking info graphic by Rightway Solution. Well, this infographic is an outcome of half baked knowledge, which can put you in serious SEO issues for long.

Those who have basic or more than basic knowledge of SEO can easily understand what this infographic is trying to say.

• Use WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin
• Use W3 Total cache plugin
• Use Social share plugin.
• Use quality content (Don’t ignore the branding and focus on SEO expert part)
• Disallow category and tag pages in Robots.txt .. Wait…..Wait….

Alright, this is where I stopped reading this infographic because it made me realize this infographic is just for the marketing purpose and serves zero value. Now let me explain in technical details:

Effect of blocking WordPress Tags and categories via Robots.txt:

Robots.txt file is a critical part of any website (be it WordPress, static site or any other). Using Robots.txt file, you control the crawling of bots. That means, if you don’t want certain part of your blog to be crawled by search engine bots (For example admin pages, database page), you do it from robots.txt. You don’t really use it for No-indexing of a content (Apart from certain situation). For noindexing a content, we use noindex meta tag, which is suggested by all major search engines including Google.

From official Google page:

While Google won’t crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web. As a result, the URL of the page and, potentially, other publicly available information such as anchor text in links to the site, or the title from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), can appear in Google search results.

Tags and categories archive might not be very useful for search engines in post-panda world (as it’s add into low quality pages), but they are very useful for user experience, content navigation and also for deep-indexing of your website. Now, when you block Tags and categories archive using robots.txt, that means you stopping bots to crawl those pages. Now here are few problem with this:

• Search engine bots will not follow or try to crawl tags and archive pages. This will hamper deep-indexing of your blog.
• If tags and categories pages from your blog are part of web-index, and you have added noindex meta tag to deindex it, search engine bots will never be able to deindex it, as they will not crawl the pages to see the meta tags.

In short you are hampering over all SEO of your WordPress blog, and you will end up hurting your blog ranking more rather than improving it, and all credit goes to one wrong SEO infographic. Since, infographic usually goes viral on social-media, you can imagine how many people might end up following it, and un-intentionally end up doing more bad than doing good for their blog organic ranking. This infographic is published on wikimotive, which is quote popular  blog and have a huge fan-base.

Point 6 could be useful only when you are quickly trying to deindex tags/categories page, and the process is:

• You block tags/categories archive using robots.txt
• Remove the entire archive directory from Web-index using Google Webmaster tool
• And once links are removed from web-index, remove those lines from robots.txt and use noindex tag.

Lessons learned:

I’m sure you must have heard “All that glitters is not gold”, and this holds true in the world of online marketing. A good infographic is not only judged by the look and design of it, but from the information provided on it.

• When it comes to SEO advices, never rely on an unreliable source, or a source which can’t reason out.

Most importantly: When ever you are making any SEO change on your blog, make sure that you know what you are doing, and what implications it will have on your blog. If you are unsure, it’s better to do nothing rather than doing something ugly. I have nothing against Rightway Solutions, but being a WordPress blogger, it’s my job to guide you in the right direction.  My suggestion to such infographic maker is, add value with infographics, don’t make it just for the sake of it. This article is intended to warn you against all such information on net, which can do more harm than any good.

Even if you are sharing this Image in Pinterest or Facebook, make sure you add comment which says “A WordPress SEO infographic that you should never follow“