Page Exclusions

1. How can I find if the website is being indexed? Is there a tool for this?


2. How can I exclude pages from being indexed? I know it involves using robots.txt file and adding no index tags on pages you don’t want indexed, but how can I apply both in WordPress?


3. Is it bad if I exclude all blog pages at a health professional website from being indexed as the blog posts are not related to his practice, just mostly personal hobbies, i.e., cooking? I notice all the organic keywords are coming from his blog posts, which is not what we want.

 

1. If you want to know if your domain is indexed, then paste the exact url to google search, and if it doesn't show up in first 3 - 5 results, then it is penalized. If You want to index a new site... then use webmaster tools for google & bing, submit sitemaps (xml sitemaps plugin is available for free), add google analytics...

2. Best way, without any knowledge is to instal all in one seo plugin... there You'll have on each post a set of options to choose (noindex, nofollow, disable seo for this post, and thousands more...)

3. If you have a lot of people coming and expecting to see tips about cooking... and they see something other.... You probably have big bounce rate, and small number of pageviews (which is something google considers in the algorithm)... then do something about it... it would be a shame to loose all those articles that are bringing traffic, but you have to sacrifice something... find some solution that will do what you want and minimize damages.

 

Wow, thank you Jacob, these responses are so helpful!

For #3, I guess it's ok to keep these articles for extra traffic boost, but should we stop writing about cooking and start focusing on the niche like his specialty in a blog?

 

That's your decision to make. If you can put somehow both things into one site(if they are closely related interests), then you can benefit from both. If your themes are not related, then You should pick one of those. Either already established cooking or the new theme...

In that case I would pick what's working and bring some extra effort on the conversion rate...