SEO on blog which uses widgets for homepage content

[onlinesource]

*** Sorry for such a long post. I'm confused myself. ***

I spoke with a SEO company last week who did a little evaluation on my blog and noticed that Google is not scanning my homepage for whatever reason. They scan other posts/pages without an issue but the homepage does not appear for any keywords.

What I've noticed is when you create a new post or page in Wordpress, you have a clearly defined title and content for the post/page. Google knows, this is the title and that is the content. Simple. Even if the header, footer and sidebars never change on each page, the title and the content is still unique to each post/page.

Anyway, I use a WooCommerce friendly theme by WooThemes which first had me set Settings > Reading > Your latest posts. Then the theme uses widgets for homepage content. I have one widget that is a slideshow, another with featured products, etc. I essentially go to Appearance > Widgets and add to the Homepage sidebar with the widgets I want.

The majority of my homepage text is in a text widget. When I view my homepage source, I have a single <h1> tag along with the rest of the content on the homepage which is placed inside a div (ie: <div id="content" class="col-full">) which leads me to believe the content even though it is coming from homepage widgets it is being labeled as "content". I just have my doubts about that.

You see, lately I've installed another plugin which is suppose to scan my homepage and suggest titles, meta descriptions, etc. I allowed the plugin to optimize my homepage on it's own. When I first asked it to scan my homepage, it focused in on the Recent Posts widget in the footer of my site. Assuming the last post was titled something like, "How to find fancy stuff online", it's suggestion for a homepage title was "How to find fancy stuff online". The problem is that the post and the post title are not unique to the homepage because the article feed appears on every single page and post of my website, so why was it focusing on articles in the footer for content suggestions and not the actual homepage content?

Then it got me thinking, so I removed the Recent Posts widget and asked it to scan again. I figured it would force it to find SEO suggestions elsewhere. This time, it's suggestion for a homepage title was... ARTICLES! That's it, just the word "ARTICLES". What in the world? It even suggested the canonical url should be mysite.com/articles which I don't believe is even an active url.

In the end, what I realize is that in my settings, Wordpress is set as Settings > Reading > Your latest posts. This means that because it's set to show posts that suggesting ARTICLES or first looking for posts or articles is likely an appropriate SEO target, correct? I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I set Settings > Reading > A static page, that static page would have a definite title and content where as the latest posts tells Google to look for my latest posts which don't exist since the Woo theme is overriding the recent posts to instead display widget content. I also believe that widget content is looked at as sidebar content which is not unique and therefore devalued.

I hope this makes a bit of sense? :)

Has anybody else tried to use widgets for homepage content and had problems with Google or other bots? It makes sense to me that it would cause major problems.

[not2easy]

It sounds like a case of a plugin that thought it understood what you wanted and decided that the widget is your most recent post. There are good plugins and lousy plugins, they are not all friendly with all themes and some don't play well with others. Be very choosy about the plugins you use, and look for recommendations from people whose judgement you trust - preferably people who are using the plugin.

If your settings are set as described:
Settings > Reading > Your latest posts
then the home page is supposed to show your most recent posts. You do have new posts that should be showing, right? You can set it to show one or two or whatever you like, you can show snippets of your most recent posts with a link to read more, but if a widget in your sidebar is occupying the front page, something isn't set right somewhere. I would suspect the setting for the widget is for it to use a single column page (without any sidebar)and if that was done by the plugin, I would try to see if I could edit the post or page that was created. Check your settings again, too, it may have changed your setting based on your request.

<div id="content" class="col-full"> The "content" in this case is the css id of the div that contains the content, though that content could be anything. The "col-ful" class is very likely a one column page layout. Most themes have a "normal" or default page that includes a sidebar and also a one column page for when you want pages without a sidebar. For your widget to appear in the sidebar, it would need to be installed in the sidebar, not in a post or page. I would not use a widget (usually a script of some sort) for the main page content.

Too many unknowns here for me to give you a better answer.

[onlinesource]

I'm going to run a test for a week or two by using a page for my homepage instead of recent posts. See if Google likes it better.

As far as Settings > Reading > Your latest posts, yes it should show my most recent posts. That is normal. My theme will instead show whatever I ask it to show in the theme settings and I can also add homepage content by way of widgets.

Basically my theme uses a Widgetized Homepage for content on the homepage instead of an article feed or page content. I think it is causing problems.

Their website warns me:

Please note! Using the Appearance > Widgets – Homepage widget area will automatically override the default homepage modules and settings once you add a widget into the Homepage widget area.

I think that is my problem.

I'm hoping switching to a page for the homepage will help. I think if you tell Wordpress to show articles or posts, then it expects to see posts but the plugin is kind of hiding the articles to make room for widget content.

[not2easy]

Yes, I think you are moving in the right direction. This:

Please note! Using the Appearance > Widgets – Homepage widget area will automatically override the default homepage modules and settings once you add a widget into the Homepage widget area.

explains the peculiar behavior that I had thought might be due to plugin/theme incompatibility. I have used a static home page for years on a few sites and they have not had problems.

[onlinesource]

@not2easy. I normally use recent posts and it works well but I think this widgetized homepage that Woo uses is causing problems because it's simply covering up the recent posts for widgets but Google is still looking for posts and not finding any.