my first website, technical issues i cannot solve

seo technical issue in a new website

[nnrodrigag]

Several months ago, I created my first website from scratch so I could implement SEO actions and learn from my mistakes and successes. I haven't had much time to pay attention to it in the past, but now I do. I have a good knowledge about SEO in general, but not about the technical side of website development (that's why I decided to start this site, to learn), but this problem is eating my head up. While I know the site has a huge gap for improvement in terms of SEO, I think there's a more serious underlying technical problem I can't quite pinpoint.

My site is a personal blog. Over the past few months, I've received between 100 and 200 impressions per day and an average of 2 to 5 daily clicks. I also see my landing pages duplicated and not updated when I search for my site with the site command in the SERPs, I also just realized that I have 2 robots.txt, one for example.com and another for www.example.com (it should be one)

I would like to know if someone with technical experience could help me understand what the possible problem could be.

thank you community!

[tangor]

@nnrodrigag... Welcome to Webmasteworld!

Your site references will be edited out by the mods (see TOS). If you want a site review you can join the paid subscriber side of Webmasterworld.

HOWEVER, short observation is you build a site to engage an audience, not SEO. Have content worth finding and go from there. As for two robots.txt the obvious answer is to have ONLY ONE ... and robots.txt is not even mandatory and is often ignored by THE ROBOTS.

Are you using a packaged site build (WordPress for example)? If so, RTFM to see how to set it up correctly to avoid getting duplicative pages.

Meanwhile, glad to have you!

[nnrodrigag]

@tangor thanks for your answer! i will check the TOS and Webmasterworld subscription also

But yes, its a Wordpress and i made it by following youtube videos because i coudnt find a proper explanation from 0 to build it (at least one that with my knowledge i could do it). But its also true that there are a lot of 'how to build a website using wordpress' tutorials and usually all of them are not 100% clear, so probably i made mistakes during the process. I will try to reach it and read the manual to see if i find a solution

Thanks again!

[lucy24]

ymmv, but I exempt robots.txt from all canonicalization redirects. That means it doesn't matter whether they request
http://example.com/robots.txt
or
https://www.example.com/robots.txt
or any other permutation; they'll be served the file at the originally requested URL. I started doing this because some robots seemed to get confused if a robots.txt request was redirected--and why give them any excuse to say they couldn't access it.

[not2easy]

Hello nnrodrigag and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Sorry, but as tangor mentioned, we don't discuss actual sites in the public forums here, we use example.com to explain URL issues.

WordPress sites only use one URL, the one you entered when it was installed - either www or non-www. You can see which one you selected in your WP Admin panel for Settings, under "WordPress Address (URL)" and "Site Address (URL)" because some WP sites have a site and then add WP in later.

In our WordPress forum: [webmasterworld.com...] you can find much more about proper settings and how it works. The Charter there: [webmasterworld.com...] includes a link to the WP plugins Repository where you can find links to learn what you need to know at WP.org: [learn.wordpress.org...]

Best WP advice I ever saw was "don't rely on plugins for everything".

For your benefit, that welcome link above offers tips on using the forums' features and settings. You're welcome.

PS - to have accurate sitemaps, most WP sites use the Yoast plugin to generate the sitemaps - it is reliable and free. Don't try to index each post as they will be in multiple URL variations and could be seen as duplicates.

[nnrodrigag]

thanks everyone for your answers and suggestions (sorry for my first post)! i will check the info and links you share!

[Kendo]

most WP sites use the Yoast plugin to generate the sitemaps

Wow! It wasn't that long ago that we had to customise our WordPress templates to add and populate meta description and keywords dynamically.

[explorador]

Hi, welcome nnrodrigag.

I'm not sure if my comment will make sense to you and the readers, or if it has the potential to be pushed for debate for it's validity, but I do believe I have good reasons to say the following.

- Yes, I understand you are doing this to learn and improve.
- Yes, it's clear you wan to expand your tech knowledge
- And yes, Wordpress

You can build a website using Wordpress, yes on a personal hosting service, and yes on a Wordpress platform. And yes you can earn money and make a life building websites using Wordpress.

But...

In terms of general learning, there is a risk of starting as a webmaster trying to learn the concepts and technical aspects, and ending up learning how to tweak Wordpress. <----- Mmmm that's very different, and very limited. There is a difference between becoming a webmaster and just learning Wordpress.

Doing everything by hand takes work. Coding your own solutions to manage your website requires more work, and using openly available tools as CMS is an alternative, but Wordpress is too niche, and puts too much effort on trying to do everything for you pushing you then to learning the preferences and plugins. I believe that's quite limiting. If you don't have too many articles, you can do this yourself using pure HTML, it's just an option. There you gain full knowledge of what the pages should output to the browser and search engines, I believe this is easier first, and then you have already gained the concepts to do the same using platforms. The other way around ends up "becoming a Wordpress user-guru", and that's very different.

The difference is... one way allows you to discuss the concepts.

The other path pushes you to keep asking "where do I do this on Wordpress? what' the preference I have to change? what's the plugin I have to install?"