What WordPress gets wrong most often
Tag, author and date archives are generated automatically and are often thin. Left indexable, they compete with the articles and can outnumber them.
Media attachment pages are indexable by default in many setups, so every uploaded image adds an empty page to the index.
The theme appends the site name or a tagline to every title, so a blog with 300 posts has 300 titles that differ only in the middle and all truncate the same way.
Paginated archive pages are sometimes canonicalised to page one, which tells search engines the later pages do not exist and hides the posts on them.
Search and parameter URLs (?s=, ?attachment_id=) are crawlable and waste the crawl budget that should be spent on articles.
The checks that matter most on WordPress
- Title and meta descriptionTitles that all end the same way, and missing descriptions on archives.
- Heading structureA missing H1 on archive pages, or several H1s where each post title is one.
- Near-duplicate contentArchive and tag pages whose titles and descriptions overlap the articles.
- Page indexabilityAttachment, tag and author URLs that should be noindexed.
- FreshnessWhat the newest sitemap lastmod says about how current the site is.
- Broken linksDead links after slug changes or a theme migration.
What to do about it
- Noindex tag, author and date archives unless one of them is a deliberate landing page you want ranked.
- Turn off attachment pages, or noindex them, so an image upload does not create an indexable page.
- Stop the theme appending the site name to every title, or at least cap the total length below the truncation point.
- Make every paginated archive page self-canonical and link the sequence so later posts can be discovered.
- Block internal search and parameter patterns in robots.txt and noindex them.
A typical WordPress failure, worked through
The setupA blog has 40 tags and 12 authors. Every archive is indexable and uses the theme default title, which appends the site name. Nothing is wrong with any single page.
What the check reportsThe site crawl reports duplicate titles across the archive pages, and the similarity check groups the tag archives because their titles and descriptions describe the same broad topic as the articles.
The pointThe problem is the set, not the page. Noindexing the archives in one settings change removes the duplicates at once.