Major SEO Problem Discovered on WPEngine’s WordPress Hosting

WPengine—a company that offers hosting solutions for WordPress websites—is currently undergoing some controversy. This issue deals with how some older posts rank in search engine results. Dave Davies at Beanstalk Internet Marketing reported on this and details what it might mean for you.

WPEngine Past Page 9

Some websites have blogs with pages and pages of postings. Websites like news publishers and recipe bloggers come to mind. They post new articles often! At the end of a URL, you may see something like “/page/9/”. Going to “/page/10/” and later, however, is a problem for bots (but not users). Dave writes, “As soon as you enter double-digits the bots are redirected to the homepage.”

This means that it will be more difficult for search engine bots to discover content past page 9. As a matter of fact, content past page 9 will likely start to lose rank in search results. Again, this issue is specific to WPEngine.

Response from WPEngine

Dave reached out to WPEngine to learn more about this issue and if it’s being addressed. He reached out via support chat and here’s their response to why this is happening: “That is happening because of a setting on our platform called redirect bots. It can be turned off but by default, it is enabled.”

So there’s a quick fix to this issue! Dave recommends you contact their support and they’ll handle it for you.

David Vogelpohl, WPEngine’s VP of Web Strategy, also discussed this issue with Dave. David Vogelpohl writes, “WP Engine has a default setting which redirects bots from certain deep pages such as those past the ninth page in pagination. This is done in order to optimize for performance”. He continues, “Additionally, we are working on providing more visibility into bot redirects and creating self-serve options for customers, themselves, to turn bot redirects on and off within the WP Engine portal.”

Featured photo is WPEngine logo

WordPress photo by Pixabay License on Pixabay