Blog & Resource sections must be fully crawlable!
These get little organic traffic directly with few exceptions. However, their main role is to serve as a hub for reaching other pages. This helps both users & search engines, so ensure SEO best practices here!
I’ve noticed 3 big reasons they go awry:
- Pagination (ex: /page/3/ in URL) exists but no internal links are shown for these. (Keep in mind that pagination via rel=”next/prev” has been deprecated, so Google won’t follow these links in the source code.)
- Canonical tags all point to the first page. Deeper pages should instead self-canonicalize since they aren’t duplicate content. (Permanent noindex status becomes nofollow as well, eventually.)
- LOAD MORE buttons are needed to display additional pages. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t interact with JavaScript here.
What are the consequences? Search engines will see fewer or even no internal links for old content, decreasing their perceived importance along with valuable context. Relatedly, this also tends to harm click depth.
This is one reason why an XML sitemap can be an invaluable backup. I’ve seen many pages ranking only because Google discovers the page within there. However, this still harms search engine performance for all but the most long-tailed queries.
As a final tip, ensure headlines or titles for those pages listed have clickable anchor text. This helps search engines pick up context versus something generic like READ MORE.