As you may know, the Yoast SEO plugin automatically saves draft WordPress posts when you publish one, and if you’ve been using it to write content, there’s no reason to worry about your unpublished WordPress posts affecting your search engine rankings in any negative way. There are two versions of the Yoast SEO plugin available – Premium and Free, and both automatically save draft WordPress posts when you publish a new one, meaning that none of your Yoast SEO settings need to be changed to prevent unpublished WordPress posts from affecting your search engine rankings in any negative way.
Do Draft WordPress Posts Unpublished Affect Your SEO?
In order to answer the question, it is important to understand what a draft post is. A draft post is an unpublished blog post that you have started but not yet finished or published. If you are like most bloggers, there will be periods of time when you write posts and then publish them right away. But there will also be times when you write posts but don’t publish them because they need more work or they are on a topic that can’t be published immediately. These would be considered draft posts.
The question of whether drafts affect your SEO isn’t an easy one to answer because it’s such a broad question with many different aspects to consider.
The Difference Between Indexed and Published
When your draft posts are sitting in your WordPress Dashboard, they are not being indexed by Google. However, when you publish them to your website they will be indexed by Google. This means that you want to publish all of your posts before you start writing new ones because it could affect how well or poorly a specific post ranks on a search engine.
How Google indexes Word Press
Indexing, or publishing, a post is important because it creates a link in the search engine’s index, which is what helps your page rank. But this doesn’t mean that draft posts don’t affect your SEO. In fact, they do – but not as much as published posts. A draft post won’t show up in search results as long as it isn’t indexed by Google or another search engine. But once you publish a post on your blog, it becomes visible to the public and will be indexed by Google.
How Google Views Pages in General
For the most part, Google looks at a page’s content and links to determine its importance. But there are a few other factors that affect how pages rank in search results. One of these is whether or not you’re making use of your website’s internal linking structure to move from one page to another. This is called site architecture and it can help make it easier for Google to crawl your site and index your pages.
What Does Google Consider to be Duplicate Content
Google considers duplicate content to be pages that are either identical or too close in content. For example, if you have two product pages for the same product, Google will consider this duplicate content. The problem arises when you publish a draft post and it becomes indexed as a new page. In order to avoid this from happening, make sure your draft posts don’t contain any of your website’s main keywords so they won’t appear in the search results.
Does it make a difference if the Post is Unpublished
Many people often ask the question if publishing blog posts without publishing them is a good strategy. While it can be tempting to save posts for later, there are many reasons why you should publish every post as soon as you have written and revised it. First of all, if you publish a post that has an error or some other problem, then your readers will know about it immediately instead of months down the line. Second, unfinished posts are usually not optimized for search engines because they do not have a meta description or keywords or tags assigned to them.
The Implications of Multiple URLs
In a nutshell, having multiple URLs will increase the possibility of being indexed by Google and other search engines. But what are the implications of having multiple URLs for your site? Does it affect your rankings negatively or is it an advantage to have multiple URLs that point to the same content?
Initially, you may be thinking that having more than one URL for your site might be beneficial as this would allow you to rank for different keywords. And while this may be true, there are some potential issues with this approach. First off, Google does not like duplicate content; so if you were to rank higher on two different URLs then there is a good chance that when Google updates their index both pages may disappear from its index.
The Importance of Indexation & Citations
Indexation and citations are important for your blog’s search engine optimization. What does this mean, exactly? It means that you need to make sure that your posts are indexed by Google and other major search engines. This is done when you publish the post, but it can also be done later with a site update or 301 redirect. You also need to make sure that the post has plenty of citations in the form of links back to your blog post on other credible websites so people will find your content through their search queries. The more citations you have, the better off you’ll be when it comes to ranking in SERPS (search engine results pages).
So What Should I do with my Published Posts?
Publish them! Once you publish a post, it starts getting crawled and indexed by search engines. Remember to make sure your title tags are descriptive, as they will be the most prominent in search results. If you’re going to be away for a while and would like to hold off on publishing, feel free to save your draft and come back to it when you have time.
One More Reason to Always Update Your Drafts!
In addition to getting your blog posts out of the draft folder, you should also make sure that they are published. This can really help with your seo.
Many bloggers make the mistake of publishing a new post and then going back to edit it. This means that their old post won’t be indexed in search engines until they publish a new version. If you write a great blog post, but don’t publish it for two weeks because you need time to edit and perfect it, then that is two weeks of missed exposure for your post!