How to Do SEO for a Blog

Blog SEO is maintenance, not setup. Installing a theme and publishing posts is the easy part. Much of what decides whether a blog grows or slowly declines is the recurring upkeep that years of publishing demand. Without it, a blog can build up what is best called blog debt, such as archive pages nobody searches for, your own posts competing for the same query, and once-winning pages sliding down the results. The recurring work is taxonomy cleanup, consolidating posts that compete with each other, refreshing pages that are slipping, organizing posts into hubs, and keeping the technical basics right. When traffic falls on a blog with a deep back catalog, the first question isn’t “how do we publish more?” It is “which existing pages are slipping, and why?”

Clean up the taxonomy first

Platforms such as WordPress generate archive pages automatically: tag, category, date and author pages. Each one is a URL that can be crawled and indexed, and each should earn its place as a page a searcher would want to land on.

• Tags. A blog with hundreds of tags, each attached to one to three posts, produces hundreds of near-empty archive pages. Noindex them, except a tag that works as a real topic page with substantial content behind it.
• Categories. Keep a small set of substantial categories, and give each one introductory content so the page is a landing page rather than a bare list of links. The right number is whatever your topics support; merge categories that hold only a handful of posts.
• Date archives. A date archive groups posts by when they were written, which isn’t how readers search. Noindex or disable it.
• Author pages. Make them substantive, with a real bio, credentials and a body of work, or noindex them. Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content asks whether bylines lead to further information about the author, which is the job a good author page does.

When you noindex, don’t also block those pages in robots.txt. Google’s guide to blocking indexing with noindex explains that the crawler has to be able to access the page to see the noindex rule.

Find posts that compete with each other

Cannibalization is when two or more of your own posts compete for the same query. Diagnose it in the Search Console Performance report: filter to a query the blog should rank for, then open the Pages tab. If several of your URLs earn impressions for the same query, look at them together.

Choose the fix by intent:

• Same intent: consolidate. Pick one owner URL, fold the best material from the others into it, and redirect the others to it. Google’s guide to redirects says a permanent redirect is used as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical. Update internal links to point straight at the owner rather than through the redirect.
• Different intents that share phrasing: differentiate. Sharpen each post’s angle and title so each answers its own question.

On an older blog, one cause to check first: several overlapping posts on the same topic, written years apart.

Watch for decay, and update before you add

Content decay is the slow decline of a page that used to perform, for reasons such as competitors publishing better answers and your facts aging. In the Performance report, compare a recent period with the one before and look for pages losing clicks and impressions. Then size the refresh to the decline:

• Light: correct facts, update examples, tighten weak sections.
• Moderate: rework the structure and add substantial new material.
• Major: rebuild a page that has fallen well behind.

Change the visible date only when the content changed. And before writing a new post on a topic you already cover, check whether an existing page earns impressions for it. Updating that page avoids creating a second page that competes with it. There’s no fixed ratio of new posts to updates; let the decay data set it.

Organize posts into hubs

Organize coverage into hubs: a pillar page on a broad topic, surrounded by posts that each go deep on one subtopic, linked to the pillar and to each other where the subtopics relate. A hub gives readers a map of what you have written on a subject, and gives each post a path from a page that matters. Well-built category pages can serve as hubs, which is one more reason to give them real introductory content.

Pagination, related posts and comments

Pagination. Google’s guide to pagination and incremental page loading sets out the basics:

• Give each page a unique URL, and don’t use the first page of a sequence as the canonical for all of them.
• Don’t rely on rel=”next” and rel=”prev”: Google no longer uses these tags.
• Be careful with “load more” buttons and infinite scroll. Google’s crawlers don’t “click” buttons and generally don’t trigger JavaScript functions that require user actions, so older posts reachable only through a “load more” button may not be found. Keep paginated archive pages with crawlable links alongside them.

Related posts. Related-post modules help discovery only if Google can follow them. Its guide to crawlable links says Google can generally only crawl a link if it’s an <a> element with an href attribute, so check that the module outputs real links rather than script events.

Comments. Moderate spam and keep filtering on. Google’s guide to qualifying outbound links recommends marking user-generated content links, such as comments and forum posts, with the ugc value.

FAQ markup

FAQ schema on blog posts used to be a way to earn a rich result. Google’s Search updates log records that the FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results, as announced in May 2026, and that its documentation was removed. Write an FAQ section only when it helps the reader.

Frequently asked questions

Should I keep publishing new posts or update old ones?

Check first. If existing pages cover the topic and are slipping, update them; if the topic is new to the blog, write the post. Falling traffic despite steady publishing points first to decay and posts competing with each other.

Should I noindex tag pages?

Noindex thin tag archives attached to a handful of posts each. Keep a tag indexed only if it works as a substantial topic page. Keep a small set of real category pages indexed, with introductory content.

Does FAQ schema still get a rich result for blog posts?

No. Google’s Search updates log records that the FAQ rich result is no longer shown in Google Search results, as of May 2026.