ClassiPress SEO Test

By Avatar of artem March 27, 2020
Research

ClassiPress SEO test can show how upgrade of ClassiPress v3 to v4 can change the site search ranking results and give ideas for further structural improvements.

Below I’ll explain how I did the tests, results and fixes.

Prepare Test

  1. I’ve created a new test site on a public server
  2. Installed vanilla ClassiPress 3.6.4
  3. Populated it with default content, 30 ad listings with images, categories and tags.
  4. Created a free account on seobility.net and started crawling.

Test steps

  1. Scan vanilla ClassiPress 3.6.4
  2. Update to ClassiPress 4.1.5 and repeat the scan.
  3. Research and fix determined errors, update ClassiPress files and repeat the scan.
  4. Merge working branch with the latest master (4.2.0) branch and repeat the scan. This step needs to find any issues that may appear between actual 4.1.5 and upcoming 4.2.0 versions.
  5. Repeat test with 4.2.0 version just to confirm results.

ClassiPress SEO Test results

Below you can see the test results graphs for better visualization of overall ClassiPress SEO progress and differences between versions.

ClassiPress SEO Test - Optimization Score
Overall optimization Score
ClassiPress SEO Test - Historical optimization graph
Historical optimization graph, where X – test step number, Y – SEO Score %

Results analyze

  1. Overall results from 3.6.4 to 4.2.0 increased on 6%, from 64% to 72%. Not so much progress compared to the old version. But this is not because the new version is not optimized enough, but because the old one was optimized very well.
  2. Significant score change determined on the second step, when we updated versions from 3.6.4 to 4.1.5.
    • Content optimization increased from 32% – 48% (16%). What is good, but not such valuable for our test, since the content in the test is complete fake.
    • Technical optimization has not been changed at all.
    • Structure optimization has a drop, from 97% to 91% (6%). This was caused by issues with headings structure and empty anchors in the ads and posts thumbnails.
  3. After the fixes, on step 3:
    • The Structure score returned and even won 1 %. Now it got score 98% and hold it up to the end of the tests.
    • Technical optimization also increased on 4% from 68% to 72%.
    • Content optimization has not been changed.
  4. Step 4: No changes, so 4.2.0 version has no SEO issues in comparison to 4.1.5
  5. Step 5:Just confirmed that.

Fixes and Improvements:

  1. Introduced function cp_get_avatar(), which adds alt tags to the avatar image.
  2. Better Listing price format in structured data.
  3. Added screen reader text for ads and posts thumbnails. Fixed issue “No link anchor text”.
  4. Added screen reader text with item title to “View Ad” and “Read More” links to resolve issue with trivial duplicating anchor texts.
  5. Fixed headers structure.
  6. Fixed issue with incorrect taxonomy RSS links.

Conclusions:

  1. Upgrade from 3.6.4 to 4.1.5 can cause a drop in ranking due to structural issues with headings and thumbnail links.
  2. Upgrade ClassiPress from 4.1.5 to 4.2.0 is very good for ranking, because it resolves issues with headings and thumbnail links made in 4.0.0 – 4.1.5 versions.
  3. Finally, upgrade from 3.6.4 to 4.2.0 should be neutral for ranking. Even more, AppThemes slightly better optimized 4.2.0 was in comparison to 3.6.4.
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