A page template is the layout and code from which many pages of the same type are generated, such as product pages, category pages or articles. In SEO the word has this technical meaning and not the one used for design or document templates.
Why do templates matter for SEO?
A template defines the elements that all its pages share, among them the title pattern, headings, canonical tag, robots meta tag, structured data and internal links. A single change to the template changes thousands of pages at once, for better or for worse. WordPress documents the mechanism for its themes. Page templates apply to a single page or groups of pages, and WordPress follows a fixed order to choose the file, starting with a template selected for the page and ending with a default.
For monitoring, a template is also a unit of analysis. seoClarity describes grouping pages by page type as one way to segment a site, so that traffic and ranking changes can be examined per group and not as a site-wide average.
Example (fictional)
An online shop has four templates: home page, category, product and article. A release changes the product template and accidentally adds <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. All 18,000 product URLs are affected, but the other templates are fine. A check that groups results by template shows the product group at 100 percent noindex and the others at 0 percent. Taking one sample URL per template catches the fault earlier than a check of the home page.
Common mistakes
- Testing only one page per site after a release, not one per template.
- Fixing a template problem on single URLs, so it returns with the next release.
- Mixing different page types in one report, which hides the template that causes a problem.
Sources
- Page Templates – WordPress Theme Handbookdeveloper.wordpress.org
- How to Use SEO Segmentation to Scale SEO Success – seoClarityseoclarity.net
Last updated: