Posted inBasic SEO SEO Strategies

How We Optimized Three Sites with Yoast for Faster Crawling, Cleaner Indexing, and Better SEO

Infographic showing Yoast SEO crawl optimization, internal search cleanup, breadcrumbs, and RSS feed credit improvements
Key Yoast SEO settings applied to SEOlutions.com, MobileWiseGuy.com, and WirelessConsultant.net for faster crawling and cleaner indexing

Over the past week I set up the same, simple Yoast SEO configuration on SEOlutions.com, MobileWiseGuy.com, and WirelessConsultant.net. The goal was to make the sites faster, cleaner, and easier for Google to crawl. (GangsterMobile.com is next.)

1Crawl Optimization

Remove junk code/feeds so Google spends time on real pages.

2Search Cleanup

Stop spammy ?s= URLs and keep them out of search.

3Breadcrumbs

Automatic internal links that also look good in Google.

4RSS Credit

Auto‑backlink in the feed so scrapers still credit you.

Step‑by‑Step (the “do this” version)

1) Crawl Optimization

  1. Yoast ➜ Settings ➜ Crawl optimization.
  2. Turn ON: Remove shortlinks, REST API links, RSD/WLW, oEmbed links, generator tag, pingback header, powered‑by header.
  3. Turn ON: Remove category/tag/author/post‑type/search feeds + Atom/RDF feeds.
  4. Turn ON: Remove emoji scripts. Add disallow for WP‑JSON API.
Benefit: fewer junk URLs, slightly faster pages, and better crawl focus.

2) Internal Site Search Cleanup

  1. Yoast ➜ Settings ➜ Internal site search cleanup.
  2. Enable Filter search terms and set Max length = 50.
  3. Turn ON: filter emojis/special characters + common spam patterns.
  4. Turn ON: redirect pretty URLs ➜ raw ?s= format.
  5. Turn ON: prevent crawling of internal search URLs.

Robots.txt add‑on (optional)

# Block internal search result pages
User-agent: *
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /page/*/?s=
Benefit: no thin “search” pages in Google, less spam, cleaner index.

3) Breadcrumbs

  1. Yoast ➜ Settings ➜ Breadcrumbs ➜ Enable.
  2. Separator: » • Homepage label: Home • Bold last item: ON.
  3. For posts, show the category. Leave formats/tags = None.
  4. Place breadcrumbs above the post content using your theme’s breadcrumb option or a simple block/shortcode.
Benefit: better navigation + stronger internal linking. Google can show breadcrumbs instead of long URLs.

4) Special Pages

  • Search page title: You searched for %%searchphrase%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
  • 404 page title: Page not found %%sep%% %%sitename%%
  • Keep both out of the index (Yoast already does this with the settings above).
Benefit: user‑friendly titles without polluting the index.

5) RSS Feed Credit

  1. Yoast ➜ Settings ➜ RSS.
  2. Before each post: leave blank.
  3. After each post, add:
This post %%POSTLINK%% first appeared on %%BLOGLINK%% — visit for the full SEO journey and updates.
Benefit: if a scraper copies your feed, it still links back to you.

Why we’re doing this (plain English)

  • Clean up junk: we remove pages Google doesn’t need (old feeds, search pages, meta links).
  • Make crawling efficient: Googlebot has limited time—point it at posts and pages that matter.
  • Help visitors: breadcrumbs = easier navigation, fewer dead‑end pages.
  • Protect content: RSS footer gives us credit if someone republishes our posts.
Quick sanity check each site: Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Fewer weird URLs (like /search/ and many feed pages) should appear over the next few crawls.

What’s next

I’ll watch Google Search Console’s Crawl stats and Pages reports. As junk URLs fade, new posts should get indexed faster. Then I’ll apply the same setup to GangsterMobile.com so it launches lean on day one.

At‑a‑glance: Remove junk ➜ Lock search ➜ Add breadcrumbs ➜ Credit RSS. That’s the whole play.

Want to see these strategies in action? Explore our SEO Case Studies to see what worked.

Tags: