Do Draft WordPress Posts Unpublished affect Your SEO?

Your business depends on hits and traffic to your website. You also know that you want your articles to be the first thing that shows up as a result. Does that mean unpublished draft WordPress posts affect your SEO? 

Ranking first, or even on the top page, does not happen by accident. It takes stratetgy, patience, and consistency. Changes in search engine algorithms can also impact your rankings and what shows up on search results. 

This means that you need to bring your best SEO practices to your business. That may mean hiring someone if you do not want to learn SEO. It is a continually growing field which means you are continually learning new techniques and strategies.

If you do not know where to start, this is a good place. WordPress is a popular website tool that allows you to have everything organized in one place. Knowing what your unpublished drafts do can help you know how to handle content. 

What is SEO?

google search

SEO is short for search engine optimization. What does all that mean? It is basically a fancy way to say how content ranks, is optimized, by search engines. The most common search engine that you probably use is Google. When companies talk about SEO, they are most likely talking about how to make your content searchable for Google. 

Content is going to be anything that you put on the internet. This includes your website, blog posts, videos, and social media posts. The easier it is for Google to read your content, the easier, or more likely, it will rank high in search results. 

SEO is a field that is constantly changing. Each time Google makes a change to their algorithm, the world of SEO has to figure out how to change their content strategy.

WordPress Posts Unpublished Effect

If you are using WordPress for your SEO and content, you want to use it properly. You have probably seen the ‘publish’ and ‘save as draft’ options. These are the two different options that you have when putting content on WordPress.

The great thing about the draft option is that it does not impact your SEO if you use the save as draft option. You can run into an issue if you hit publish and want to save it as a draft later. 

How it works is if you hit publish, Google starts to crawl and index your content. If you take the content back, Google can’t read it anymore. In addition, it creates less traffic and can ruin any indexing you had with Google. 

Google Index

The Google Index is exactly what it sounds like. It is a large index that Google keeps of every website, article, and other content. This is a lot of information. Since Google can’t put everything on the first page, it has to filter content. 

To filter the content, it looks at keywords, images, meta descriptions, and tags. From there it takes into consideration the search phrases and what users are looking for. Lastly, Google shows what it thinks is the most important content you need to see.

Hurting Your SEO 

There are different things that you can do that hurts your SEO. Google and other search engines will flag content that does not meet guidelines or is not using best practices. This makes it so your content cannot be found when using a search engine.

This causes multiple problems. It stops people from finding your website and company. This can lead to less traffic and fewer transactions. The best thing you can do is to not hurt your SEO. Keeping your SEO up on best practices is a great thing to do. It allows your content to be indexed and ranked by Google.

Unpublished Draft WordPress Posts

computer mouse

If you have several drafts in your backlog, don’t worry. Your content has not been indexed by a search engine as long as you have not hit the published button. 

When you hit publish, you are ‘going live’ in a sense. Hitting the publish button gives search engines the okay to start crawling and indexing your content.

If you hit publish and then save it as a draft later is when you run into issues. You run into problems if a search engine has already started to crawl your content and you take it away. 

Unpublished Drafts Affect Your SEO

So do draft WordPress posts unpublished affect your SEO? The short answer is no, unpublished drafts do not affect your SEO. What does hurt your SEO is if you published something and then take it back and save it as a draft. In fact, if you are not sure if you want to publish something, save it as a draft. 

Finally, if you have already published something and made a change, just make an edit. That way you will keep your Google index without having to create a whole new post. Then this allows you to make the necessary changes without hurting your SEO. 

Hopefully you now know a thing or two about unpublished WordPress draft posts and how it affects your SEO. Secondly, this is good knowledge to have if you handle your own content and marketing. It can also be beneficial if you are planning on going into SEO or any marketing career.

Even if you do not want to handle content, you are consuming content everyday. It is good to know how search engine algorithms work. This gives you the power to understand how to find the content you want when searching the internet or your favorite app. 

However, there are people who spend their whole careers learning everything about SEO. Also, there are even companies that are dedicated to helping companies with their content and SEO. 


Reborn Consultants is a company that wants to give you the best SEO, content, and marketing plans. This lets you rank higher, get more traffic, and make more transactions. See what we can do for you by sending us a quick message. Use this form to reach us the quickest. We look forward to learning about your business and working with you.