The simple answer is no.
If a new WordPress post is in draft mode, it can only be viewed from the back end admin area , when you are logged in to the website. Compare it to a draft email. While you are working on it, it is just sitting in your mail box. It can not be seen until you send it to someone.
The less simple answer is, maybe, under some conditions.
A draft WordPress post could effect your SEO efforts in the following ways:
- If a web page was published and live. Then for some reason you switch it back to draft mode. Once a web page is published, it can be found by search engines and indexed on their site to potentially be viewable in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Once you change the status to draft, users would see a 404 page because the page no longer exists on the front end of the website.
- If you have many posts that are draft and they have many revisions, this adds to the size of your WordPress database. Over time this can effect your website performance. A good thing to have on your ongoing WordPress maintenance task list is to optimize your database regularly.
So, for a new web page that has only be in draft mode, draft WordPress posts shouldn’t affect your SEO.
