Blog not showing up when searching for exact post/META titles
-
I am working on a blog http://www.possessionista.com which is a very popular fashion blog. It is very well established with a 100% natural link profile and zero spammy stuff. The blog ranks #1 for random fashion terms like "kourtney kardashian cat eye sunglasses" and "emily maynard boots".
The problem I am experiencing is that none of the actual titles of her posts or any of the content in the post results in her blog showing up if searched.
EX: http://www.possessionista.com/2011/10/pippa-middletons-zip-jacket.html
When you search "Pippa Middleton's Zip Jacket" on google her blog is nowhere to be found. Try searching allintitle:"Pippa Middleton's Zip Jacket" and she's nowhere to be found either. Even search "The other day, I met with my friend Kiran for our monthly mutual admiration society" on google and she's nowhere to be found even thoguh this is a unique snippet from her post.
This post is already indexed and cached with the above mentioned details. i've also tested dozens of older posts as well. Same issue.
You can actually do this to see a more clear picture:
Do a google search for: allintitle:Bachelorette Fashion: Episode 2 - Ashley Hebert Brown site:possessionista.com
That will bring up her blog which means google recognizes that the phrase is in her META title. Now do a google search for: allintitle:Bachelorette Fashion: Episode 2 - Ashley Hebert Brown without the site: included. She does not pop up but other people do.
I did find that she had a duplicate title tag for a few weeks, but I've fixed that. Her posts used to pop up #1 when you search the title, but now obviously not. I am kind of at a loss and have tried a bunch of options with no success.
Oh, one other thing is that some people do scrape her content, but only a few like maybe 10 and they've always been doing it even when she used to rank for her own post titles.
Have you guys experienced this issue? Do you have any ideas of how to fix it?
-
This was a panda issue. It's fixed now. We lowered the outbound link count and cleaned up the site as a whole. Traffic is at about 70% of what it was.
-
Have you checked the sitemaps? Are they getting updated as she posts fresh content?
If the site's getting scraped a lot, does she employ canonical tags to claim her stuff?
-
Thanks Ryan. I just updated the meta descriptions to all be unique. I just started working with this blog so we've done no optimization yet besides fixing the duplicate title tag issue.
Webmasters shows no issues except of course the duplicate description tags, 1700 in all.
I've just never seen this before. How can someone rank really well for semi-competitive terms that their posts are about, but you can do searches on their Titles or Exact Text Snippets from their posts and find them on google. It kind of seems like a contradiction.
Any other suggestions?
-
Hey guys, just some more info:
We're talking about a blog here that has a 100% natural link profile, no link building efforts. The blog gets tens of thousands of visits per day from search. It's well established. I'm also a SEO consultant so i know my stuff. I've covered all the basics. This is an advanced question if you know what i mean. Webmasters reveals no issues. Traffic suddenly drop by about 50% 10 days ago. All of the sudden you couldn't search her title and find her even though you could find her doing this two weeks ago before the sudden drop off.
-
It does look like the archived posts get an _archive added to them. It would be better to keep the original URL intact, and not create this separate one in the archive process.
-
That brings up an interesting thought, when you "archive" the blogs does a /archive get added to the url?
-
I did a site:possessionista.com search. For the first several SERP pages, I'm seeing all your archive pages. I had to go to page 15 before I saw any actual posts. I could be wrong, but it looks like the Googlebot favors your archives over your individual posts.
I also did this advanced search: site:possessionista.com pippa middleton - the zip jacket post was #2. So I'd say you are getting crawled and indexed.
For the post in question, the meta description currently reads as: Celebrity Fashion and Style from TV and movies: The Bachelor, Pretty Little Liars, 90210, Glee, Entourage, Lying Game. I doubt it will fix the issue you raise, but it is something that probably ought to be addressed.
Have you claimed the blog in GWT? It's a good place to check to see if there are any major errors that need to be addressed.
-
How does your link profile compare to the ones that are popping up in search?
You mentioned that the Title tag has the phrase, but does it also appear within the body?
How many links are going out from the page?
How many levels from the home page is the blog?
Do you have links pointing at these individual posts?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Is AMP works on blogs only?
I have installed AMP Plugin in my WordPress website but when I check pages with /amp/ it shows 404 error. But for blog pages, for the example www.website.com/blog/post/amp/ it shows amp version of the particular page. Also, nothing is showing in search console Accelerate Moile pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Stephanie0 -
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
URL Parameters Settings in WMT/Search Console
On an large ecommerce site the main navigation links to URLs that include a legacy parameter. The parameter doesn’t actually seem to do anything to change content - it doesn’t narrow or specify content, nor does it currently track sessions. We’ve set the canonical for these URLs to be without the parameter. (We did this when we started seeing that Google was stripping out the parameter in the majority of SERP results themselves.) We’re trying to best strategize on how to set the parameters in WMT (search console). Our options are to set to: 1. No: Doesn’t affect page content’ - and then the Crawl field in WMT is auto-set to ‘Representative URL’. (Note, that it's unclear what ‘Representative URL’ is defined as. Google’s documentation suggests that a representative URL is a canonical URL, and we've specifically set canonicals to be without the parameter so does this contradict? ) OR 2. ‘Yes: Changes, reorders, or narrows page content’ And then it’s a question of how to instruct Googlebot to crawl these pages: 'Let Googlebot decide' OR 'No URLs'. The fundamental issue is whether the parameter settings are an index signal or crawl signal. Google documents them as crawl signals, but if we instruct Google not to crawl our navigation how will it find and pass equity to the canonical URLs? Thoughts? Posted by Susan Schwartz, Kahena Digital staff member
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AriNahmani0 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Not alt tags but Title and description Meta: My designer's answer.
Hello! I was busy doing lots of key wording for my images which I hate and notices that when viewed in source code, the different places I inputed information translated into Title and Description meta tags but NO alt tags. As I'm a a photographer, it's really important to me that I make the most of my images to get increased traffic so I challenged the people behind my website about it. This is their response to the question: "We all know how important the alt tags are for image SEO so why does
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid
the design allows Title, Description and Keyword image tags but not alt
tags?" Unfortunately, there is no way to add an alt tag and title tag specifically to an image display page. However, as you have pointed out here, we use other elements that essentially accomplish the same thing. Each image display page does have its own page title and meta description, as you have also noticed. For the title, we use the IPTC Headline field (if there is no headline, then we use IPTC Title, and if there is no title, then we go to file name), and for the meta description, we use both the IPTC caption as well as the keywords - so all of that information is embedded on the image display page with the image itself and search engines can index this content. Alt Text data intends to given contextual information to search engines when they crawl your site, and the IPTC metadata that shows along with your images, does this as well." What is your opinion on that answer?0 -
Title Tag Help
Hi everyone, So, I have some general question's about Title tags. My question's are as follows: 1. If i have a title tag like this 'Commercial bathroom instillation '. Will I show up for Commercial bathroom or Commercial bathroom instillation? The reason I ask is, i'm aiming for Commercial bathroom which has more search volume, but here is where the problem comes in. If I have Commercial bathroom instillation it is a more compelling title. Ideally i'm aiming for Commercial Bathroom, so im in a bit of a conundrum, as you can see. 2. My second question is if I have 'Bath Review and Shower review' for my title tag. Will I show up for Bath Review individually, and shower review individually, or only when someone search's that exact query? I hope that makes sense thanks. Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
E-Commerce site - How do I geo-target towns/cities/states if there aren't any store locations?
Site = e-commerce Products = clothing (no apparel can be location specific like sports gear where you can do the location specific team gear (NBA, NFL, etc)) Problems = a. no store front b. I don't want to do any sitewides (footers, sidebars, etc) because of the penguin update Question = How do you geo-target these category pages and product pages? Ideas = a. reviews with clients locations b. blog posts with clients images wearing apparel and location description and keywords that also links back to that category or be it product page (images geo- targeted, tags, and description) c. ? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cyclone0