Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Blog posts not showing in serps for exact match title search
-
hi-
my first client ranks #1 for the exact phrase of each blog post title
the 2nd client doesnt rank anywhere when i search for the exact post title
2nd client has robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/so that shouldnt noindex any posts right?
his site ranks for many kw's - but oddly none of his blog posts are anywhere to be found - i dont mean for a kw search - i mean for searching for the entire title he doesnt rank anywhere in first 5 pages for any of 6-7 posts i checked
any idea what could cause this?
thanks
-
Also check Google webmaster Tools. When doing a site: of your site, there are some odd-looking SERPs and at least one page has a message that the site might be compromised.
-
Taswir, every page on your website has a meta-no-index. no-follow tag in the header. This explicitly tells the search engines NOT to include you pages/posts in the search results.
On WordPress sites, this is usually caused by having the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box in the Reading section of the Settings checked. This is often set this way during development, then folks forget to remove it when the site goes live.
Remove the check mark from that box and the engines should start indexing your pages within a day or so.
If that box isn't checked, check for plugins that might have the same settings - like SEO plugins.
That should do it.
Paul
[Included a screenshot to show where in the navigation to find the setting to change]
-
Hi Paul would you please also have a look on my blog http://www.thetopblogger.com as I am also facing the same problem. When I search with the URL at Google, the URL appears on top but when I check with "Exact Post Title" from my bog, this doesn't pull the related post from my blog.
I checked more than 15 posts in this way and so far only 1 post ranked on #6 though the post title is exactly matching with my search.
I am not a expert at Robots.txt but you can check my blog's robots.txt file too. http://www.thetopblogger.com/robots.txt
Waiting for your reply Bro. Thank you.
Regards
Taswir
-
There are a number of issues that are likely causing indexing problems with this site, Eric, but I'm going to have to be up front with you.
The site's business model is so completely against the search engines' terms of service, and is contributing to the low opinion so many in the public have of SEO, that regretfully I must decline to provide any further help with this particular site.
This is my own judgement call and is not intended to reflect on you in any way.
Paul
-
I must've gotten confused with wp-content. Thanks for clearing up Paul!
-
Wp-includes doesn't include any user content, William. The wp-content folder is where all user-uploaded images, pdfs etc are stored, so removing wp-includes from the robots.txt won' t have any effect on whether posts/pages are indexing or not.
But even if such content were in that blocked directory, posts and pages are in the database and are output from their respective pseudo index pages, none of which are ni the /wp-includes directory.
I'm just on my out the door, Eric, but if you want to PM me a few example URLs/pages, I'd be happy to have a look. Or of course you could post them publicly here for others to give you a hand, if you're comfortable with that. It's pretty hard to address problems like this without being able to research the actual pages.
Paul
-
I'd troubleshoot the site by removing /wp-includes/ mainly because from what I understand images are pulled from that dir usually. Or a lot of content is from wp-includes.
Remove it and see if that helps.
I'd also check WMT and use Googlebot to fetch the site. Usually that works on getting things indexed quicker. I would also check WMT messages to see if there was any manual action taken on your client's account.
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
-
How does Google handle fractions in titles?
Which is better practice, using 1/2" or ½"? The keyword research suggests people search for "1 2" with the space being the "/". How does Google handle fractions? Would ½ be the same as 1/2?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice2 -
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
Video titles and descriptions
Hi everyone, I have a question about embedding videos on a website: if you optimize the title and description for the video in Youtube, will these be taken into account for the ranking of the page where the video is embedded? Or will only the Youtube link for the video show in SERP's, instead of the page itself? I've read in a post of Phil Nottingham that it's usually not a good idea to embed a Youtube video on your own site, but use Wistia instead, exactly to avoid cannibalisation of your own rankings. Is this correct? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
Bulk reverse image search?
Hi, i have a couple fashion clients who have very active blogs and post lots of fashion content and images. Like 50+ images weekly. I want to check if these images have been used by other sources in bulk, are there any good reverse image search tools which can do this? Or any recommended ways to efficiently do this for a large number of images? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | snj_cerkez0 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
No matter what the keyword, only the homepage shows in the SERP
Hi, wondered if someone could help. My clients website shows up well for terms but its always the homepage rather than the targeted landing page. For example, if you search for "teeth whitening anglesey" they appear http://goo.gl/ohJdua however, its the homepage rather than the tooth whitening page http://goo.gl/uVI8gK Thanks Ade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | popcreativeltd0 -
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 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0