Blog posts outranked for Title a String searches in content...why?
-
Site Pages: When I wrap a page title, or a string of several words in quotes, and GG search, my client's page shows up first. My understanding is that this shows general health of site, and acknowledgement as the original source of the content.
Blog Posts: When I wrap a blog page, or post, title or string of words in quotes, and GG search, Feedblitz, Facebook, and other scraper sites appear before the blog home page, and also the actual blog post. The blog is in a separate directory. Does this suggest that the /blog/ is being penalized or demoted in any way? Does it indicate the /blog/ directory does not have authority?
Both the static site pages, and the blog pages, are using rel=canonical tags.
What causes this, what does it indicate, and how can I fix it?
Thanks,
Greg -
The site is 10 years old, the blog 4 or 5 years old, and has held top positions for extremely competitive keyword phrases such as 'health insurance quotes' and 'individual health insurance'. The site was hit by penguin, a panda, and subsequent pandas. I successfully recovered the site from an 'unnatural links' penalty, which required the removal of a lot of links. The site began to rank for primary keywords, but not great. Top 50. I saw this as an accomplishment.
I hope that helps. I left out details initially because I was hoping someone could be able to tell me if what I am experiencing is indicative of a known issue. Thanks for your help, happy to add more detail.
-
We need more info. A major question is site age. If the /blog directory is fairly new, your results are not atypical. Also if the /blog directory is fairly new and changing the URL wouldn't damage existing SERPs too much, you might try a more descriptive directory name like /location-business type-blog.
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
-
Seeing URL Slugs as search result titles
I've been seeing some search results for my site that look like the first result here, where the URL slug is used as SERP title: https://drive.google.com/a/fitsmallbusiness.com/file/d/0B37y4RslpuY-a0hQYjlJQ0NxeFJicDF6RVlURFVSNFN0aGhB/view?usp=sharing The article title (and Yoast snippet title) are both "28 Press Release Examples From The Pros", but for some reason I'm seeing "press-release-examples" in the search results. I've seen this for multiple articles, and I see it now and then with different articles. I'm aware that Google often changes the titles in search results, but it seems very weird to me that they would opt for just the URL slug here. Thoughts? Has anyone else seen this issue? Any idea what might be causing this? All help much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | davidwaring0 -
I am looking for the best post and page title template
There seems to be a few schools of thought as to how the title templates in the yoast plugin. currently mine are set with the default templates posts title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) page title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) What are the best options here for proper SEO. I am learning as much as i can but i have searched for a concrete answer here on the net, but found many different responses. What do you all think? What is my best option?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Search results indexed
Hi there, is is bad practice in seo to have search results for products indexed? For example a search result of holidays to Ibiza, with lots of deals coming up? its a search query url that would be indexed, with just an image and price per product on the page, with about 10 per page? Any advice appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Blog separate from Website
One of my clients has a well established website, and a well established blog - each with its own domain. Is there any way to move the blog to his website domain without losing the SEO and links that he has built up over time?
Technical SEO | | EchelonSEO0 -
Google is changing the title
Hi! Lately i have seen that Google changed the page titles for some clients, not all... its about 30% of them. For example, the title looks likes this after the Google change: Company name: SEO and Pay per click management But in on that page it looks like this: SEO and Pay per click management - Company name Does anyone know why?
Technical SEO | | DanielNordahl1 -
Duplicate content / title caused by CAPITALS
What is the best way to stop duplicate content warning (and Google classing them as duplicate content), when it is caused by CAPITALS (i.e www.domain.com/Directory & www.domain.com/directory ). I try to always use lower case (unless a place name then i use Capitals for the first letter), but it looks like i have slipped up and got some mixed up and other sites will also be linking to Capitals Thanks Jon
Technical SEO | | jonny5123790 -
How do you measure content on a website?
I never thought of this question before. Maybe because i didn't focus myself on content but only on optimizing existing content from clients. So how do you measure the content on a specific page?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0 -
Duplicate content
This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0