My blog post for a specific keyword is in the 'omitted results'. Why might this be, and how to overcome it?
-
My website Homepage: http://kulraj.org
Here is the page I am working to rank for:** http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/**
When I search specifically for 'kulraj hedonic treadmill' just to test it, the first result is this: kulraj.org_/tag/_hedonic-treadmill. It shows the shortened version of the article that is within the Tag page.
[I'm new to SEO and Moz, please keep in mind]
Moz has told me I have duplicate content, which is regarding my main Blog page and Tags page, which is true the content is duplicate.
However, the actual blog post itself is not displayed anywhere else on the website, or anywhere else on the web. Moz confirms this, and reports no duplicate content warning.
My questions, therefore, are:
1. How do I actually go about installing a rel canonical tag within a standard WordPress dashboard (I'm using Genesis Framework) - I'm finding great difficulty finding instructions on this anywhere on the web. I clearly need to fix the issue with Blog page and Tags Page.
2. Why would my blog post be omitted, and are there any suggestions I could implement to bring it into the main search results.
Other things I've noticed:
1. If I type this URL in: kulraj.org/hedonic-treadmill, it automatically redirects to http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/
2. Inside Google Webmaster Tools it says: No new messages or recent critical issues.
3. Regarding the above, when I click 'Labs > author stats' within Webmaster Tools, it shows nil stats, so something there is not quite right either, even though Google+ Authorship is confirmed.
-
In my opinion, kulraj.org/author/admin/ is essential because it is the main listing for your blog.
As the number of posts on your blog grows you might want to add categories back. They can bring in a lot of traffic if the category names match a topic that people are searching for. With a small number of posts on your blog it is very easy to encounter duplicate content problems. However, once you have a large number of posts then breaking them into a small number of category pages can become an important opportunity and a minimal duplicate content risk.
If you do that I would limit the number of words that are displayed for each post. I would also carefully choose the categories to match what people are searching for.
I have a blog that does not have tags and does not have categories. I do that to avoid duplicate content. However, lots of my topics overlap and I have lots of linking from one blog post to another. I also have some hand-built FAQ pages that link to my blog posts and other informative content. These pages can bring in a lot of traffic.
-
Thank you very much for your kinds words - I'm glad you enjoyed the content, and I really appreciate the advice regarding duplicate content.
I've taken your advice and deleted all tags. I also deleted all categories. Visitors do not visit these pages so I cannot justify, at present, having them and creating unwanted duplicate content.
I am stuck, however, with this issue:
Removing the tags and categories removes 4 of those 7 search results.
But 3 remain:
1. kulraj.org [even though blog post text does not appear here]
3. http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/
My question, therefore, is:
1. Shall I concern over these three?
2. Is there a way to remove the 2nd type of link, as it seems as useless as tags/categories.
Thanks again.
-
In my opinion, websites are similar to boats.... the heavier you load them the deeper they ride in the water and the more difficult it is to gain speed and control them.
I did this search and found the guy jumping with the briefcase and the top part of your article on seven different pages. That is way too many in my opinion.
On my site, tag and archive do not exist. Category continuation pages do exist but they are noindexed. I threw these overboard a long time ago to lighten the load and now my ship floats higher, accelerates faster, steers easier and competes with greater strength. I don't need those pages, my visitors don't need those pages and Google HATES them.
About your questions....
-
rel=canonical..... I would not use it. If I delete the pages mentioned above I don't think that I will need it.
-
why the post is omitted? The first four paragraphs of that post appears on seven pages of your site. Google hates that.
BTW... I read that whole article and really enjoyed it. It's not the type of reading that I normally do but it was very interesting, well-written and thought provoking. Nice work. Great content.
-
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
-
I'm struggling to understand (and fix) why I'm getting a 404 error. The URL includes this "%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D" but I cannot find that anywhere in the referring URL. Does anyone know why please? Thanks
Can you help with how to fix this 404 error please? It appears that I have a redirect from one page to the other, although the referring page URL works, but it appears to be linking to another URL with this code at the end of the the URL - %5Bnull%20id=43484%5D that I'm struggling to find and fix. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
301ing 404's
Hey guys, I am currently in the process of redirecting some of my 404 pages to pages like my home page. Before I do that, I am assessing the link value of the 404 pages. My question is what do you do with the 404 pages which appear to have low quality links, do you really want to redirect them to an important page on your site? What should I do with these 404 pages? CheersAdam
Technical SEO | | Adamshowbiz0 -
What's the best way to handle Overly Dynamic Url's?
So my question is What the best way to handle Overly Dynamic Url's. I am working on a real estate agency website. They are selling/buying properties and the url is as followed. ttp://www.------.com/index.php?action=calculator&popup=yes&price=195000
Technical SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Rel = Canonical in Blog Posting
Hello, I keep coming back to rel=canonical issues! I noticed when I "view pagesource" that my drupal blog posting automatically creates link rel="canonical" href="/sample-blog-title" /< pattern (with the > reversed) in the source code. I'm getting a lot of Rel=Canonical warnings and double content warnings from Seomoz so I've been trying to insert link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"< but the page won't retain the code for some reason. I'm entering the code in Plain Text, but saving the document as Full HTML. Is there a better piece of code I can put in to demonstrate that the original blog page is the original source? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Wordpress Blog Blocked by Metarobots
Upon receiving my first crawl report from new pro SEOMoz acc (yaay!) I've found that the wordpress blog plugged into my site hasn't been getting crawled due to being blocked by metarobots. I'm not a developer and have very little tech expertise, but a search dug up that the issue stemmed from the wordpress site settings > privacy > Ask search engines not to index this site option being selected. On checking the blog "Allow search engines to index this site" was selected so I'm unsure what else to check. My level of expertise means I'm not confident going into the back end of the site and I don't have a tech guy on site to speak to. Has anyone else had this problem? Is it common and will I need to consult a developer to get this fixed? Many thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | paj19790 -
Could Having Blog Posts as Home Page Cause Keyword Dilution?
Something I've never been a fan of is having a blog as the home page of a site. I've always thought that it's a bit like walking into someone's house through the kitchen out back.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay
If it's a vistors first time, it can be a little disconcerting or ackward even if they are not familiar with the writers style. But something just dawned on me, and I'd love a second opinion on this. For websites that focus on multiple keywords (in my most of my client's case it's usually a mix of Wedding Photography, Engagement Photography, Portrait Photography, Family Photography, etc). A lot of these clients will include the photos in a blog post along with a snippet of text that may talk about the people they're photographing and maybe a bit about where they photographed. But they're usually optimizing for the overarching keyword (Wedding... Portrait..., etc as per above). Now I'm wondering if having three or 5 posts on the home page, where most of them are focusing on a specific keyword like New York Wedding Photographer, is actually diluting the keyword they are trying to rank for. My theory is that if I have them move their blog to a domain.com/blog, and solely focus on the desired keyword on the home page, that they would do substantially better in the SERPs. Can anyone subtantiate this? Thanks!0 -
Syndicating With Blogs
Hey all, The idea is that whenever i post a new article on my blog on my "money site" would it be OK to syndicate the same article to all of my other blogs like wordpress, tumblr etc? So for example the exact same content that is on my website will be on myblog.wordpress.com and myblog.tumblr.com but with a URL at the bottom pointing to the original source. (the money site article URL) Are there any foreseeable problems with this? The objective being having the content distributed across the web as much as possible I apologise if this has been asked before, i could not find the answer. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
When to SEO optimize a blog post?
Hi there, Here's our situation: there are two people working on the blog. person 1) writes the posts person 2) SEO optimizes the posts I know this is not ideal but it's the best we can do and it's a whole lot better than no blog. 🙂 I'm the fellow optimizing the posts. I've found that my best SEO efforts usually slightly undermine the readability of these posts -- not in an extreme way, I'm not going overboard with keywords or anything. Rather, things like a sexy & enticing article heading may have to be dummed down for search engines... Because of this dumming down, I like to wait a couple of weeks to SEO optimize our posts, the logic being that we get the best of both worlds: a happy regular readership on topic articles that are clearly described for (and aligned to the terms used by) our search engine visitors What I'm wondering is, Generally: can you see any problems with this setup? would you do it differently? Specifically: does Google (et al) punish this sort of backwards re-writing? and, does it somehow amount to less SEO mojo when done retroactively? Thanks so much for your time! Best, Jon
Technical SEO | | JonAmar0