What is the best method for indexing blog pages?
-
I have a client whose blog has hundreds if not thousands of entries. My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? Can we do this dynamically? And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all?
Thanks,
Chris
-
is there a way to insert the title tag dynamically on each blog post via the cms?
CMS is software, and every software package is different. I will share there should be a way to do it, but you would need to search your CMS provider's site to get the details.
For your titles, I am not clear what you are asking. I would recommend the title tag for your blog matching your blog's title. You may want to add your site name or category name depending on the situation. For example if your site is "Chevyworld.com" and you have a blog entry titled "1982 Stingray, the end of an era" then the post title could be:
1982 Stingray, the end of an era
1982 Stingray, the end of an era | Chevyworld
1982 Stingray, the end of an era | Corvettes | Chevyworld
In the first example, your CMS would be adjusted to use the blog title for the title tag. In the second, the blog title plus your site name would be used for the title tag. The last example uses the blog title, the blog's main category tag and the site title.
Will google treat each entry as a unique page?
You need to ensure each page can only be accessed by one URL. For example, take a look at the following blog article's URL:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html
Now try to access that same article with various other URLs such as without the www or with adding a trailing slash character:
http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html/
Notice that when you try to remove the "www' the same article appears but the site's redirect works and adjusts the URL by adding the "www'. Does your blog article redirect itself in this manner? Or does it display for both the www and non-www url?
Another example is the trailing slash. In this case the URL is adjusted and a question mark is added. If you View Page Source you will see there is a canonical meta tag which ensures the correct version of the page is consistently used by search engines.
-
Thanks for the reply. Follow up to your response, I am familiar with sitemaps, but what I meant by dynamically was is there a way to insert the title tag dynamically on each blog post via the cms? Also should each title tag for the blog follow a formula like: Client Blog: article a Client Blog: article b Client Blog: article c (and so on) Also thanks for the info on the canonical tags. So for a typical blog, will google treat each entry as a unique page? I want to make sure we don't get dinged for having duplicate pages.
-
**My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? **
I am assuming that since each entry is unique content and is offered on your site that you desire people to read it. If that is the case then yes, it would be a tremendous help to be indexed by Google. If the pages are not indexed by Google, then how will people find these pages? It will only happen if they are either already on your site, or are told about the pages or linked to the pages.
Having a page indexed by Google allows people to find it through a normal search, which is how most pages on the web are discovered.
Can we do this dynamically?
Yes. You can submit a simple sitemap to Google, and they will try to crawl your site's pages if they have not already done so. It is important you do not block their efforts in your robots.txt file nor with any "noindex" meta tags.
** And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all?**
Canonical tags help ensure the correct version of your blog entry, or any web page is indexed. If your page can be accessed through multiple URLs, then it should be canonicalized so the proper version of the page is indexed.
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
-
Keywords are indexed on the home page
Hello everyone, For one of our websites, we have optimized for many keywords. However, it seems that every keyword is indexed on the home page, and thus not ranked properly. This occurs only on one of our many websites. I am wondering if anyone knows the cause of this issue, and how to solve it. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Ginovdw1 -
Get List Of All Indexed Google Pages
I know how to run site:domain.com but I am looking for software that will put these results into a list and return server status (200, 404, etc). Anyone have any tips?
Technical SEO | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
Duplicate pages in Google index despite canonical tag and URL Parameter in GWMT
Good morning Moz... This is a weird one. It seems to be a "bug" with Google, honest... We migrated our site www.three-clearance.co.uk to a Drupal platform over the new year. The old site used URL-based tracking for heat map purposes, so for instance www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html ..could be reached via www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=menu or www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=sidebar and so on. GWMT was told of the ref parameter and the canonical meta tag used to indicate our preference. As expected we encountered no duplicate content issues and everything was good. This is the chain of events: Site migrated to new platform following best practice, as far as I can attest to. Only known issue was that the verification for both google analytics (meta tag) and GWMT (HTML file) didn't transfer as expected so between relaunch on the 22nd Dec and the fix on 2nd Jan we have no GA data, and presumably there was a period where GWMT became unverified. URL structure and URIs were maintained 100% (which may be a problem, now) Yesterday I discovered 200-ish 'duplicate meta titles' and 'duplicate meta descriptions' in GWMT. Uh oh, thought I. Expand the report out and the duplicates are in fact ?ref= versions of the same root URL. Double uh oh, thought I. Run, not walk, to google and do some Fu: http://is.gd/yJ3U24 (9 versions of the same page, in the index, the only variation being the ?ref= URI) Checked BING and it has indexed each root URL once, as it should. Situation now: Site no longer uses ?ref= parameter, although of course there still exists some external backlinks that use it. This was intentional and happened when we migrated. I 'reset' the URL parameter in GWMT yesterday, given that there's no "delete" option. The "URLs monitored" count went from 900 to 0, but today is at over 1,000 (another wtf moment) I also resubmitted the XML sitemap and fetched 5 'hub' pages as Google, including the homepage and HTML site-map page. The ?ref= URls in the index have the disadvantage of actually working, given that we transferred the URL structure and of course the webserver just ignores the nonsense arguments and serves the page. So I assume Google assumes the pages still exist, and won't drop them from the index but will instead apply a dupe content penalty. Or maybe call us a spam farm. Who knows. Options that occurred to me (other than maybe making our canonical tags bold or locating a Google bug submission form 😄 ) include A) robots.txt-ing .?ref=. but to me this says "you can't see these pages", not "these pages don't exist", so isn't correct B) Hand-removing the URLs from the index through a page removal request per indexed URL C) Apply 301 to each indexed URL (hello BING dirty sitemap penalty) D) Post on SEOMoz because I genuinely can't understand this. Even if the gap in verification caused GWMT to forget that we had set ?ref= as a URL parameter, the parameter was no longer in use because the verification only went missing when we relaunched the site without this tracking. Google is seemingly 100% ignoring our canonical tags as well as the GWMT URL setting - I have no idea why and can't think of the best way to correct the situation. Do you? 🙂 Edited To Add: As of this morning the "edit/reset" buttons have disappeared from GWMT URL Parameters page, along with the option to add a new one. There's no messages explaining why and of course the Google help page doesn't mention disappearing buttons (it doesn't even explain what 'reset' does, or why there's no 'remove' option).
Technical SEO | | Tinhat0 -
Page crawling is only seeing a portion of the pages. Any Advice?
last couple of page crawls have returned 14 out of 35 pages. Is there any suggestions I can take.
Technical SEO | | cubetech0 -
Google indexing directory folder listing page
Google somehow managed to find several of our images index folders and decided to include them into their index. Example: websitesite.com/category/images/ is what you'll see when doing a site:website.com search. So, I have two-part question: 1) Does this hurt our site's ability to rank in any way?
Technical SEO | | invision
Because all Google sees is just a directory listing page with a bunch of links to images in the folder. 2) If there could be any negative effect, what is the best way to get these folders out of Google's index?
I could block via robots.txt, but I'm afraid it will also block all the images in that folder from being indexed in Google image search. I could also turn off directory listing in cpanel / htaccess, but then that gives is a 403 forbidden. Will this hurt the site in anyway and would it prevent Google from indexing the images in the directory? Thanks,
Tony0 -
Https indexed - though a no index no follow tag has been added
Hi, The https-pages of our booking section are being indexed by Google. We added But the pages are still being indexed. What can I do to exclude these URL's from the Google index? Thank you very much in advance! Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek ACSI Publishing | dennis@acsi.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Is this 404 page indexed?
I have a URL that when searched for shows up in the Google index as the first result but does not have any title or description attached to it. When you click on the link it goes to a 404 page. Is it simply that Google is removing it from the index and is in some sort of transitional phase or could there be another reason.
Technical SEO | | bfinternet0 -
What is consider best practice today for blocking admins from potentially getting indexed
What is consider best practice today for blocking pages, for instance xyz.com/admin pages, from getting indexed by the search engines or easily found. Do you recommend to still disallow it in the robots.txt file or is the robots.txt not the best place to notate your /admin location because of hackers and such? Is it better to hide the /admin with an obscure name, use the noidex tag on the page and don't list in the robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | david-2179970