Blog not showing up when searching for exact post/META titles
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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That brings up an interesting thought, when you "archive" the blogs does a /archive get added to the url?
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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.
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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?
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