Blog Not Ranking Well at All in Search Engines, Need Help!

[Keith-Eneix]

Hi Mozers,

Need some help on a CMS I've been working with over the last year. The CMS is built by a team of guys here in Washington State. Basically, I'm having issues with clients content on the blog system not getting ranking correctly at all.

Here's a few problems I've noticed: Could you confirm and scale these problems based upon being, "not a problem" "a problem" and "critical must fix"

1. The title tag is pulling from the title of the article which is also automatically generating a URL with underscores instead of dashes.

• Is having a duplicate URL, Title, and Title tag spammy looking to search engines?
• Are underscores on long URL's confusing google? Where shorter one's are fine (i.e. domain/i_pad/
  (i.e.http://www.ductvacnw.com/blog/archives/2013/05/20/5_reasons_to_hire_a_professional_to_clean_your_air_ducts_and_vents),

2. The CMS is resolving all URL's with a canonical instead of a 301 redirect (I've told webmaster tools which preferred url should be indexed).

• Does using a canonical over a 301 redirect cause any confusion with Google? Is one better practice then the other?

3. The H1 tags on the blog pull from "blog category" instead of the title of the blog post.

• Is this is a problem?

4. The URl's are quite long with the added "archives/2013/05/20/5".

• Does this cause problems by pushing the main target keyword further away from the domain name?

5. I'm also noticing the blog post is actually not part of the breadcrumbs where we normally would expect that to populate after the blog category name, Problem?

These are some of the things I've noticed and need clarification on. If you see anything else please let me know?

[wissamdandan]

I understand from where you are coming from,

did you try to run the website on screaming frog or Moz Crawler? did u see certain anomalies ?

[Keith-Eneix]

Agreed,

since I'm seeing these issues across all sites that use this CMS with all the above issues I mentioned could it be that these are all causing a critical issue with the indexing/ranking issue. I must say, I've had a much easier time ranking the pages with the CMS which give me more control then I have had with ranking the blog articles of the websites using the CMS.

As this issue seems to be consistent across all sites using the CMS I'm trying to figure out the problems that need to be actually fixed within the CMS (as the programming costs us lots of dough).

[wissamdandan]

Great Keith,

I just want you to take what i said and go a lil broader.

ie. Google is not quickly indexing  or knowing about your content when you hit publish. which indicate:

• Low authority
• Crawlers is not used to / not trained to come to your website regularly to check for updates.
• Trust Issues

fixing these 3 bullets points will help your problems that you are facing

Sincerely,

[Keith-Eneix]

The ranking issues were happening before any content was syndicated elsewhere. However, you do make a good point. I just wanted to clarify that the issue has been happening before any syndication occurred on all sites using this specific CMS.

[wissamdandan]

All Problems you mentioned are opportunities that you can make you blog "better" but there is no "critical must fix" that is preventing google from indexing and rankings your website.

but what i see in the serps that you are syndicating your blog through blogger and wordpress and it seems that google is discovering the content on blogger and wordpress before your site(your site cache is on 21st the wordpress/blogger it shows may 20th).

what i will do is try to disable that syndication and try to submit your rss feed to google under sitemaps (http://www.ductvacnw.com/blog/latest.atom)