Blog posts not appearing in Search
-
http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/blog works well to index my niche terms. Looked at webmaster tools today and since today it has put my indexed pages from 900+ to 11 ???
I have recently added a new site format via a web designer and was all working fine.
Now none of my posts are appearing.I have resubmitted site map for 993 pages
Is there anything I can do to stop/ prevent this from happening again? and what do you think was the cause?
Thanks everyone!
Daniel
-
Glad you found my info useful. If you need anything else send me a PM
-
Totally exceeded my expectations, thanks! I have done all these things and now it has sent me on a quest for sorting out the rest of the site.
Cheers!
-
On the General Settings
- Make sure you tick the box of the SiteWide Meta settings. Untick the rest
On the post type settings
- Leave everything unticked apart the META ROBOTS no the Media section where you should tick it (turn on noindex, follow)
On the Taxonomies
- Noindex, follow the Meta Robots on the tag section
On the XML sitemap settings
- Tick Ping yahoo and ask
- Exclude post types: tick media
Exclude taxinomies: tick tags and format
That should do the trick
General advises
- If you plan to do posts aiming all the time your main keyword, rename the blog to something else
- Remove the keyword from you categories. For example if you have categories like "band hire lewisham", "band hire london", band hire croydon" etc change them to "lewisham", "London", "Croydon" etc.
- Remove the recent post widget
Thats all I can think of now.
-
OK I get it.
Excellent advice and thank you. I may be pushing your knowledge too far when I ask this:
How should I change it? I have installed Yoast now and I think this is going to be the way forward.
-
Will try to give you an example.
Consider for a moment that you start a blog about "local bands whatever" and "band hire whatever". You have 3 categories including hire and LSI similar keyphrases. You name your blog "band for hire bla bla bla". Your tagline name and description got it as well". You write articles that all have the keyword with it and are all similar named. You've got a recent posts widget on the bottom of the post which names each article by name. Every article has a tag of your keyword in it or something similar anyway.
Lets assume that you start a fresh post right now. Before you even start writing:
Every page has "local band" "band hire" once as blog name in title, plus articles all have "local band, nind hire etc" ... meaning each title has the term twice in it.
There is the "band hire" in the blog title H1 tag.
There is a "band hire" in the blog byline.
There are 2-3 categories with "band hire" in it.
There are 5 articles in recent posts with "local hire" in it.
You had a few tags on every page showing the keyword but you have now removed it.
Your url already got it another 2 local-band-hire-surrey-hire-local-bands-surrey/- I am not even toughing img alt tags, RSS etc
Count them up, that's roughly 15 "band hire/local hire" keywords on every page, before you even start writing. You would need a 2250 word article that will not mention your keyword ONCE to balance that and still might lose.
Hope that helps.
-
webmaster update today: Bit better?
| 1 | | /blog/sitemap.xml | Sitemap | Jan 29, 2014 | - | Web | 993 | 774 |
| | 2 | /sitemap.xml | Sitemap | Jan 29, 2014 | - | Web | 2,344 | 1,977 | | -
Great advice. Thanks. I am using the posts as niche 'hire genres'
My strategy so far has been to do this and all has been going fine. Would you suggest the page titles and h1s need the work
I don't get what you mean That makes your page start with a 1%-1.5% optimisation on the main keyprhase thus your page will not rank.
I am going to go back over the blog posts and run them through the MOZ grader and get them checked and also this will help with revitalising old posts?
I really appreciate your comments
-
Your pages are overoptimised, good move to remove the tag. I will assume you havent edited wordpress at all and left it by default. Wordpress is an overoptimised nightmare unless you edit it the right way. Your site is constructed in a very "keyword specific" way and all your landing pages/blog include the same keyword with location variations. That makes your page start with a 1%-1.5% optimisation on the main keyprhase thus your page will not rank.
If you write a blog article and you dont rank for its title within 2 days you have over-optimised and need to bring down the % a bit. Also try to add more content, aim for 700words at least instead of just pushing internal pages with blog titles that cross link with each other.
My £0.02
-
Good find on the tag cloud. I have removed!
New site map created today. Never done one for it before, maybe that is a problem but it didnt seem to have an impact before.
Absolutely brilliant to know you are here and actually respond to things!
I am going to go over to Yoast as it seems to be better than seo ultimate for things like this.
I will recheck webmaster tools tomorrow. One thing for sure though, having an offline business plan is also handy
-
When did you submit the new sitemap? I have known it to take more than a few days for the pages submitted in a site map to be indexed.
As a separate point I also noticed that many of your pages have the same tag cloud on the right of each page which can be seen as keyword spamming. Take a look here to find out why it may not be helpful to your pages and ability to rank.
-
Thanks Simon. Only thing is that it is the last few days that it has happened and now nothing is coming up as valid. eg. http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/blog/local-band-hire-surrey-hire-local-bands-surrey
-
I don;t think there's reason to be unduly worried. In fact a quick search using site:http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/blog shows about 2,370 results for your blog entries so they certainly are indexed. It could just be a temporary glitch in webmaster tools which could right itself soon enough.
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
-
Domain Change Post Mortem
Hello, my company changed our domain 2 weeks ago and we are just starting to see traffic level back out, except for Organic. The site is on shopify so it made switching the domain pretty easy, as well as the 301 redirects (no url structure changes). We've taken all the proper steps with google/bing webmaster tools as well as monitoring 404's and 301 testing and don't see any red flags. Does anyone roughly know how long it takes for 301's to re-index and domain authority to start building back up for our new domain? Our old domain was about 13 years old and the new one was parked for quite awhile. p.s. I also noticed a lot of our traffic ending up as referral from our old url. I was able to wipe the sessions from analytics which cut it down, but will this persist for the foreseeable future? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | SchoolhouseElectric0 -
Having Issue with Site Search in Analytics
Hi Mozzers, We launched a website in October 2012 and have added in the settings(Google analytics) of that profile "Do Track Site Search" since we have a search box on the website. The site search report worked for 10 days and it was over(from end of december till beginning of January 2013). Since then I have been trying to understand this issue. I have added all the query search terms possible, but still not showing any signs of life. At this point I am not sure what to do? Some Help would be appreciated! Search URL= subdomain.example.com**/search/node/**.... Thanks! z93cGUZ.png
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Stats show /blog/wp-cron.php at the top. What is it?
Hi, I have worked with websites for years but have no clue when it comes to Wordpress. We have our main website and then a Wordpress blog running in a subfolder that is only about a year old. The blog has only 7 posts so you can see how small it is vs main website with 200 pages. Usually our main index page of the site is at the top of the stats with the most views and this page /blog/wp-cron.php is about 30% lower. Now suddenly over the last month this page has jumped to the top and accessed almost as much as the home page of the site. We took a big hit with the latest Google Update so we are tyring to determine if there is anything technical in our site that has caused an issue. Thanks in advance Force7
Reporting & Analytics | | Force70 -
Reasons for drop in URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search
Hi I'm having trouble understanding why I'm getting the results I am for my organic traffic data. I've been focussing on a few keywords throughout my website and the most recent results show that there is a big increase in the Organic Search Visits and the Non-Paid Keywords Sending Search Visits for both Branded Keywords and Non-branded Keywords, but the results for URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search are the complete opposite. Down by a few percent. I don't understand why this would happen and was hoping that someone could maybe explain and give a few reasons for why this is happening and maybe give some tips on how to stop it from happening in the future if possible. Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Bonx0 -
Metrics for guest posting
I have couple blogs willing to publish an article with a backlink to my site. I want to compare them. What SEO metric is the best to use for comparison: Domain Authority or Domain Domain Mozrank or DomainTrust? I want to choose a blog that will give me the most linkjuice
Reporting & Analytics | | Alexey_mindvalley0 -
Nofollow page is being reported as a landing page for organic search in Google Analytics
One of my client's websites includes a series of pages for an enrollment process. All of these pages are blocked by robots.txt. In Google Analytics these pages are showing data as landing pages for organic search traffic, and have been for quite some time. There was recently a surge of organic search traffic landing on one of these pages, coming from multiple search engines. The pages appear to be blocked and I'm not finding any of them in the search results for the keywords that are being reported in GA or by searching for the url. Does anyone have any insights into why this might be happening?
Reporting & Analytics | | rgibson1000 -
Using Clients GA account for their over all website to Optimize Their Blog? or is there a better way to compare apples to apples
I would like to optimize my clients blog. If I am using their GA account for their over all website but put in the sub folder for SEOMOz, will it detect that I only want to optimize the blog ex. http://xxx.com/blog or will I be seeing the GA for the entire site on SEOMOZ?
Reporting & Analytics | | CliffordC0 -
Standard % of nonbranded organic search traffic?
I am working on developing goals for 2012. I will be doing several SEO projects, including one on a website for study abroad programs. Currently, nonbranded organic search is 15.49% of our visits and in 2010, it was 15.02%. I am wondering if anyone has any advice or knows of a benchmark percentage that could help me set an attainable goal. Thank you!!
Reporting & Analytics | | CIEEwebTeam0