Blog posts not appearing in Search

[Agentmorris]

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

[artdivision]

Glad you found my info useful. If you need anything else send me a PM

[Agentmorris]

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!

[artdivision]

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

1. If you plan to do posts aiming all the time your main keyword, rename the blog to something else
2. 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.
3. Remove the recent post widget

Thats all I can think of now.

[Agentmorris]

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.

[artdivision]

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.

[Agentmorris]

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 | |

[Agentmorris]

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

[artdivision]

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

[Agentmorris]

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

[simon_realbuzz]

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.

[Agentmorris]

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

[simon_realbuzz]

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.