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
-
How to safely syndicate blog posts in LinkedIn Company page
We currently post our new blog post on our company profile (in Linkedin) immediately after publishing on our company blog. Is this running the risk of duplicate content? My colleague pastes the new posts URL into (I've given an example using my own site - ironically about Panda)! Does this run the risk of creating duplicate content? I've tried searching for indexed pages in Google for past posts and only find the originals (no URLs for the LinkedIn domain). I've got a bit confused about the whole subject having read Neil Patel's excellent article on "...syndicating content without screwing up you seo"! Thank you 🙂 10FpxLP 10FpxLP
Technical SEO | | Catherine_Selectaglaze1 -
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 -
Why is there a difference in the number of indexed pages shown by GWT and site: search?
Hi Moz Fans, I have noticed that there is a huge difference between the number of indexed pages of my site shown via site: search and the one that shows Webmaster Tools. While searching for my site directly in the browser (site:), there are about 435,000 results coming up. According to GWT there are over 2.000.000 My question is: Why is there such a huge difference and which source is correct? We have launched the site about 3 months ago, there are over 5 million urls within the site and we get lots of organic traffic from the very beginning. Hope you can help! Thanks! Aleksandra
Technical SEO | | aleker0 -
How do I get my pages to go from "Submitted" to "Indexed" in Google Webmaster Tools?
Background: I recently launched a new site and it's performing much better than the old site in terms of bounce rate, page view, pages per session, session duration, and conversions. As suspected, sessions, users, and % new sessions are all down. Which I'm okay with because the the old site had a lot of low quality traffic going to it. The traffic we have now is much more engaged and targeted. Lastly, the site was built using Squarespace and was launched the middle of August. **Question: **When reviewing Google Webmaster Tools' Sitemaps section, I noticed it says 57 web pages Submitted, but only 5 Indexed! The sitemap that's submitted seems to be all there. I'm not sure if this is a Squarespace thing or what. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | Nate_D0 -
My blog homepage deindexed, other pages indexing, still traffic not changed.
Hello! Today when I check my blog site search on Google, I can't see my blog home page. Though all my posts and pages are still on the Google results. Today I published a test post, then it also indexed by the Google less than 3 minutes. Still I can't see any traffic changes. 10th of April (yesterday) when I perform a site search (site:mydomain.com), I saw my site on the Google search result. Today I installed the Ulitmate SEO plug-in and deactivated WordPress SEO plug-in. After a few hours I saw this issue. (I'm not saying this is the issue, I just mentioned it). In addition to that I never used any black hat SEO methods to improve my ranking. my site:- http://goo.gl/6mvQT Any help really appreciate!
Technical SEO | | Godad0 -
Campaign shows 5,000 warnings from shared database feed, made pages no-follow and no-index, are we OK now?
One of our campaigns shows 5,000 warnings for dup content, meta descriptions, and urls. This is from a xml database feed that is shared throughout the industry. We made the pages no-follow and no-index, but on Moz crawl still get the warnings. No warnings on Webmaster tools. Should we ignore these warnings and are we OK now, or is there more work to do?
Technical SEO | | geilt0 -
Blogs are best when hosted on domain, subdomain, or...?
I’ve heard the it is a best practice to host your blog within your site. I’ve also heard it’s best to put it on a subdomain. What do you believe is the best home for your blog and why?
Technical SEO | | vernonmack0 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90