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
-
My pages are being crawled, but not indexed according to Search Console
According to Google Search Console, my pages are being crawled by not indexed. We use Shopify and about two weeks ago I selected that Traffic from all our domains redirects to our primary domain. So everything from www.url.com and https://url.com and so on, would all redirect to one url. Have added an attached image from Search Console. 6fzEQg8
Technical SEO | | HariOmHemp0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Why blocking a subfolder dropped indexed pages with 10%?
Hy Guys, maybe you can help me to understand better: on 17.04 I had 7600 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 6113). I have included in the robots.txt file, Disallow: /account/ - which contains the registration page, wishlist, etc. and other stuff since I'm not interested to rank with registration form. on 23.04 I had 6980 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 5985). I understand that this way I'm telling google I don't want that section indexed, by way so manny pages?, Because of the faceted navigation? Cheers
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
What is the best way to handle links that lead to a 404 page
Hi Team Moz, I am working through a site cutover with an entirely new URL structure and have a bunch of pages that could not, would not or just plain don't redirect to new pages. Steps I have taken: Multiple new sitemaps submitted with new URLs and the indexing looks solid used webmasters to remove urls with natural result listings that did not redirect and produce urls Completely built out new ppc campaigns with new URL structures contacted few major link partners Now here is my question: I have a pages that produce 404s that are linked to in forums, slick deals and stuff like that which will not be redirected. Is disavowing these links the correct thing to do?
Technical SEO | | mm9161570 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Lots of Pages Dropped Out of Google's Index?
Until yesterday, my website had about 1200 pages indexed in Google. I did lots of changes: removed low quality content, rewrote passable content to make it better, wrote high quality content, got lots of likes and shares on social networks, etc. Now this morning I see that out of 1252 pages submitted, only 691 are indexed. Is that a temporary situation related to the recent updates? Anyone seeing this? What should I interpret about this?
Technical SEO | | sbrault740 -
Product landing page URL's for e-commerce sites - best practices?
Hi all I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and with each one, I learn something new and apply to the next site and so on. Lets call it continuous review and improvement! I have always structured my URL's to the product landing pages as such: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category/product-name Now this has always worked fine for me but I see more an more of the following happening: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/product-name Now I have read many believe that the longer the URL, the less SEO impact it may have and other comments saying it is better to have the just the product URL on the final page and leave out the categories for one reason or another. I could probably spend days looking around the internet for peoples opinions so I thought I would ask on SEOmoz and see what other people tend to use and maybe establish the reasons for your choices? One of the main reasons I include the categories within my final URL to the product is simply to detect if a product name exists in multiple categories on the site - I need to show the correct product to the user. I have built sites which actually have the same product name (created by the author) in multiple areas of the site but they are actually different products, not duplicate content. I therefore cannot see a way around not having the categories in the URL to help detect which product we want to show to the user. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | yousayjump0 -
GWT indexing wrong pages
Hi SEOMoz I have a listings site. In a part of the page, I have 3 comboboxes, for state, county and city. On the change event, the javascript redirects the user to the page of the selected location. Parameters are passed via GET, and my URL is rewrited via htaccess. Example: http:///www.site.com/state/county/city.html The problem is, there is A LOT(more than 10k) of 404 errors. It is happenning because the crawler is trying to index the pages, sometimes WITHOUT a parameter, like http:///www.site.com/state//city.html I don't know how to stop it, and I don't wanna remove it, once it's very clicked by the users. What should I do?
Technical SEO | | elias990