My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
-
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog
Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this?
See here for what i mean.
I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd.
Thanks to all for help!
-
Hello Geoff,
It looks like you've installed the Yoast plug-in now and the category pages have a noindex,follow robots meta tag. That might do the trick, but you should make sure the posts are in an XML sitemap that you list in your robots.txt file and submit to Google Webmaster Tools - or whatever they're calling it this week.
I checked several things and it looks fine:
-
No robots meta tag blocking on posts.
-
No robots.txt blocking of posts.
-
Followable Read More links from category pages
-
Mostly unique content on posts (though they may be seen as thin affiliate pages in some cases).
At this point you should focus on getting your posts into an XML sitemap and also look into the following:
-
Lots of pages that shouldn't be indexed, such as /contact pages with various parameters and redirect.php with various parameters: http://tinyurl.com/qdne3g2
-
Security errors. I see several popping up in Firefox, including "This website does not supply identify information". I'm assuming you have a valid SSL Cert?
-
-
Hi
I was trying to checking if you have "no index" for your blog post pages but i found some html errors in your page.
There are few more errors that you need to take care of. It may not be the only reason why your category page is ranking above your post pages. But it could be a small factor that you need to take care of as well. Are you using any SEO plugin for the blog ? I prefer Yoast SEO plugin and it works great for me.
I would follow what @oleg has mentioned regarding the category.
-
I would noindex the categories or clean them up + optimize them... seems like most categories only have 1 post and the categories have more internal backlinks than the posts.
I would combine categories by brand or something and add a unique paragraph of text to the top with phrase(s) you want to rank for. Alternative is to noindex the categories which should help your posts rank - less duplicate content.
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 increase Page authority of old blog posts
Hi, How can I increase the page authority of old blog posts? There are many posts that are ranking well (Page 1 lower or Page 2) - but I want to make them rank higher by making the post more usable, better UI, design, content relaunches etc - these all would inherently mean improving Page authority also eventually. What are some concrete steps I can take to improve page authority of blog pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pks3331 -
Cache and index page of Mobile site
Hi, I want to check cache and index page of mobile site. I am checking it on mobile phone but it is showing the cache version of desktop. So anybody can tell me the way(tool, online tool etc.) to check mobile site index and cache page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
URL structure for categories, sub categories and products
Hi, I'm looking for some advice about URL hierarchy and the best way to structure URLs for SEO with regards to categories, sub categories and product pages. The way the site is set up displays the URLs as such, example: 1. /badge-accessories/ 2. /badge-accessories/plastic-wallets/ 3. /badge-accessories/plastic-wallets/clear-flexible-wallets/ I am questioning whether it would be best to keep it like this (which the site developers are suggesting) or change to something like: 1. /badge-accessories/ 2. /plastic-wallets/ 3. /clear-plastic-flexible-wallets/ Or something like: 1. /badge-accessories/ 2. /plastic-wallets/ 3. /plastic-wallets/clear-flexible-wallets/ Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kerry_Jones0 -
Ranking slipped to page 6 from page 1 over the weekend?
My site has been on page one for 2 phrases consistently from May onwards this year. The site has fewer than 100 backlinks and the link profile looks fairly even. On Friday we were on page 1, we even had a position 1, however now we are on page 6. Do you think this is Penguin or some strange Google blip? We have no webmaster tools messages at all. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
How can we improve rankings for category pages
Hi Everyone, I have a dog breeder site I'm working on and I was wondering if I could get some tips and ideas on things to do to help the "category" pages rank better in search engines. Let's say I have "xyz" breed category page which has listings of all dog breeders who offer that particular breed, in this case "xyz". I have certain breeder profile listings which rank higher for those terms that the category page should be ranking for. So I'm guessing Google thinks those breeder profile pages are more relevant for those terms. Especially if well optimized. I know thin content may be my problem here, but one of our competitors dominates the rankings for relevant keywords with no content on their category pages. What do you all suggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rsanchez0 -
Page Indexed but not Cached
A section of pages on my site are indexed (I know because they appear in SERPs if I copy and paste a sentence from the content), however according to the text-only cached version of the page they are not being read by Google.Why are they indexed event hough it seems like Google is not reading them..... or is Google in fact reading this text even though it seems like they should not be?Thanks for your assistance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0