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 I can improve my website On page and Off page
My Website is guitarcontrol.com, I have very strong competition in market. Please advice me the list of improvements on my websites. In regarding ON page, Linkbuiding and Social media. What I can do to improve my website ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
How to make Google include our recipe pages in its main index?
We have developed a recipe search engine www.edamam.com and serve the content of over 500+ food bloggers and major recipe websites. Our legal obligations do not allow us to show the actual recipe preparation info (e.g. the most valuable from the content), we can only show a few images, the ingredients and nutrition information. Most of the unique content goes to the source/blog. By submitting XML sitemaps on GWT we now have around 500K pages indexed, however only a few hundred appear in Google's main index and we are looking for a solution to include all of them in the index. Also good to know is that it appears that all our top competitors are in the exactly same situation, so it is a challenging question. Any ideas will be highly appreciated! Thanks, Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edamam0 -
404 Error on Blog Pages that Look Like Loading Fine
There was recently a huge increase in 404 errors on Yandex Webmasters corresponding with a drop in rankings. Most of the pages seem to be from my blog (which was updated around the same time). When I click on the links from Yandex the page looks like it is loading normal, expect that it has the following message from the Facebook plugin I am using for commenting Any ideas about what the problem is or how to fix it? Critical Errors That Must Be Fixed | Bad Response Code: | URL returned a bad HTTP response code. | Open Graph Warnings That Should Be Fixed | Inferred Property: | The 'og:url' property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags. |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
| Inferred Property: | The 'og:title' property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags. |
| Small og:image: | All the images referenced by og:image should be at least 200px in both dimensions. Please check all the images with tag og:image in the given url and ensure that it meets the recommended specification. |0 -
Best possible linking on site with 100K indexed pages
Hello All, First of all I would like to thank everybody here for sharing such great knowledge with such amazing and heartfelt passion.It really is good to see. Thank you. My story / question: I recently sold a site with more than 100k pages indexed in Google. I was allowed to keep links on the site.These links being actual anchor text links on both the home page as well on the 100k news articles. On top of that, my site syndicates its rss feed (Just links and titles, no content) to this page. However, the new owner made a mess, and now the site could possibly be seen as bad linking to my site. Google tells me within webmasters that this particular site gives me more than 400K backlinks. I have NEVER received one single notice from Google that I have bad links. That first. But, I was worried that this page could have been the reason why MY site tanked as bad as it did. It's the only source linking so massive to me. Just a few days ago, I got in contact with the new site owner. And he has taken my offer to help him 'better' his site. Although getting the site up to date for him is my main purpose, since I am there, I will also put effort in to optimizing the links back to my site. My question: What would be the best to do for my 'most SEO gain' out of this? The site is a news paper type of site, catering for news within the exact niche my site is trying to rank. Difference being, his is a news site, mine is not. It is commercial. Once I fix his site, there will be regular news updates all within the niche we both are in. Regularly as in several times per day. It's news. In the niche. Should I leave my rss feed in the side bars of all the content? Should I leave an achor text link on the sidebar (on all news etc.) If so: there can be just one keyword... 407K pages linking with just 1 kw?? Should I keep it to just one link on the home page? I would love to hear what you guys think. (My domain is from 2001. Like a quality wine. However, still tanked like a submarine.) ALL SEO reports I got here are now Grade A. The site is finally fully optimized. Truly nice to have that confirmation. Now I hope someone will be able to tell me what is best to do, in order to get the most SEO gain out of this for my site. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | richardo24hr0 -
Drop in number of pages in Bing index
I regularly check our index inclusion and this morning saw that we had dropped from having approx 6,000 pages in Bing's index to less than 100. We still have 13,000 in Bing's image index, and I've seen no similar drop in the number of pages in either Google or Yahoo. I've checked with our dev team and there have been no significant changes to the sitemap or robots file. Has anybody seen anything like this before, or could give any insight into why it might be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GBC0 -
Thousands of 404 Pages Indexed - Recommendations?
Background: I have a newly acquired client who has had a lot of issues over the past few months. What happened is he had a major issue with broken dynamic URL's where they would start infinite loops due to redirects and relative links. His previous SEO didn't pay attention to the sitemaps created by a backend generator, and it caused hundreds of thousands of pages to be indexed. Useless pages. These useless pages were all bringing up a 404 page that didn't have a 404 server response (it had a 200 response) which created a ton of duplicate content and bad links (relative linking). Now here I am, cleaning up this mess. I've fixed the 404 page so it creates a 404 server response. Google webmaster tools is now returning thousands of "not found" errors, great start. I fixed all site errors that cause infinite redirects. Cleaned up the sitemap and submitted it. When I search site:www.(domainname).com I am still getting an insane amount of pages that no longer exist. My question: How does Google handle all of these 404's? My client wants all the bad pages removed now but I don't have as much control over that. It's a slow process getting Google to remove these pages that are returning a 404. He is continuously dropping in rankings still. Is there a way of speeding up the process? It's not reasonable to enter tens of thousands of pages into the URL Removal Tool. I want to clean house and have Google just index the pages in the sitemap.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Organising Blog categories for SEO and usability.
Hello! I'm a professional photographer and have used categories in an old blog to separate my work. (weddings, portraits, etc.) I'm starting an new blog and everything was imported, except categories so as i started rewriting them, I noticed the 'personalised URL. So I was thinking of re-writing my categories based on types of jobs and location. For example: *North Wales -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography *Cheshire -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography and so on... Or do you think it's best to just have shoot style categories? What do you guys think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0 -
Google replacing subpages in index with home page?
Hi! I run a backlink building company. Recently, we had a customer who had us build targeted backlinks to certain subpages on his site. Then something really bizarre happened...all of a sudden, their subpages that were indexed in Google (the ones we were building links to) disappeared from the index, to be replaced with their home page. They haven't lost their rank, per se--it's just now their home page instead of their subpages. At this point, we are tracking literally thousands of keywords for our link building customers, and we've never run into this issue before. Have you ever run into it? If so, what's the best way to handle it from an SEO company perspective? They have a sitemap.xml and their GWT account reports no crawl errors, so it doesn't seem to be a site issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ownlocal0