Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Blog age: 1 year or so
I have 2 posts that generate the lions share of my traffic. Or I should say, I *had* two posts, one has fallen off the radar, and it was my most popular.
A few months ago, I could type in "my term" into google, and I would come up first through fifth, it moved around a bit, as I would expect. As of a few months ago, "my term" shows nothing, nothing at all.
If I run a site:www.example.com my term
I get back 4 results, with the usual "repeat the search with the omitted results included." link at the bottom. If I use that link, I do in fact find the page that used to be favorable listed.
Organic result #1 is a link as follows:
www.example.com/?p&paged=16
Curiously, I have never had that linking structure, and wordpress seems to never have supported it. How did it get in there, and why is it #1. I have tried the url removal tool, but it just errors out and tells me to add a url to remove over and over. The page is and has always rendered a 404, or at the very least, has for a very long time. It should also be noted, this is a supplimental result.
Organic results #2 through #4 are valid links, they are real pages, but totally irrelevant. On my blog, I have a set of nav links above each post:
Earlier post ¦ Main ¦ Older post
Those are normal href links, in divs, and use the real post title on the left and right on the "Main" link.
Since the "my term" is in the forward and backward nav on 2 pages that are not the actual post, I am guessing, google is calling this "duplicate", and shoving it into the omitted results.
The forward and backward posts could not be more non related to each other. One is about dimples, one is about google, and the other is about a phrase I liked.
In a nutshell, google has the most relevant results hidden, and the worst possible ones showing up organic. How can a 404'd page even be in the list, at least, after this much time. I am not sure I can call these real "organic" as I am in the site: search style, but you get my point.
On a side note, why does adding a space after the colon on a site: search yield totally diffferent results?
Even stranger, why do other domains that link to me show up in a site: search, I have no control over those domains?
Stranger still, a link: www.example.com shows zero in google, but 186 external links in Webmaster tools at google.
Thanks for any help, this all seems a mess to me, and there is a lack of consistency that makes it hard for me to troubleshoot this on my own.
If your title estructure are like this:
Blog Name: Category name: Post name
You maybe can have suplementals results because G take the repeted word in your title tag and think its spam.
You need chage it and put only Post Name on the title of every page, and, if you can, put an orginal description tag for every page at your site.
Please read the -950 post in this forum and test this:
Search for your term, go to advanced search, put 100 by 100 reults, go to the last page (10) and if you can see your site, you are 950ed, but if you cant see your site, click at the bottom link (include ommited results) , go again to the last page and you can see your site.
[edited by: TaLu at 5:39 pm (utc) on May 23, 2007]
TaLu, thanks
My html title structure is as follows:
Blog Name ¦ Blog Title
I don't have meta keywords, but after reading these forums, I did drop in a meta description, and took the advice of, at the very least, put the title in the meta description.
Perhaps I should find a wordpress mod that allows me more granular control over meta description and put in something more relevant? I know there are plug ins that will take a substring of the post, but that to me smells of the easy way that could cause me trouble, since my first sentence of a post is rarely more than a fluffy intro.
My post title is just an href with a css class applied to it, perhaps I should first start with changing that to an h1 instead?
So my repetition is in the html title, meta description, and post title on the page. I am taking from your comments this is bad practice?
Should I remove the Blog Name ¦ Blog Title from the html title tag and just use the page title? I do like having the blog name show up in serps, I think it looks nice and adds recognition to the users who see the listing.
Oh, I also have the repitition of the navigation links above the actual post, which is in the format of earlier post ¦ MAIN ¦ newer post.
This is just not making a lot of sense to me, an html title that matches the body copy title of a blog post is very standard form, and IMO, highly usable and logical.
I read the -950 post last night after posting, just by accident. As far as I can tell, I am not in that hole, in either normal or omitted results.
As for url exclusion via robots.txt, will that honor something like /?page=23
