Hello, First of all I wanted to thank all the people who built this forum. It's just such an awesome forum to be at. No Email activation needed (I hate them...) ok so I have just established a Wordpress blog: digital-horizon.net And I tried to make it Google Friendly (google is the only search engine i really care about, screw others!), but I failed for several reasons and was left with unsolvable questions that I'd like to ask: 1. Google is not indexing the pages. Even when I search site:digital-horizon.net it still brings up Tag URLs and what not. I did not even submit the Taxonomy map to google and yet tags show up higher than posts. Some posts don't show up at all even though they're indexed (says Webmaster tools) 2. I used to have the blog hosted under a subdomain but now when I try to remove the old stored subdomain URL, google just doesn't remove it. The removal tool shows as if they're removed but if I search, they're still there! 3. Google Crawler generally seems to be lazy. The preview of the site has been changed for months and still not updated in the Webmaster tools! Can anyone kindly provide me with solutions?
Are you using the All In One SEO plugin? That will let you make your home site and individual posts Google friendly with keywords, tags, and descriptions for each post. You also should set your site to automatically ping a few places with each new post. I use Smart Update Pinger for that. Go to a few pinging sites and get their URLs to the ping list and then every time you post it will send out pings everywhere.
I'm using Wordpress SEO plugin by Youst which does both: pings websites and optimizes the keywords. I'm having problems with Google mostly, not Wordpress.
Hi i can see google cached 495 pages, Tag URL's index more doorway URL's than your post url. So better to use max 3 tags per post URL's.
Can you give more info? What did you use for analyzing my website? I've submitted it to webmaster and it shows only 15 URLs indexed. I'm using only 1 tag per post and yet still the tags show higher than the posts...
Have you activated canonical url plugin as this will help google to identify the original content of your blog and will not rank tag pages higher than original pages.
You have not set up the yoast tool to noindex your tag pages. I couldnt see 'noindex' tag in the source code of this page, http://digital-horizon.net/tag/problem/ Other useless pages you are seeing in index are from the old-subdomain which are now redirecting to, http://digital-horizon.net/wp-signup.php?new=v0r73x This is not going to remove these pages from index because its a 302 redirect. for google to "eventually" remove all of them...you need to have 301 redirect. (removal tool in WMT is of no use here) I would rather suggest you to just drop the old pages and have 404 on them. (I can't see any loss of link juice and its in accordance with new google policy) then after you might use WMT tool. Depends on crawl rate assigned to your site. You don't seem to have blocked anything on the site. so chill! Hope it helps
Hi dexterb007, Your post is the most useful SEO forum post I've ever read! Thanks a lot! A lot of things got solved (such as the tag pages problem) Can I ask some more questions? I've updated the theme of the website, so the preview kinda matters. Can I force google to update it somehow?
thanks mate..happy to help you! As your site is new, there is actually no way to trigger the recrawl. Submitting sitemap won't help. but there's an option called "fetch as Google" in WMT that should give Google a signal to refresh your listing and its preview/cache. also having couple of high quality backlinks from the sites which have high crawl rate might also help google to reach you!
based on your question, there is an whole industry out there..called SEO still, I am not sure if this works anymore but, you can have links from social bookmarking sites and popular forums like this one..which get crawled frequently. But it still doesn't guaranty refreshing your listing in google.
Well I've optimized the website but for some reason the search results are still not showing up my posts. WMT shows that they're indexed but when I search site:digital-horizon.net, not many "posts" come up.
If you are talking about the old content on the subdomain of your site, i mean if these posts were earlier indexed with, 'sub.domain.com/some-post' and you want, "domain.com/some-post" to show up in index...you need to have 301 redirect from respective old post to new post url. but while I checked latest posts on your homepage..they seem to be giving 404 error! (I bet this is the reason)..something is set wrong with new urls. http://digital-horizon.net/change-default-search-engine/ http://digital-horizon.net/download-youtube-video/
You checked it exactly at a time when the site map was down. I fixed it now! See if the posts are coming up fine.
Well this is my first post on this forum. The conversation is so healthy and very useful. Well if you through your page URL in front of Google by pinging it, it may help. Second problem may be because of spam or irreverent links. Google made strict rules for SEO. Google demand relevant and natural links,completely unique, distinct and quality content and much more. So you may check all these factors.