So I have a blog and a question regarding SEO. The thing is my blog posts' titles are comprised of words devided with dots and not spaces which results in a long continuous url with at most one day in it. I'm concerned because when querying Google for one such title (post title, with dots) my site does not even show in the results page. Sometimes I get visitors to my posts from Google but I often find my site at the bottom of the 2 page results. Could someone please help me identify the problem? I mean, I don't expect to rank high for all post titles but my site should at least show up when queries for that keyword are made, shouldn't it? If you're wondering what I'm talking about please refer to my signature. Thanks for any help!
Hi Aaron111, thanks for the promt reply! Ok, but do I need to stumble | digg | etc all posts in order to just get them listed in the Google index? I mean, 97% of the posts are in Google's index yet they don't show up for extremely specific keywords like post title exact match. If this is the case, how come all other blogs and torrent sites for example appear when queried for such keywords? I even had the strangest of all: another blog which feeds off my rss feeds ranks for those particular keywords while my site is nowhere to be found. Also I should mention that site never gets complete posts as I add the <!--more--> tag half way through the post. What is wrong with my blog? PS. At the moment I don't care whether I rank high or low, I just don't see how the blog doesn't show up at all when most if not all other blogs/sites in the niche do.
Hmm, I begin to wonder, do all the webmasters do this? I mean, if there are two pages of results for a given keyword, and my site appears at the very bottom, did all the previous ones stumble or digg their pages to get in front of me? I see pages that are barely SE optimized, they don't even have the keyword in their title tags. How does this happen? Seriously, I think I should make a few examples: Search Term | Keyword:MindMapper.Pro.2008.v6.0.0.1828.Incl.Keymaker-CORE Blog Post URL: h**p://clan-tlg.com/0day-apps/mindmapperpro2008v6001828inclkeymaker-core/ SERP Position: 17/17 SERP Analysis: 1.) s.technorati.com/clan-tlg.com << my blog in technorati (whatever) 2.) h**p://raidrush.ws/w4,apps-news/12/ << kw not in url or title, kw found only found 1 time among lots of content 3.) ****2baksa.net/news/21324/ << kw in title, ok 4.) ****sharebus.com/index.php?showtopic=150806&mode=linearplus << forums post, kw in title, ok 5.) isohunt.com/torrent_details/29070591/keyword << kw not in title or url, but isohunt is big so it's ok 6.) 0daycheck.eastgame.net/0day/archives/111915_Mind.html << kw optimized, good 7.) h**p://www.chilewarez.cl/foros/showthread.php?t=97347 8.) ***.0wei.com/thread-27832-1-1.html << well optimized, ok 9.) ***.tongtong.net/ttbt/html/857/bt_857142.html << good, ok 10.) ***freakz.ro/forum/viewforum.php?f=154 << (!!!) forum category, among so many posts, this page ranks for the keyword! 11.) bt.eastgame.net/details.php?id=ab6de26435f6cb93629a3802a0cc7f02b74d1c6c << good keyword density, kw not in url, but I guess ok position 12.) forum.2baksa.ws/news/21324/ << (again) 2baksa page mentioning this keyword 13.) vanix.net/crack_mindmapper%202008_keygen_serial_torrent.html << ok? 14.) ***.raidrush.org/get/p-19/p-1 (!!!) site search results, probably only 1 mention of the keyword, in fact currently none 15.) ***.crackdb.org/MindMapper.Pro.2008.v6.0.0.1828.torrent/get_112502_MindMapper.Pro.2008.v6.0.0.1828_crack.html << I guess ok 16.) qiq.ru/12/11/2007/programmy/41186/mindmapper_pro_2008_v6001828.html < somehow ok 17.) my site's post, url mentioned above. Why I think my site should do better than at least 1 of the rest of those pages: -keyword targeted (kw in title, url, density, meta description tag) I will be so thankful if someone could please look at this example and tell me what I'm doing wrong to deserve this disrespect from Google. Seriously, I admin it - this is beyond me, I'm desperate and have no idea as to why this is happening.
Hey dude, I checked your blog, I don’t really know what is causing you this problem. It might be your blog template, which isn’t converting the titles into proper URL’s. I have some suggestions for you: 1. Click on Edit (on one of your post), it will bring you then back to the administration area of your website, change the “Post Slugâ€, that is the URL of your article. You can do this for all of your existing articles/posts. 2. Put a space instead of a dot in your upcoming articles/posts so you can have more friendly URLS 3. Create a sitemap (you can use gsitecrawler), and submit that to Google webmaster, this way the good and correct URL’s of your website will be indexed. And now, just a bit patience, you will soon see the change in your ranking
Hey man, I thought about that but I think it's wordpress that rewrites titles upon publishing/editing a post. I found out a few functions that rewrite into dashes or strip / trim special characters, e.g. ~!@#$%^&*()+ or that turn umlaut letters into Latin letters. And the function that I think rewrites post titles is sanitize_title_with_dashes(). But the problem I'm currently not good with php but I tried studying the function and I couldn't find a solution to make the function rewrite dots into dashes instead of trimming (removing) them. I asked in the WP support forum, but I guess there are few people who can help me there and there's the chance they'll never see my thread or bother to reply. At least no one seems to have any idea what I'm talking about. Anyway, to you suggestions I can say why it's not practical to do them. One title consists of at least several words divided by dots. So that would mean I'll have to rewrite manually from 4 up to 11-13 dots for each post while making the post slug. So basically I think I need someone with a bit more experience with regular expressions and the php functions that could look at the WP function code and help me understand and modify it so that it rewrites dots into dashes instead of just removing them. PS @ilovelinux Yeah, of course I am, I wouldn't be writing this post and mentioning I've SEOed my blog if I didn't even use permalinks. @SEOSpeakS I don't think you should forget about directories, you just need a good list of free directories. PS2 I should've said this but without looking at my blog I don't think the rest of you understood me correctly. Sorry if I didn't explain myself more clearly. Thank you.
OK, I've got an update on the urls problem. You know when I'm struggling with something it doesn't leave me alone until I've done it. So I had yet another look at the wordpress function sanitize_title_with_dashes() and added a str_replace() to replace dots with dashes and voila, it's working! For now I haven't noticed any errors on the website, and new posts now get converted ok. Now I only hope that this has been the problem to my miserable serp positions. I'll let you know how the blog is doing in the next few weeks or so. If this fixes the problem I guess I should be be looking at quite a few sleepless nights fixing all the 1700 posts.