Wordpress category issue

Hello everyone,

I couldn't find a suitable category for this thread, so..

It's been a while since my friend set up a website on a wordpress platform but he has some issues. Categories (some of them) aren't being indexed by Google (or Bing, SE's in general). It's not about time, those categories have been up for the whole month and still deindexed.

Wordpress is updated, links have been pinged, shared on social networks etc... but nothing seems to be working. He's using WPsimpy, a wp theme. Maybe it's because of the template? but why only some categories?

Any ideas? maybe he should change theme?

idk

 

I doubt it would be the theme if it's been being used all along. Each category is going to display the same because the theme itself isn't aware of each individual category, in other words will probably display each category the same way, so in terms of the SE spider crawling your site, not much of a difference.

I would probably just give it more time, depending on the update frequency of your site (not necessarily by yourself but by SE's as well), it may take more time to propagate through.

 

Thanks for the answer, sounds logical. But, can I do something to make the process faster (besides sharing or pinging links)? Maybe play with robots.txt, will that work? I don't even know how that really works. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

Got a sitemap? Make sure to update it, perhaps adjusting the weight of each page...other than that, not sure. I probably wouldn't try to force it or it might even come slower, who knows! I'm sure others would know more about this than me!

 

What you can try is adding new content to the categories that aren't indexed, that's probably the best way to speed things up. Also, use a SEO plugin like Yoast, it gives more info and builds a very nice sitemap.

Another possibility is extending the ping list in wordpress, you can find ping lists all over the internet Not sure if it helps though... But what you should definately do, is sharing on social media!

 

Yes, it has a sitemap. The strange fact is that posts which are included in those categories are indexed, but not categories itself, so, I'm sure there must be a trick to it.

 

Maybe adding content to the categories itself will do the trick? You can add descriptions and stuff to it.... Google does find actual content pages a lot more interesting then category pages, so it's behaviour is kind of explainable...

 

So, basically, you mean, not all pages could be indexed? alright, I'll try that. thank you

 

All pages can be indexed, but google will index content pages a lot better, and use category pages to find content pages Content pages are also the pages you want to rank in Google, so it also is what you want

 

Understood. I submitted sitemap to webmaster tools (as well as links individually), pinged them etc.. I'll wait for one day and post if something happens.

 

It could be the theme. It appears that the theme may be over three years old, themes not kept up to date can be problematic.

 

Try updating category descriptions and than recreating your sitemap. That might help.

 

Categories have their descriptions but it doesn't show up in Google search (even for those categories that are indexed).

 

I checked stats today, still not indexed. In webmaster tools I see "108 URLs submitted but only 74 indexed" from sitemap, what could it be?

 

Just have patience, it can sometimes take long time to get indexed fully, it depends on how often Googlebot comes by your site... Maybe try to get some links from other websites in the meantime?

 

Sure, I'll do that too