Hi all, I've been running my WordPress website for a couple of years and I'm trying to investigate a curious traffic drop. In my investigation, I've noticed that when I type many of my exact post titles in Google, what I see on the results pages are my category and tag archives -- sometimes multiple archives from my own website on the same results page -- but not the actual post. This doesn't happen with every post on my website, but it happens with enough that I'm worried I could be losing out on traffic. I haven't noindexed my category and tag archives because I figured they'd be useful for long-tail searches, but when someone types the exact title of a post, it seems to me Google ought to consider the post the most relevant result to show. Obviously the easiest thing to do would be to noindex my website's archives, but I'm wondering if that would be a knee-jerk response to a bigger problem that I'm not noticing. Some of the things I've looked at so far: * The archive pages contain completely different text from the posts because they display custom excerpts. * I've found no serious crawl errors in Webmaster Central. * The posts aren't noindexed and show up when I type "(search term) site:mywebsite." I'd appreciate any suggestions!
I'm kind of wondering what the specific functionality of the All-in-One SEO Pack is that you're referring to, because chances are that I can do it with the plugins I'm already using. My posts all have appropriate and unique meta titles and descriptions, and my category and tag archive pages contain no duplicate content because my post excerpts contain no text from the posts. Suppose I have a post called "ACME Blue Widget," and I've filed that post under my website's "Widgets" and "ACME Widgets" categories. The problem I'm running into is that, for many of my posts, if I type an exact post title in Google I'll see the "Widgets" or "ACME Widgets" category archive -- or sometimes both -- on the first results page, but I won't see the "ACME Blue Widget" post, which is what I think the searcher actually wants. Although I could noindex my category archives, where would that leave me if someone wants to search for "ACME Widgets?" So what I'm trying to figure out is what could possibly make Google think the "ACME Widgets" category archive is the most relevant result when the searcher typed "ACME Blue Widget."