I just looked up my site on Google using the site:domain.com method and was floored to see that out of the 193 links it has index, only ONE of them is an actual content page!!! One is my link page, another is my feed page, and then there's the Javascript file for collapsing ads. The other 188 links are for the Comment Feeds!!! Now I know why 75% of my search engine traffic is from MSN and why I'm so terribly ranked on Google! Is there something about WordPress that's preventing Google from indexing my content pages? I'm using the fancy permalinks feature, it seems to be working fine for those comment feeds...
It's /category/post-id ... ick... I really hope that isn't the problem because I've already been running it like this since February 4! I've just run across the Google Sitemap plugin for WP... installed and ran it, it did indeed generate an XML sitemap and pinged Google with it... hopefully this'll turn up some results. It's still so bizarre that only my comment feeds were indexed...
I hope you mean category/post-slug.php, cause if you're using that "www . name.com/widgets/%20&%%1sessionid2434" crap, that's bad. the google sitemap plugin is great, but there's another plugin that is a great extra addition. it's called crawlpage and it creates a Yahoo/MSN/human readable sitemap. I swear by them both.
Google's indexing is a little messed up at the moment. Wait for another week or two before you panic and start changing stuff.
No, not using the query style links... my links look like domain.com/category/33 . The reason I went with the post ID instead of the slug is because I didn't want to risk getting penalized for having the keyword twice in the same URL (the category is the keyword). I'll have to look into that crawlpage plugin... I really need a boost in my Yahoo traffic as well. Thanks for the tip. Minstrel, I know about the Google dance, it's quite frustrating ... but I am kind of freaking out because I'm getting hundreds of hits a day from MSN and just 2 or 3 from Google, and I can't even get into the top 200 results with Google no matter what I do. Like I said, hopefully the sitemap will help.
I don't know. I couldn't get either crawlpage or the Google sitemap plugin to work. *shrug* I figure Googlebot will index me when he finishes chasing the girls at Samantha's forum...
If I felt I had to choose between the category and the slug, I'd drop the category, myself. But, hey, that's why they make chocolate AND vanilla.
The more I think about it the more I regret using post IDs... I think I'll look into supporting both simultaneously. BTW, I got both Google Sitemap and CrawlPage plugins to work just fine... I'm really impressed by Google Sitemap, I didn't know it pinged Google automatically. Hopefully I'll start seeing results soon.
Sketch, are you using version 1.5x? I get error messages from both of those plugins - undefined functions.
Nope, I'm using WP 2.0. The Google Sitemap plugin has a 3.01 beta in case you don't have it. PM me with the undefined functions and any other errors, maybe I can help.
Just reporting in to let everyone know it seems Google Sitemap helps A LOT. I've gone from Google being around 10% of my search engine traffic to around 40%. My rankings for certain keywords have skyrocketted as well, I'm in the top 10 for some surprisingly good phrases I hadn't thought of Gives me a lot of ideas as far as optimization (mainly shifting my attention to moderate 3-word phrases instead of huge 2-word phrases). I'm using Google Analytics (just got my code last week!) to track this stuff... if only there were a way to see if these plugins were working with Yahoo, still not doing too well there.