Blog Not Ranking Well at All in Search Engines, Need Help!
-
Hi Mozers,
Need some help on a CMS I've been working with over the last year. The CMS is built by a team of guys here in Washington State. Basically, I'm having issues with clients content on the blog system not getting ranking correctly at all.
Here's a few problems I've noticed: Could you confirm and scale these problems based upon being, "not a problem" "a problem" and "critical must fix"
1. The title tag is pulling from the title of the article which is also automatically generating a URL with underscores instead of dashes.
- Is having a duplicate URL, Title, and Title tag spammy looking to search engines?
- Are underscores on long URL's confusing google? Where shorter one's are fine (i.e. domain/i_pad/
(i.e.http://www.ductvacnw.com/blog/archives/2013/05/20/5_reasons_to_hire_a_professional_to_clean_your_air_ducts_and_vents),
2. The CMS is resolving all URL's with a canonical instead of a 301 redirect (I've told webmaster tools which preferred url should be indexed).
- Does using a canonical over a 301 redirect cause any confusion with Google? Is one better practice then the other?
3. The H1 tags on the blog pull from "blog category" instead of the title of the blog post.
- Is this is a problem?
4. The URl's are quite long with the added "archives/2013/05/20/5".
- Does this cause problems by pushing the main target keyword further away from the domain name?
5. I'm also noticing the blog post is actually not part of the breadcrumbs where we normally would expect that to populate after the blog category name, Problem?
These are some of the things I've noticed and need clarification on. If you see anything else please let me know?
-
I understand from where you are coming from,
did you try to run the website on screaming frog or Moz Crawler? did u see certain anomalies ?
-
Agreed,
since I'm seeing these issues across all sites that use this CMS with all the above issues I mentioned could it be that these are all causing a critical issue with the indexing/ranking issue. I must say, I've had a much easier time ranking the pages with the CMS which give me more control then I have had with ranking the blog articles of the websites using the CMS.
As this issue seems to be consistent across all sites using the CMS I'm trying to figure out the problems that need to be actually fixed within the CMS (as the programming costs us lots of dough).
-
Great Keith,
I just want you to take what i said and go a lil broader.
ie. Google is not quickly indexing or knowing about your content when you hit publish. which indicate:
- Low authority
- Crawlers is not used to / not trained to come to your website regularly to check for updates.
- Trust Issues
fixing these 3 bullets points will help your problems that you are facing
Sincerely,
-
The ranking issues were happening before any content was syndicated elsewhere. However, you do make a good point. I just wanted to clarify that the issue has been happening before any syndication occurred on all sites using this specific CMS.
-
All Problems you mentioned are opportunities that you can make you blog "better" but there is no "critical must fix" that is preventing google from indexing and rankings your website.
but what i see in the serps that you are syndicating your blog through blogger and wordpress and it seems that google is discovering the content on blogger and wordpress before your site(your site cache is on 21st the wordpress/blogger it shows may 20th).
what i will do is try to disable that syndication and try to submit your rss feed to google under sitemaps (http://www.ductvacnw.com/blog/latest.atom)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International SEO and Indexing in Country Specific Search Engines
Hey everyone! My company has recently migrated to a new domain (www.napoleon.com) which includes migrating many TLD separate domains to the new. We have structured the website to have multi-language and regions, including regional content, product offerings etc. Our structure is as follows just to give an example. napoleon.com/en/ca/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Napoleon.com
napoleon.com/fr/ca/
napoleon.com/en/us/
napoleon.com/de/de Currently, specifically the homepage version of the USA website is indexing into Canadian Search Engines, and I can't figure out why. It has been roughly 6 weeks since launch. Any thoughts on this? Thank you Dustin0 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Robots.txt help
Hi Moz Community, Google is indexing some developer pages from a previous website where I currently work: ddcblog.dev.examplewebsite.com/categories/sub-categories Was wondering how I include these in a robots.txt file so they no longer appear on Google. Can I do it under our homepage GWT account or do I have to have a separate account set up for these URL types? As always, your expertise is greatly appreciated, -Reed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Good Morning America Appearance - Search Rankings Down
We had some products on the Steals and Deals segment of Good Morning America. The same day we received a message from Google in Webmaster Tools (below). The message says that search result clicks have increased significantly. It seems like this was almost a warning that they were not sure this was valid. The promotion included a link from the good morning america site on yahoo to a subdomain on our site. The rankings have fallen a good little bit since and in Webmaster tools, there are no links to our site listed and no internal links and no content keywords for the site. Is this is a temporary freeze on our site until they figure out if this is manipulative? I would have thought a link from Good Morning America would be great for SEO. Search results clicks for http://www.justjen.com/ have increased significantly. This message is not indicative of any problem in your site. It is simply to inform you that the number of clicks that one of your pages receives has increased recently. If you have just added new content, this may indicate that it has become more popular on Google. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gametv0 -
I need help with a local tax lawyer website that just doesn't get traffic
We've been doing a little bit of linkbuilding and content development for this site on and off for the last year or so: http://www.olsonirstaxattorney.com/ We're trying to rank her for "Denver tax attorney," but in all honesty we just don't have the budget to hit the first page for that term, so it doesn't surprise me that we're invisible. However, my problem is that the site gets almost NO traffic. There are days when Google doesn't send more than 2-3 visitors (yikes). Every site in our portfolio gets at least a few hundred visits a month, so I'm thinking that I'm missing something really obvious on this site. I would expect that we'd get some type of traffic considering the amount of content the site has, (about 100 pages of unique content, give or take) and some of the basic linkbuilding work we've done (we just got an infographic published to a few decent quality sites, including a nice placement on the lawyer.com blog). However, we're still getting almost no organic traffic from Google or Bing. Any ideas as to why? GWMT doesn't show a penalty, doesn't identify any site health issues, etc. Other notes: Unbeknownst to me, the client had cut and pasted IRS newsletters as blog posts. I found out about all this duplicate content last November, and we added "noindex" tags to all of those duplicated pages. The site has never been carefully maintained by the client. She's very busy, so adding content has never been a priority, and we don't have a lot of budget to justify blogging on a regular basis AND doing some of the linkbuilding work we've done (guest posts and infographic).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasonLancaster0 -
Rankings Nose Diving Help Needed
Hey There SEO Community, I am trying to help these people: http://goo.gl/B1smo They once ranked in the top 10 for "lifewave" and "lifewave patches" but have disappeared. Any idea why and what I can do to help? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | siteoptimized0 -
301 redirect help
Hey guys, I normally work in WordPress and just use a 301 redirect plugin. I bought a site and rather than maintain two similar ones have decided to redirect one to the other. I am having trouble with the .htaccess file. Here is an example. These are two redirects: redirect 301 /category/models/next/2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster
redirect 301 /category/models I want both of these URLs to redirect to the same URL of the new site. However, the /category/models is the only one working. It redirects to the new page just fine. The /category/models/next/2 is redirecting to nearly the same URL on the new site, only it is adding /next/2 to the end and that is bringing up a 404. Why is it adding /next/2 to the new URL? How can I fix this? There are several doing this. Help appreciated!0 -
Is User Agent Detection still a valid method for blocking certain URL parameters from the Search Engines?
I'm concerned with the cloaking issue. Has anyone successfully implemented user agent detection to provide the Search engines with "clean" URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyaRiemer0