Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
-
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog
Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this?
See here for what i mean.
I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd.
Thanks to all for help!
-
Hello Geoff,
It looks like you've installed the Yoast plug-in now and the category pages have a noindex,follow robots meta tag. That might do the trick, but you should make sure the posts are in an XML sitemap that you list in your robots.txt file and submit to Google Webmaster Tools - or whatever they're calling it this week.
I checked several things and it looks fine:
-
No robots meta tag blocking on posts.
-
No robots.txt blocking of posts.
-
Followable Read More links from category pages
-
Mostly unique content on posts (though they may be seen as thin affiliate pages in some cases).
At this point you should focus on getting your posts into an XML sitemap and also look into the following:
-
Lots of pages that shouldn't be indexed, such as /contact pages with various parameters and redirect.php with various parameters: http://tinyurl.com/qdne3g2
-
Security errors. I see several popping up in Firefox, including "This website does not supply identify information". I'm assuming you have a valid SSL Cert?
-
-
Hi
I was trying to checking if you have "no index" for your blog post pages but i found some html errors in your page.
There are few more errors that you need to take care of. It may not be the only reason why your category page is ranking above your post pages. But it could be a small factor that you need to take care of as well. Are you using any SEO plugin for the blog ? I prefer Yoast SEO plugin and it works great for me.
I would follow what @oleg has mentioned regarding the category.
-
I would noindex the categories or clean them up + optimize them... seems like most categories only have 1 post and the categories have more internal backlinks than the posts.
I would combine categories by brand or something and add a unique paragraph of text to the top with phrase(s) you want to rank for. Alternative is to noindex the categories which should help your posts rank - less duplicate content.
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
-
Password Protected Page(s) Indexed
Hi, I am wondering if my website can get a penalty if some password protected pages are showing up when I search on google: site:www.example.com/sub-group/pass-word-protected-page That shows that my password protected page was indexed either before or after adding the password protection. I've seen people suggest no indexing the page. Is that the best method to take care of this? What if we are planning on pushing the page live later on? All of these pages have no title tag, meta description, image alt text, etc. Should I add them for each page? I am wondering what is the best step, especially if we are planning on pushing the page(s) live. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
E-Commerce Site Collection Pages Not Being Indexed
Hello Everyone, So this is not really my strong suit but I’m going to do my best to explain the full scope of the issue and really hope someone has any insight. We have an e-commerce client (can't really share the domain) that uses Shopify; they have a large number of products categorized by Collections. The issue is when we do a site:search of our Collection Pages (site:Domain.com/Collections/) they don’t seem to be indexed. Also, not sure if it’s relevant but we also recently did an over-hall of our design. Because we haven’t been able to identify the issue here’s everything we know/have done so far: Moz Crawl Check and the Collection Pages came up. Checked Organic Landing Page Analytics (source/medium: Google) and the pages are getting traffic. Submitted the pages to Google Search Console. The URLs are listed on the sitemap.xml but when we tried to submit the Collections sitemap.xml to Google Search Console 99 were submitted but nothing came back as being indexed (like our other pages and products). We tested the URL in GSC’s robots.txt tester and it came up as being “allowed” but just in case below is the language used in our robots:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /9545580/checkouts
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/+
Disallow: /collections/%2B
Disallow: /collections/%2b
Disallow: /blogs/+
Disallow: /blogs/%2B
Disallow: /blogs/%2b
Disallow: /design_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_theme_id
Disallow: /preview_script_id
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association
Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml A Google Cache:Search currently shows a collections/all page we have up that lists all of our products. Please let us know if there’s any other details we could provide that might help. Any insight or suggestions would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts! Thank you in advance. Best,0 -
How long to re-index a page after being blocked
Morning all! I am doing some research at the moment and am trying to find out, just roughly, how long you have ever had to wait to have a page re-indexed by Google. For this purpose, say you had blocked a page via meta noindex or disallowed access by robots.txt, and then opened it back up. No right or wrong answers, just after a few numbers 🙂 Cheers, -Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
What would cause the wrong category page to come up?
I am trying to figure out why the wrong thing is coming up in the serps. For example, we are trying to rank for used widgets. But when you type in used widgets in google the primary widget page doesn't come up, one of the secondary categories under used widgets comes up. What would cause this? What are things I should check?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Should I set up no index no follow on low quality pages?
I know it is a good idea for duplicate pages, blog tags, etc. but I remember somewhere that you can help the overall link juice of a website by adding no index no follow or no index follow low quality content pages of your website. Is it still a good idea to do this or was it never a good idea to begin with? Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael_Rock0 -
How can I prevent duplicate pages being indexed because of load balancer (hosting)?
The site that I am optimising has a problem with duplicate pages being indexed as a result of the load balancer (which is required and set up by the hosting company). The load balancer passes the site through to 2 different URLs: www.domain.com www2.domain.com Some how, Google have indexed 2 of the same URLs (which I was obviously hoping they wouldn't) - the first on www and the second on www2. The hosting is a mirror image of each other (www and www2), meaning I can't upload a robots.txt to the root of www2.domain.com disallowing all. Also, I can't add a canonical script into the website header of www2.domain.com pointing the individual URLs through to www.domain.com etc. Any suggestions as to how I can resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iam-sold0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0