My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages

[walletapp]

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!

[Everett]

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?

[MindlessWizard]

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.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

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.