Change in how Google indexes WordPress blogs?
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Hi Everyone,
Not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but I used to get generally between 20 and 50 search terms referring people to my blog each day. It was a great way of generating readership.
Now, all of a sudden, I’m only getting one or two. And usually one of them is the name of my blog. All of the other terms that my posts used to be popular under are not coming up anymore. When I tried some of them out myself, I found that the WordPress tag pages are coming up higher and my post down much lower (if at all).
For example, if you search on “Ontario coroner bed sharing”, the WordPress tag “Ontario coroner” comes up first. I know for a fact that that page didn’t used to show up in the search results and my post on the topic, which is now 7th or 8th in the results, used to be 1st or 2nd in the results.
I also used to get good traffic for the term “cry it out” and now my posts are pages and pages down in the search listings (probably like page 20 or so), but the WordPress tag page is up higher.
So, it would seem like Google is now giving WordPress tag pages a higher priority than individual posts. Has anyone read anything about this change?
Thanks
Annie
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More details:
I don’t think it is Google that is the problem, since I have found the same thing on Altavista and Yahoo. I’m wondering if WordPress has somehow changed what gets indexed by the search engines or if it has changed how the tags appear within the code of a page.
I used to get fairly good search rankings based on a lot of my tags. Now it looks like the search engines are easily finding my posts if I search based on their title, but not if I search based on the tags. Even if they are very unique tags. Instead of finding my post, it finds the WordPress tag page. The problem with that is that even if I have the most authoritative piece of content on a specific topic, if other people have written content that includes the same “tag” more recently, then my post won’t show up on the main wordpress “tag” page.
Am I the only one that is getting a lot less referrals from search engines all of a sudden? (this started about 2 days ago).
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Have a look at this: http://faq.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/my-post-doesnt-show-up-in-the-tag-list-what-gives/
Some of your posts have too many tags and categories.
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I haven’t had any trouble with my posts not showing up in the tag lists. They do always show up there. The problem is that the ranking in search engine results has dropped dramatically the past few days, as has the number of referrals that I am getting from search engines. I am getting more referrals from WordPress tag pages though, which seems to be as a result of the tag pages being ranked higher in search engine results on my prime key words.
However, since the tag pages are chronological, if 10 people have written something more recent on that topic than I have, then my post won’t show up on the main page for that tag anymore. So not only can people not get to my posts as easily from search engines, but if they do make it to the WordPress tag page, I might not be on the main page even if my post is more relevant and in-depth on that tag than other more recent posts.
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