Search engines see one post, no longer see the rest of my website!
-
My website used to get roughly 800 referrals per day from search engines, going to a large number of posts. On May 15 I published a hot post. Now I get bout 2,100 search engine referrals per day, but all to this one post:
Spoilers for “Castle”: explaining the finale & season 7. It’s a metaphor for America.
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2014/05/15/castle-solution-68128/Almost nothing to the rest of the website. It’s like the search engines have optimized on this one post, and no longer see the rest of the website.
Any thoughts on what happened? I’m worried that when interest in this one subject fades, we’ll become search engine orphans.
This might be outside your area of support, but as experts you might have some advice.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
Hi there,
Unfortunately, we don’t have any influence on how or where your blog appears in search results. The topic of Castle may have just become more popular, and your post was featured as it was very informative and well-written. However, we automatically notify search engines whenever you post something new to your site so every post is indexed. Your other posts are indexed in search results as well. It just appears that this post is getting the most traffic from Google searches.
-
Thanks! It’s the mysteries of search engines. We’re so dependent on them, but have so little knowledge of how they work. This would be a great subject for more WP articles, in addition to those you’ve already written — the WP community would be interested!
Thanks!
Sidenote: what I found odd was the *decrease* in hits to other posts that accompanied the increased hits to the Castle post. The traffic from search engines had been stable for 3 years. It was if there was a max SEO throttle at work.
-
Regarding the decrease in search traffic to other posts, Google just updated it’s search algorithm. You can read a bit about it here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/denispinsky/2014/06/09/google-panda/
It’s possible that the decrease in search to several of your posts is related to the changes mentioned above. Unfortunately, I can’t say for sure!
-
Thank you, that’s a very helpful answer. Esp since its not, strictly speaking, a WP issue!
-
Yep – I apologize, but there isn’t much we can do to increase the appearance of your blog posts in search engines. However, your Castle post is doing really well! That’s a huge plus. Perhaps there are some helpful insights you can glean from that piece to apply to your other blog posts.
-
Jeremy,
I appreciate your answer, which was on target and useful.
A suggest in return — tapping the WP staff for articles about how search engines work. Not to game them, or let them be our Editors. But for many of us they are by far the largest source of traffic.
They send half my hits. So the success of one post doesn’t offset the collapse in SE traffic to the other 2,700 posts! It’s my problem, not WP’s. But I am probably not the only one in this boat.
Again, thanks for your help, which has pointed me in the right direction for more research.
So any info from your experts will help, as this internet engineering is unknown territory to me.
-
I definitely understand. We appreciate the suggestion. I’ll ping our Editorial folks in charge of our blog content and see if we can get an in-depth or series of posts out about search engines!
-
I look forward to reading them. Better support for webmasters is, IMO, a valuable to distinguish WP from its competitors.
Another suggestion on this subject: an article about using the Google webmaster page. It has lots of graphs, few of which have any obvious meaning to me.
And on a higher level, should I be using Google analytics, and if so, how?
While these articles w/b of interest only to a minority of your clients, they’re the ones growing — generating traffic now and tomorrow.
Keep up the great work.
-
Hi!
The page on Google Webmaster tools is a great suggestion. I’ll add that to the list as well. WordPress.com does not currently support Google Analytics tracking. However, we do offer built-in statistics showing you most of the same types of information as Google Analytics would display. You can read more about that here:
I appreciate the awesome suggestions!
- The topic ‘Search engines see one post, no longer see the rest of my website!’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 