SEO issues: Google not indexing most popular posts
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That is Google. Google is a strange and mysterious thing that I don’t think even they understand. You would not believe the search terms that have brought people to my site – phrases that have absolutely nothing to do with anything I’ve ever written.
The tags/categories names also play a big role too. If you use broad, general tags, you are going to be competing with bunches of people and many of those people might have higher page rank which means you are going to be down the list a ways.
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Permit me to post a dissenting opinion here about the importance of tags. I almost never use them (I tried it a few times and didn’t notice any effect on traffic), yet the first time I got a Google pagerank I was a 5. Since then my traffic has doubled, but now my pagerank is down to 4, so that’s a bit of a mystery.
Nevertheless, I still place very well on Google searches. For example, a web search (not a blog search) on “Palen creationist” — without the quotes — which was a hot topic during the election, still gets over 100,000 Google hits, and one of my posts is 3d on the list. In a blog search on the same thing there are over 700,000 hits, but there I don’t show up until the third page, which is still a respectable showing. Difficult to understand, isn’t it? Somehow Google treats me well, and I don’t think I’ve ever used a “Palin” tag.
I know I’m disagreeing with some well-informed people here, but I think tags are very much over-rated. In my experience it all depends on titles and content. And also Google’s quirks, which are beyond human understanding.
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@sensuous, I don’t disagree at all. I don’t use tags either, only a few relevant Categories, and I use those mainly for in-blog organizational reasons.
IF you are going to use tags though, then the search engines are going to use those in their process of placing your posts, and it then becomes important to make sure they are relevant and not overly broad in scope.
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What about the fact that this canned wordpress.com theme that I use puts the post title in H2 tags? Is that making enough of a difference that I should considering moving onto a self-hosted setup so I can edit the HTML and PHP?
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All themes I’ve ever looked at – here or self-hosted – use h2 as post title. You’re grasping at invisible straws here. Editing the HTML and PHP will not help either especially if you are talking about adding meta keywords/tag. They have been so abused that search engines pay virtually no attention to them anymore.
I have a friend who spent $500 having someone go through and modify their blog and do all of the so called SEO tricks with the promise that it would increase their traffic, raise their page rank and place them higher in searches. Before they did that, the blog had a page rank of 4 and was averaging 500 hits per day. Now a year later it still has a page rank of 4 and is still getting 500 hits per day. Anytime that someone figures out a way to “game” the search engines, they adjust their algorithms to compensate for the gaming and everyone goes back to a more or less level playing field.
As far as SEO, wordpress.COM is at or near the top. Everything they do is “right” and gives you the best advantage right out of the box.
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“…Google is rewriting their whole way of doing things…”
I think this is what you’re referring to:
…everybody who does a search will end up with different search results based on their prior search history. Personalization is going to be “web-wide” using third party cookies and things.
“We can’t search for any term and look at rankings because I can get different results than you for exactly the same query. So that’s going to change a lot,” he says.
According to Bruce, this is all going to really help Google fight spammers. He says it will affect the way scrapers and spammers work, because if they are just scraping text, they wouldn’t be able to rank.
He also says that all of the variables that come into play may diminish the value of linking, which will certainly not help the spammers’ cause either. He says it will be a big win for Google, and big win for the searchers.
There’s no question that if everything Bruce talked about comes true, the SEO world will be turned on its ear. Bruce says, “If you’re not ready for it as an SEO, you’re gonna lose.”
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/17/seo-about-to-get-turned-on-its-ear
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It’s more than just that; that has been an annoyance for quite some time now. I for one LIKE seeing things I’m not expecting when I search; essentially Google is making each of our worlds smaller and more isolated. I’ve been looking for a way to turn that OFF when searching.
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You’re welcome. Do remember that if you clear your cookies, you will have to reset things back to where you want them.
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Damn. Google IS evil; only signed-in users are able to remove their history, everyone else gets the personalized search by default.
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I didn’t look too closely, but that does qualify as evil. I guess that means you don’t have a smoogle account.
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Oh, I do. I have several. But the thing is, it’s obviously pressuring everyone who does not have one to get one.
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Some great discussion has taken place here. I am surely going back with an enhancement of my knowledge and understanding. :)
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I’ve also found that my main WordPress posts (lingpipe-blog.com) no longer seem to be indexed by Google.
For instance, two of my latest posts had their tag pages and my top-level blog page picked up, but not the page for the blog entry.
post 1: “Arabic Named Entity Recognition with the ANER Corpus”
http://lingpipe-blog.com/2009/07/30/zou-and-hastie-2005-regularization-and-variable-selection-via-the-elastic-net-prior/post 2: “regularization and variable selection via the elastic net [prior]”.
http://lingpipe-blog.com/2009/07/28/arabic-named-entity-recognition-with-the-aner-corpus/They’re both the #1 hit in Bing for exact searches on phrases from their title.
This can’t just be personalization, because it’s not just order, I don’t get the page at all, and with phrase search, I can go through all the results.
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I have also had trouble http://www.everthinghubsite.com used to pop up firtst one on google search now it doesnt even show up —scope out the best internet alibi greates
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