Vast majority of my posts are not indexed in Google

  • Unknown's avatar
    robertmulcahy · Member ·

    I noticed a while back that almost all hits on my blog are for a very small number of posts. To explore this, I verified Google Webmaster Tools and used Google’s URL Inspector. Most of my posts are flagged as ‘Crawled – currently not indexed’ and no further information is available. A few of my posts show up in Google searches, though–only about 6 or so out of the few hundred posts I’ve written over the years–but I can’t tell what’s different about them. If it were a sitewide problem then none of the posts would work, right? Not sure where to go from here. Any advice?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • supernovia · Staff ·

    Hi @robertmulcahy, checking the console is a good start. Sometimes just getting started there is a good nudge to Google if they haven’t been paying you much attention before.

    My next suggestion is to check on your post titles to see if you can make them more specific to the content, so they’re less in direct competition with other articles out there using the same titles. I’ll bet if you check your stats, the most popular posts have quite specific titles. We have more on that, and on writing findable content, here:

    How to Publish Posts that Search Engines Will Love

    And more general SEO tips here:

    Optimize Your Site for Search Engines (SEO)

    Try those things, and give search engines plenty of time to see your efforts. I can’t promise top three results or any thing like that, and please know that sometimes changes like these can take months to add up to better rankings. But it should help the people who are looking for your specific content to have an easier time finding it.

    Good luck!

  • Unknown's avatar
    robertmulcahy · Member ·

    Thank you for the reply. The pointer on post titles is interesting. I’ll experiment, though in browsing through the posts that Google has indexed, one of them is a post entitled “Ergodic Switch, Part 3” but parts 1 and 2, with similar titles, are not indexed at all. Sigh. It’s hard to know what’s going to make a difference since the algorithm is effectively a black box.

  • Unknown's avatar
    robertmulcahy · Member ·

    I posted an entry this morning with a long, very specific title–specifically, “Writing an Undiscoverable Web Journal: Exclusion from Google’s Search Database.”

    We’ll see if that gets indexed.

  • staff-zinnia · Staff ·

    Write back with an update. Thank you :)

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