Google and WordPress permalinks question

  • I finally made the switch to WP from MT (yay…), but Google doesn’t like my permalinks at all (boo…). Searches for various old pages all show up with only the base domain address…which wasn’t the case at all under MT. What this means is that regardless of the term searched for, Google is showing/linking to only https://inkmuse.com/imblog/, when it should be, say,
    https://www.inkmuse.com/imblog/2005/01/11/the-taming-of-the-bean/

    (This was tested on a Google search for “taming of the bean inkmusings”)

    Any solution to this? At this rate, no one will be able to find anything within the site. And while the old saying, “All roads lead to Rome” might have been dandy a few thousand years ago, all Google searches leading to the home page…well, it sucks.

    I did use A.King’s WP redirect script to rebuild my MT individual archives one last time to force everything over to the new permalink structure…could that be why Google is defaulting to the base domain only???

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)

  • Give it another visit – Google loves WP permalinks. A couple of my posts where I have bitched about certain things are #1 in a search on those terms. (Which is not a boast, just saying …)

    yea i just checked mine and seems to work fine ..except my listing ‘Spaminator Added’ only made it to #2 on google..

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Again, agreeing with Podz, a couple of my posts are in the top ranks as well.

    Nice ranking, CafeRG. If you want even more funny results, try MSN Search.

    https://www.macmanx.com/wordpress/archives/2005/02/07/updated-msn-search-rankings/

    If having permalinks are not essential for you (besides making sure you’re indexed by Google) you may want to drop them altogether.

    After having some problems with permalinks (specific to our windows based install) I removed them to see how Google would deal with it. All our pages are indexed by Google, so it doesn’t seem to care about permalinks. I may put them back in later, but so far not having them hasn’t been a problem.

    Thread Starter gvtexas

    (@gvtexas)

    I’m being Googled fine…the blurb in the match is from the post with the term…but the problem is a searcher would never get to the post in question because Google is only linking to the root, not the article. I will test this in a day or so, given that the WP-version only went live Monday.

    Since my MT links had a different subdir, I can see where Google has/hasn’t picked up the WP-version blog. The old links go right to the article, new links only to the root. ??

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    The Google results I was talking about do go straight to my articles. You have to give GoogleBot at least two weeks to reach it’s maximum effectiveness.

    Thread Starter gvtexas

    (@gvtexas)

    Probably so…plus I have a robots.txt file in the root, but just noticed that that meta info is not getting into the pages…so I added that line to the header template…should make a difference. Not all SEs read that properly, but I think I remember that Google and most of the major SEs do.

    I think what happened is that the term happened to be on your index page when Google hit it. So, since according to the cached version of your page that’s where the term was, that’s where google sends you. In a week or so, when the post has moved off the front page and into the archives, Google will be able to cache that copy, and start reporting back the “correct” result.

    Tg

    Thread Starter gvtexas

    (@gvtexas)

    Yeah, I thought so too…but I tested it with older article terms that weren’t on the front page…and Google showed both the link to the MT-generated page and the same blurb pointing to the WP front page. Unless Google is retaining the cached version of when that article appeared on the front page a month ago and that’s the link I’m seeing thinking it’s read the WP pages.

    That might explain what I’m seeing…except I didn’t think they retained such links for that long.

    Ah ok, actually I see that some of my pages are also linking to index like you instead of the actual entry, but the weird part is that it seems random. Some of my google links correctly go to the actual post while others go to the index page…
    The ones linking to index have this URL: wordpress/index.php?paged=1 , and the ones linked to an actual post have a URL like: wordpress/?p=452

    But I’m not sure permalinks would change anything to that. It seems just to be that google decides to follow some links and not others.

    Are all your links going to index or just some of them?

    I think it might also have something to do with Google recent change to their index. I’ve heard from other people that sites that were previously and virtually non-existent on Google all of the sudden appeared in the past day or so. Methinks they’re changing things over there.

    Thread Starter gvtexas

    (@gvtexas)

    mosco – just some of them, so far. I get the old Google link to the old MT-based site linking to the correct individual page, and the new links (showing the correct excerpt) going to the blog root.

    But…today I tested a few and they are now *correctly* showing…so it just takes time, I guess. Either that, or fixing my robots.txt file forced the issue.

    Bump!

    I’m still having problems having my site (permalinks and all) indexed by Google. Right now, only https://www.uselessrambling.com is indexed. I can’t seem to figure out what I need to do to placate the Google gods and get my site searchable!

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    You’ll need to give Google 2-4 weeks before your full site is index. To speed the process a little bit, run this plugin: https://scott.yang.id.au/2005/05/permalink-redirect/

    Also, read through this article: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_Wordpress

    Thanks macmanx! Just uploaded and activated the plugin and I will look over the codex article.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 16 total)
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