All kinds of indexing weirdness.

  • Okay.,..6 days ago I unchecked the privacy box in my wordpress and allowed search engines to crawl my new site. Today, through google alerts, I find that Google has finally started to index my posts and pages. But there is weirdness all around. I can′t even begin to tell you how perplexed and depressed I am.
    To name a few really weird happenings:

    1. On searching for my site name “spanska fastigheter” in Google…it returns the home page….listed on my yearly archives page?! Why on earth would Google pick the search term from an archives page to rank instead of actually ranking the site itself?

    2. On all of my posts that I access through the Google SERP there are a related posts feature that should just not be there at the top every post! It even shows up three times in identical blocks of text. I have no related posts plugin installed, nor have my theme any related posts feature. And these ugly looking listings of related posts DO NOT appear if I access my posts through my actual website. (www.spanskafastigheter.se) They do only appear if I find my way to the posts through Google: What…? Why…? Example: https://spanskafastigheter.se/tvarumslagenhet-2-minuter-fran-stranden-nerja-chaparil/

    3. Google lists a few of my images in the serps as articles (I use wordpress galleries for my real estate listings) for some of my keyword phrases…and the posts these images belong to are not even optimized for the very search terms they are ranked for! It′s like Google decides through my tags, and archives pages which posts/images to rank. For example…in one specific search query I made (I used the title of my latest post)…an image named “k?k” (kitchen) appeared for a keyword phrase (buy real estate in Spain) that is only listed in my tag cloud! *lol*

    A related question: when I start making articles that are more optimized (they for example have the keywords in the title tag, and are linked to) than previous articles, containing the same keywords, listed in the SERPS, will these override the previous articles (for instance my above example with the image named “kok” ranking for a specific search term ) and put them further down the SERP, or simply erase them from the index all together? How often does google decide what page/pages are most relevant? As I understand it…indexing material vs. deciding search rankings are totally different ball parks.

    BTW, I use a premium theme (and no one has reported this kind of weirdness), and one of Sweden’s most respected hosts, so…I just don′t understand why this is happening. Could it be because I used the no index privacy option in wordpress before launching? Perhaps…Google only finds my newer posts and don’t know what to do with the surrounding info (such as archive pages, tags, links, etc)?
    Fact of the matter is that none of my most optimized pages have been indexed yet (I find them through searches though…but through tags or archived pages, etc). And those were the ones I created first.
    And, no, the” no index robots.txt” command is not found through “view source”. It is gone.

    I would be extremely helpful if someone was to shed at least a little light on this subject, especially the “related posts” that appear in my posts through Google searches.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Search engine ranking takes time, incoming links from reputable sites, and basic SEO.

    Why on earth would Google pick the search term from an archives page to rank instead of actually ranking the site itself?

    Archives pages should be blocked from indexing. I’d recommend a SEO plugin.

    On all of my posts that I access through the Google SERP there are a related posts feature that should just not be there at the top every post!

    Temporarily disable all plugins and see if the problem continues. Also try switching to the default theme and see if that changes anything.

    and the posts these images belong to are not even optimized for the very search terms they are ranked for! It′s like Google decides through my tags, and archives pages which posts/images to rank.

    The Google image search algorithm just has a problem with this right now (high sensitivity and low specificity).

    Thread Starter vagabond72

    (@vagabond72)

    Thanks. ??

    I do have the robots.text plugin installed, but haven′t used it because I was afraid that this kind of weirdness would ensue.
    However…do you think that once google start noticing my incoming links from external sites that it will replace the indexed archive pages? Perhaps many of the weird things that are happening to the ndexing of my site right now is due to lack of links?

    “The Google image search algorithm just has a problem with this right now (high sensitivity and low specificity).” hmm do you think this might be due to te fact that I registered last week, through the webmaster tools, my site for “advanced image search”?

    cheers

    Thread Starter vagabond72

    (@vagabond72)

    I have done some further reading on the subject…and it seems that indeed sometimes Google will interpret archive pages as the primary content (because of higher PR for individual articles). And it seems some of my problems derive from this fact. I will use my robot.txt plugin right away to try to remedy the problem, despite not being totally comfort with this type of advanced experimenting on my site.

    Will this only cure the problem with future articles or will it eventually erase my archive pages that are all ready indexed in the serps as well?

    “The Google image search algorithm just has a problem with this right now (high sensitivity and low specificity).” hmm do you think this might be due to te fact that I registered last week, through the webmaster tools, my site for “advanced image search”?

    No, my images have this problem too and I don’t use advanced image search.

    sometimes Google will interpret archive pages as the primary content (because of higher PR for individual articles)… I will use my robot.txt plugin right away to try to remedy the problem…

    Don’t block your archives with robots.txt, you’ll impair internal link discovery. Instead, use meta noindex,follow on these pages (a SEO plugin can do this).

    Thread Starter vagabond72

    (@vagabond72)

    Iridax, I use the robots meta plugin and I have checked the box for “prevent indexing of date based archive” Is this the way to go?

    Has anyone reading this post any idea as to what might be causing the “Related Posts For” issue that appears when I find my articles through Google (it totally breaks some of my posts)? I have searched and searched…but I just can′t seem to find anyone that have a similar problem. ??

    Iridax, I use the robots meta plugin and I have checked the box for “prevent indexing of date based archive” Is this the way to go?

    Yes, using robots meta is okay, but not robots.txt. Here’s what I have in the head of my archive and search pages:

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>

    Thread Starter vagabond72

    (@vagabond72)

    Case closed. Culprit plugin “physic search”

    Thanks again to Iridax!

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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