Google Search Goes to Wrong Page

Do you know what their search query is? Have you tried it in google yourself ? Could you give links and example? Is it going to a 404 maybe and you ahve the 404.php set to goto the main page?

My site stats show 4 keyword searches in Google. All 4 listings take searcher to home page. One such search was on “Huangbaiyu”. Towards the bottom of the page is a listing for my blog https://www.building-green.org. It would be a lot more useful if the click brough up the article post that contained “Huangbaiyu” and not the home page.

All instances are the same situation.

If you looked at the cached page on google:
https://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:TXYujDTbUNYJ:www.building-green.org/+Huangbaiyu&hl=en

you will see that google crawled and got that when it was on youre front page… hence why the link takes you to the front page

google does not have a cached copy of your single page url of that article

https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=WZPA,WZPA:2005-37,WZPA:en&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebuilding%2Dgreen%2Eorg%2Fbuilding%2Din%2Dgreen%2Dnewsweek%2Dinternational%2Deditions%2Dmsnbccom%2F

You would have to have that page itself indexed in google for it to take it to that page

and… next time google indexes your index page if that is not on it.. then it wont have a link to that for that keyword next time

Put this in your header…
<meta name=”robots” content=”<?php echo (!is_single()?’no’:”); ?>index,follow” />

I guess if you don’t ever change the number of posts displayed on a page you could change the above to (is_home()… and that way just the home page would not be indexed, all archive pages, etc., would.

Thanks estjohn and Beel. I understand why this is happening now.

Beel – I put the code you gave me in the header template. So now if Google caches the post when it’s on the main page, future searches on the same term will follow the post even after it’s archived?

Not sure I follow you, but if search engines follow the rules (and not all do), then when they arrive at any nonsingle post page (or just the home page if you made the change) they should not index (cache) that page but will follow the permalink to the single post page and cache that.

It is a good idea to have “noindex” on all nonstatic pages for obvious reasons.

Edit: On another read, I think I understand what you are asking. Theoretically if a search engine arrives at your index page, it will not index any posts on that page, but it will follow the links to their individual post pages and index those.