tommip

Thanks for all the suggestions how to dig deeper into this.

Things I’ve already done:
– I’ve modified the OG image size in Yoast to match the requirements so it shouldn’t be that. No effect.
– I also run the URL through couple of checking tools, including Facebook debugger, and they all were able to read the OG metadata correctly and some reported it’s ok for LinkedIn.

The weird thing is that this bug, if you can call it one, seems to be affecting the “whole site”. Meaning none of the pages and their OG data, whether it is an article or a page, regardless of the WP template, seem to behave the same on LinkedIn. So, I guess it’s something to do with LinkedIn itself. They apparently have their own cache system too.

The problem is not your robots.txt. Usually WordPress robots.txt file contains something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/

Telling all the search engine robots to not index the WP admin (login) section.

I’m pretty sure, judging by the fast rate of dropping in Google search results, that your site has been given a penalty by Google. Most common reasons are bad links (I hope you haven’t been buying any links to your site!) or some update on Google’s algorithm which affects your site’s ranking (I’m not aware of any major updates being done lately).

Sorry to say, it’s most likely very very difficult to recover from the situation you are in unless you can get some information about the actual reason behind this.

I suggest you check out Google Search Console (former Webmaster Tools) to see how your site is indexed by Google.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Most likely your rankings are dropping for another reason.

One thing to notice: a weird thing happened on my site some time ago. A bunch of broken and irrelevant URL’s appeared in Google’s index. I posted about this (see the thread here) and apparently the cause of this could be some bugs in Yoast.

In theory these irrelevant URL’s could harm your visibility in Google search too. I haven’t been able to verify if this problem was caused by Yoast.

Thanks for the reply! Yes, the site is using Yoast so I’ll check that out.

Did you have any plugins installed which handle redirects, such as Yoast SEO plugin? If so, check the settings of those, even though you deactivated them.

The hackers could have just added redirects to the plugin/WP settings. Since those are stored in the WP database replacing files doesn’t change anything.

I’m no expert on this, but redirects are handled on the server. It’s possible that the hackers actually attacked the whole server, not just your WordPress, and added redirects there. I suggest you contact who ever is in charge of the server.

Thanks girlieworks! That was the issue! I didn’t realize the posts are affecting this. Not all subcategories had published posts. I can live with this feature. ??

Is there a way to force a category listing of all categories, regardless of published posts?