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1. samdavis
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Hi - my WordPress site is about 8 weeks old now. I'm running version 2.9.2, I use the Ultimate SEO plugin, I have a Google XML Sitemap generated and have a sitemap page on my site.

   The problem I have though is when searching in Google, only some pages are returned. The other strange thing is, one of my first posts does not even show at all even when doing a site: search in Google!

   And to make it worse, the majority of the pages returned actually point to my "tag" pages, not the full permalink URL.

   Any ideas?

   http://www.guitarjar.co.uk

2. richarduk
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Spam?

   Eight weeks old, and hundreds of pages showing with the site command?

3. samdavis
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   What do you mean? Some of my early pages are not even showing, but doing the site option does bring up pages, but they all seem to reference the "blog post tags" ie: "guitars" as opposed to the Title... I'm not spamming I just need some advice

4. samdavis
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Just checked again, and doing a site search for a particular post lists the "Tagged" archive page 1st, but the actual post to the article is way down.

   All I was hoping was Google would do it the other way around, making my actual post the more prominent in the search results, rather than the "tag" archive page.

   Any thoughts?

5. richarduk
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Apologies.

   I didn't spend a lot of time, but I did a site search, found a tagged page, looked at it - you have a breadcrumb navigation at the top of that page for tagged pages.

   I also looked at the bottom of a single post page, found a link to archives, clicked on it, received a fatal error for archive pages, which seem to be the tagged pages?

   SO - I'm not quite sure what the set up is, and where the tags come into it all, but probably you've got what the search engines consider duplicate content, and they're not too bright at the moment. You can specify your canonical url - information here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

   Simplest way, however, is to put meta noindex, nofollow at the top of all archive and tagged pages. Since archives use archive.php and tags usually use the generic tag.php that shouldn't be difficult. You could then put rel=nofollow on the archive/tag link that I found at the bottom of the page and on the top breadcrumb navigation when tags are involved.

6. samdavis
   Member
   Posted 1 year ago #

   Top man - cheers for the reply. I'll look into that - after I spent the day in the sun! Cheers, Sam

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