Google Search prefers my WordPress.com blog to my WordPress.org one–but why?

  • DabidK

    (@dabidk)


    12 years, 3 months ago

    At the end of last year, I did a selective splitting of the toy reviews I write on my personal WordPress.com blog to a new WordPress.org blog specifically made for hosting them. I copied over all of the old, archived content from my personal blog to the new toy blog. However, no matter what I do I can’t seem to make Google pull up my new blog on searches for anything except for posts that are all-new content created since I opened the new site.

    I still get 200+ referrals from Google every day to the content on my old site, and usually less than 5 referrals to my new site. I deleted out all of the text from many of my old blog’s reviews and placed links on the pages to the full reviews on my new blog, but Google insists on pulling up the old blog pages for those reviews on searches instead of the new ones. When the new reviews get pulled up at all, they’re a very low priority whereas on the old wordpress.com site my reviews would always be first or second page results within a few hours of posting.

    In addition, if I make a post on my old personal blog with just a title and a link to the full review on my new blog, Google will still usually pick that to display as a front-page search result and ignore the actual article with the full review on the new site. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.

    My new site is registered with Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and has been since I opened it, and I’ve submitted sitemaps several times that include all of the old content. I even submit all new articles via the Fetch as Googlebot function immediately, but it’s mostly to no avail. Google just refuses to direct people to the archived articles on the new site and gives low priority to the new articles that I post. I don’t want to delete the old content entirely off the old site, as I want visitors who bookmarked it and incoming links to have a way of finding their way to the new site.

    I’m using the Yoast SEO plug-in to add meta tags and keywords and so forth, which I was never able to do on the wordpress.com blog. I thought that’d increase my search relevance, but I’m literally getting next to no traffic from Google. I’m getting a couple hundred hits daily from direct links I post to Facebook, Twitter, and message boards, but search engines just hate me.

    The original site URL is http://www.dabidsblog.com/ and the new site is http://www.toyreviewdaily.com.

    Can anyone help me? Was just being on wordpress.com doing something before that made Google like it more than my new site?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • revium

    (@revium)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    What you want to do is add a canonical meta tag from your old site pointing to the corresponding page on your new site.

    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

    Hopefully you do not have too many pages on the old site to redirect. There are some WordPress plugins that can help with this.

    Using this meta tag will help the search engines learn that the new site should be credited with the old site content, and once they have crawled the old pages and updated their index, your new site should start ranking in their place as long as you do not have any other issues.

    wp_seo_02

    (@wordpress_seo_02)

    12 years, 2 months ago

    Most know how I feel about SEO Plugins from Yoast or anyone else so I won’t go on that rant however, keep in mind that the older site is (aged) the more credibility it has with SEARCH INDEXING. (IF optimized correctly) Give your new site time and it will produce great results.

    Oh yeah, as a WordPress developer, I LOVE your strategy – well thought out and VERY intentional market penetration..MY HERO 🙂

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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