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Help forum > Webmaster Central > Crawling, indexing & ranking > Why did Google only index 1 of my blog posts with multiple tags?

Why did Google only index 1 of my blog posts with multiple tags? Report abuse

HOCKMASM
Level 1
3/8/10
I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES
My site's URL is: www.stephenhockman.com/blog
Description (including timeline of any changes made):
I finally got my blog indexed by google. However, it seems they only indexed one of my blog posts (but under multiple tags.) Any ideas why that would be? I have one post I tagged with multiple keywords, and if you search my site on google you will see the same post come up multiple times with a different tag in the title.

Wondering why my other posts weren't crawled yet. I have about 30 total.

Also, any tips when tagging a blog post? I don't want to over tag or under tag, not sure what is the best for SEO.

Thanks.

Replies 1 - 7 of 7

yasir
Level 15
3/8/10
Use of canonical link element may help:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

Or/and you can block Google Bot from crawling the tags via robots.txt.
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Bob Gladstein
Level 8
3/8/10
I'm kind of of two minds when it comes to tagging on a blog. You've already got categories as an organizational tool, and tags can be used as sort of a finer filter for organizing posts by subject-matter. For example, if my blog has a Politics category, some of the posts in that category may be tagged as being about Obama, Pelosi, or both. So when people search the blog, it may be convenient for them to just look for posts about Pelosi if that's their interest, rather than having to go through all of the Politics posts.

But if I've got a Pelosi tag, I imagine that any halfway decent writer (and I like to think that I am) is going to have words and phrases in posts with that tag that function as contextual synonyms for Pelosi, like Speaker. So I may use the word "speaker" as often as I use "Pelosi". Does that mean I ought to have a "Speaker" tag too? If I do, I'll bet every post that's tagged "Speaker" is also tagged "Pelosi" and vice-versa. I don't think that helps anyone. It's just another source of duplicate content, and blogs already have plenty of those.

There are WordPress plugins that let you set Category pages and/or Tag pages as noindex, and that eliminates a lot of duplicate content issues, but I'm not sure that's the best way to deal with the issue -- not in every case.

In the case of your blog, I don't see a site search. Having that would make it easier for users to find content without needing to know the names of your tags. I also don't see a tag cloud, or any overview of the tags you're using. I only see them at the end tagged posts. That's useful for someone who reads one of your posts and decides at that point that they'd be interested in seeing other things you've written about that subject, but not for people who are looking for a more specific breakdown of your posts than the lists of categories and archived months in your right column offer.

And you are using what I have to figure are synonymous tag names. How many posts that are tagged "photoshop tip" aren't also going to be tagged "photoshop trick"? I don't see how that helps users navigate the site. It might give you a tiny boost in ranking for both of those phrases in search engines, but I wonder if that boost is enough bigger than the boost you'd get with a single tag for "photoshop tips and tricks," or just a single "photoshop tip" tag, the posts of which would most likely contain the word "trick" anyway.

So my advice is that you put some more thought into how you want to organize your information, keeping in mind what you think would be best for your readers, and how search engines are going to respond to finding different ways (which work out to different URLs) of getting to the same information. Hopefully, you'll find a way to provide enough options that people will find it easy to find what they want without giving them so many options that they can't tell the difference between them, and at the same time make it as clear as possible to search engines that you offer unique content about specific subjects.
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HOCKMASM
Level 1
3/8/10
now all my blog posts are gone from index after posting this....what happened??
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HOCKMASM
Level 1
3/8/10
ok. so i changed my tags. now each post only has 1-2 max. and the tags are several words each now instead of using commas. for ex. marketing video promo, motion graphics design.

is that good to do?
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Autocrat
Level 14
3/8/10
You had a page called Blog.
You deleted it.
You didn't setup a 301 Redirect to the new blog.

.

I'm not seeing any links in Yahoo to the blog.

As per many other topics - if your site is Not popular/important, then do not expect rapid crawling/indexation.
(and by the looks of it - your new blog has only been up withing a few weeks?)
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HOCKMASM
Level 1
3/8/10
So here's something interesting. I just wrote a new article and Google Index it immediately! I installed a wordpress plugin to continually update my sitemap.xml.

So why aren't any of my other posts in the index?? The only other one is a claim token i posted for technorati. Why is google discriminating my posts? I have lots of content rich blog posts on the design industry, yet it indexes my token post??
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Bob Gladstein
Level 8
3/8/10
Google indexed the March 8 post because it crawled the page on March 8. But I don't know why you think your other posts aren't indexed. The previous post, dated March 6, was apparently cached on March 6: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A//stephenhockman.com/blog/tutorials/podcast-episode-4-photoshop-awesome-eyes-part-2/

The post before that one, dated March 3, was most recently cached on March 6 (but that's just the most recent cache date. It may have been added to the index earlier than that): http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A//stephenhockman.com/blog/articles/wordpress-blocking-google/

Here's another March 3 post most recently cached on March 8: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A//stephenhockman.com/blog/articles/graphic-design-info-principles/

Not all of your posts are in the index, but some are. Keep adding new content. If Google sees that you have new content every time it comes around, it will likely start coming around more often. And if you continue to develop links to the whole site, that will give Google reason to crawl deeper and pick up older posts it didn't catch the first time around.
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