What on Earth is happening with Google not showing new articles on blog

[zanet]

For years a new published wordpress article within hours would appear on Google Serps

Recently this isnt happening
Instead the author page or category page is being shown

The actual article page doesnt appear at all in the results


Can some one give me a clue as to how to fix this

I have checked the articles are all follow
Title and descriptions are fine
[FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif]The xml sitemap is submitting to Google webmaster [/FONT]

I can only guess this must be a double content issue with the Author page and Category page taking the glory for a new article in the Serps

Is this correct?​

 

[RiverWire]

Could you post the link so i could take a look ? could be a canonical issue or incorrect setup of an SEO plugin too.

 

[zanet]

@Rivewire
Take this recent post: http://www.globaldashboard.org/2012/02/06/agenda-21-is-evil/

Once this would have popped up to the very top of a Google search - at least while it was fresh.


Now it might as well not be there. Even if I search on the title AND the author, agenda 21 is evil - Google Search

any ideas - is this double content causing the issue?

What ive done so far in the last 2 days
I've just put no index on categories
I've made sure Google is aware of the article page by sending the spider manually to index it on Google webmasters

Thanks in advance

 

[RiverWire]

The page is indexed although you do have alot of code clutter on the page, My recommendations should be get rid of "All in one SEO pack" its past its sell by date and install Yoasts SEO plugin which comes with a sitemap generator also so you can remove bulky plugins that also do the same functions. Go through Yoasts SEO plugin settings carefully , Import the data from the All in one seo pack and set the correct settings for archive and category indexing .

I would also recommend using this as your wordpress robots.txt file :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/*
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.php$
User-agent: All
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

There is no need to allow bots to crawl through the site indexing everything that they dont need to.

Dont forget to update your Sitemaps URL in google webmaster tools once you switch to Yoast.

You can also request google to re-crawl your site once changes have been made, and then resubmit it to the index . Google will see that as the site has had a large change and will crawl all the pages again.

 

[zanet]

Thanks Riverwire
So is it definitely a double content issue - as previous years this wasn't an issue in google - im assuming its recent changes in Googles Algorithm
I've used Yoast on several other sites, so i will switch after importing from All in SEO
Is there any settings i should be weary of on Yoasts, as it has an unbelievable amount of options
Also does the Robots.txt file go in the root of the site?

 

[RiverWire]

I would say definitely, but its an option so its best to do what you can to focus on the pages that do matter and cut down on bloat .

Generally you dont need all the short links and RSS link meta data so you can disable those, No index archives and author archives as they show basically the same as category pages

Obviously read through what the settings do because they can do alot of damage if your unfamiliar with what some do.

Robots.txt file goes in the root yes. You have one already, just overwrite that .

Another thing you might want to try is adding a plugin like " seo-automatic-links " which will link keywords in posts to other related posts and increase internal linking , It could be that your site hasnt got a good enough internal linking structure.

 

[zanet]

Many thanks for you suggestions
I'll try them and see how it impacts the Serps