Hi,
Google is only indexing my site after I add a new ‘post’ (I’m using the Avada WordPress template and a ‘post’ is actually an item in the portfolio.
When I add a post I get lots of queries, if I don’t keep adding posts every day Google pushes the site down.
I have also changed lots of URLS on my site to more SEO friendly ones so getting many crawl errors at the moment.
I changed these URLs in accordance with info from the Yoast plugin- I’m just making them more search engine friendly because part of the URLs used to read ‘portfolio_category’ etc.
Does anyone know what I could do with the site? I thought I would upload a plugin that redirects the crawl errors, that may help.
I cannot write a post every day as there is far too much information to edit and add (I don’t have normal posts, mine are full band profiles and they take 8 hrs +)
Firstly, I’m seeing a totally blank page when I visit your link, which suggests you might have a more fundamental problem here.
Leaving that aside for now, if you are changing the URLs of your pages, it’s important to set up a 301 redirect, so that both human visitors and bots can easily access the pages they are looking for. See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en
My guess would be that it’s the number of crawl errors and “not found” pages which is causing your site to drop in search results. Sort those out first, before worrying about anything else.
When you say
do you mean that Google is only crawling your site after you add new content, or that only the new content is being indexed? (You can check what Google has in its index by doing a site:yourdomain search.)
All of my sites were temporarily down due to WordFence plugin conflict all sorted now.
Thanks for the 301 advice, I’ll action that now.
I think it is crawl errors, there are over 300, I’ve just checked.
Sorry, when I referred to Google ‘indexing’ my site after a new post, I meant that Google was putting my site back to the top of the search engines as soon as I post new content. For example, if I add a new ‘post’ (ie performer) to my portfolio each day, Google puts my site back in the top 20 of the search engines. Miss a day, and it goes down again. This is very frustrating, because obviously my site is a ‘site within a blog’ and I simply cannot post that much, because I don’t even have traditional posts anyway.
I am using the Avada portfolio format for a ‘post’ - ie I go to ‘portfolio’, click ‘add’ and then I type out each artists information, add photos, mp3 etc. Then save. The resulting page that users can see is actually a dynamic blog post. I think the reason Google is putting my site down if I don’t post everyday is due to this?
For which search terms, though? For somebody searching for the band/venue/genre? Search results are very specific to the search term used (and also your search history, location etc. may play a part).
Whether or not your site is returned in search results should depend purely on the relevance of your content. Very few sites add new content daily, nor is it necessary to do so.
Hi, Google puts it back up there for everything I believe, we receive such a wide range of queries once we add a new post that I do feel it’s right across the board. It must be a search location thing.
I’m going to go back into Console/GWT and have a good look around and see what I can do next. It’s really frustrating because this site was receiving lots of hits and Google seem to just want me to advertise
As I said before, if you have a lot of crawl errors and 404s, that may be affecting how Google regards your site. It is unlikely to show it in search results if the links it has indexed are no longer viable. (New pages which you are adding now do not suffer from this problem.)
Thanks, but it was doing this a long time before I had the crawl errors, I had a very small amount at one time and Google was still penalising me if I didn’t add new content, however I will go into Console and have a look now.
Thanks
Hi, I’ve just looked in Webmaster tools and I have 379 server errors (code 500)- this is obviously from my site being offline due to plugin error.
However, I’ve got 259 ‘not found’ (404). I’ve just looked at Google’s help files, and it says not to worry about 404’s or change them! I don’t know what to do now!
Are those 404s for pages which no longer exist? If so, then yes, you can forget about them. If they’re for pages where you’ve changed the URL, then you really need to redirect them to the correct new URL. That’s important for search engines, and equally important for any visitor who may be using and old bookmark or following an old link.
Yes, I’d say half of them are re-directs so I’ll go in and change them now. I’m going to use the ‘Redirect’ WordPress plugin. I’ve got two ‘soft’ 404’s too so I’ll look up how to fix them.
Thanks very much for your help.
I also forgot to mention my site got hacked and injected with thousands of web pages for perfume, clothes etc, all with gibberish on each page. Should I grab the URL’s of each of these pages and force a redirect to my home page from these URL’s in the ‘Redirect’ plugin?
Or are these the type of 404’s google said to ignore? (ie spammy).
Thanks!
They were injected in to my site by a spammer, I then paid to have my host clean the site but I also deleted one of my domains so I expect most of them must have been deleted. Thanks
Thanks very much for this, I will action that in the .htaccess file.
I am now worried because I’ve actioned a load of redirects in the ‘redirect’ WordPress plugin and I think I may have done this wrong.
Basically, we used to have pages for each county in the UK etc on our site but the UX of this was awful.
So, for example, there was a dynamic page for ‘Glamorgan’. Now, for ease of use, we’ve deleted this page and just have a dynamic page saying ‘Wales’- this is so much better.
However I’ve actioned a redirect to the Wales page from the Glamorgan page in the ‘Redirect’ plugin- is this wrong? Technically it’s a totally different page but in real life, it’s perfect- anyone looking in Glamorgan can now find the same act in Wales and it’s much easier for them.
I read in Google Webmaster Tools that the re-directs are for the same page.
Thanks
No, for a “renamed” page that is what you want to do.
That is, you want “Glamorgan” to go to “Wales” not “home”
for those redirects to work you need to make sure the “not a real folder, not a real file” redirect comes after those in the htaccess rules, and that the earlier redirect rules have the “Last” flag.
Thanks, however for these ‘Glamorgan to Wales’ style redirects, what I’ve actually done is used the ‘Redirect’ WordPress plugin, is this ok? It’s actioned it like this:
all sorted now.
