What is the best method for indexing blog pages?
-
I have a client whose blog has hundreds if not thousands of entries. My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? Can we do this dynamically? And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all?
Thanks,
Chris
-
is there a way to insert the title tag dynamically on each blog post via the cms?
CMS is software, and every software package is different. I will share there should be a way to do it, but you would need to search your CMS provider's site to get the details.
For your titles, I am not clear what you are asking. I would recommend the title tag for your blog matching your blog's title. You may want to add your site name or category name depending on the situation. For example if your site is "Chevyworld.com" and you have a blog entry titled "1982 Stingray, the end of an era" then the post title could be:
1982 Stingray, the end of an era
1982 Stingray, the end of an era | Chevyworld
1982 Stingray, the end of an era | Corvettes | Chevyworld
In the first example, your CMS would be adjusted to use the blog title for the title tag. In the second, the blog title plus your site name would be used for the title tag. The last example uses the blog title, the blog's main category tag and the site title.
Will google treat each entry as a unique page?
You need to ensure each page can only be accessed by one URL. For example, take a look at the following blog article's URL:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html
Now try to access that same article with various other URLs such as without the www or with adding a trailing slash character:
http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html/
Notice that when you try to remove the "www' the same article appears but the site's redirect works and adjusts the URL by adding the "www'. Does your blog article redirect itself in this manner? Or does it display for both the www and non-www url?
Another example is the trailing slash. In this case the URL is adjusted and a question mark is added. If you View Page Source you will see there is a canonical meta tag which ensures the correct version of the page is consistently used by search engines.
-
Thanks for the reply. Follow up to your response, I am familiar with sitemaps, but what I meant by dynamically was is there a way to insert the title tag dynamically on each blog post via the cms? Also should each title tag for the blog follow a formula like: Client Blog: article a Client Blog: article b Client Blog: article c (and so on) Also thanks for the info on the canonical tags. So for a typical blog, will google treat each entry as a unique page? I want to make sure we don't get dinged for having duplicate pages.
-
**My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? **
I am assuming that since each entry is unique content and is offered on your site that you desire people to read it. If that is the case then yes, it would be a tremendous help to be indexed by Google. If the pages are not indexed by Google, then how will people find these pages? It will only happen if they are either already on your site, or are told about the pages or linked to the pages.
Having a page indexed by Google allows people to find it through a normal search, which is how most pages on the web are discovered.
Can we do this dynamically?
Yes. You can submit a simple sitemap to Google, and they will try to crawl your site's pages if they have not already done so. It is important you do not block their efforts in your robots.txt file nor with any "noindex" meta tags.
** And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all?**
Canonical tags help ensure the correct version of your blog entry, or any web page is indexed. If your page can be accessed through multiple URLs, then it should be canonicalized so the proper version of the page is indexed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
An informational product page AND a shop page (for same brand)
Hi all, This is my first foray into e-commerce SEO. I'm working with a new client who sells upscale eBikes online. Since his products are expensive, he wants to have informational pages about the brands he sells eg. www.example.com/brand. However these brands are also category pages for his online shop eg. www.example.com/shop/brand I'm worried about keyword cannibalization and adding an extra step/click to get to the shop (right now the navigational menu takes you to the information page and from there you have to click to get to the shop) I'm pretty sure it would make more sense to have ONE killer shopping page that includes all the brand information but I want to be 100% sure before I advise him to take this big step. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | MouthyPR1 -
Alternatives 301? Issues redirection of index.html page with Adobe Business Catalyst
Hi Moz community, As for now we have two different versions of a client's homepage that’s dividing our traffic. One of the urls is the index.html version of the other url. We are using Adobe Business Catalyst for one of our clients and they told us they can’t 301 redirect. Adobe Business Catalyst does 301 redirects, but not to itself like an .htaccess rewrite. Doing a 301 redirect using BC from index.html to / creates an infinite loop and break the page. Are there alternatives to a 301 or any suggestions how to solve this? Thanks for all your answers and thoughts in advance,
Technical SEO | | Anna_Hoesl
Anna0 -
Bigcommerce only allows us to have https for our store only, not the other pages on our site, so we have a mix of https and http, how is this hurting us and what's the best way to fix?
So we aren't interested in paying a thousand dollars a month just to have https when we feel it's the only selling point of that package, so we have https for our store and the rest of the site blogs and all are http. I'm wondering if this would count as duplicate content or give us some other unforeseen penalty due to the half way approach of https being implemented. If this is hurting us, what would you recommend as a solution?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Why is this page not ranking but is indexed?
I have a page http://jobs.hays.co.uk/jobs-in-norfolk and it is indexed by Google but will not show up for any keywords I try. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | S_Curtis0 -
Effect of 302 redirects from empty parent page to sub page
A client's website has links to their service pages which then redirect (302 through a php "Location:" header) to that service's first sub-page. For example, our-services/service-x redirects to our-services/service-x/about-service-x I can only think this has been done because there is no actual content for the parent page and to maintain some kind of structure for navigation and URLs. Really there's no reason why the 'about-service-x' page can't be removed and its content transferred to the main 'service-x' page. Then the redirects can be removed also - it's not how a 302 should be used for a start. I'm just wondering what kind of effect this current redirection has on SEO, as I know 302s don't pass any link juice? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | driftingbass0 -
Does Google Still Pass Anchor Text for Multiple Links to the Same Page When Using a Hashtag? What About Indexation?
Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page. I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already: a.) in the site's navigation b.) in the sidebar More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article? I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed. Just so I understand this... a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed? b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled? Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | Spencer_LuminInteractive0 -
Getting More Pages Indexed
We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png
Technical SEO | | Mattchstick0 -
Site Change of Address - best method?
When changing domains, there's the obvious anxiety about sacrificing the value of your old domain. A client recently changed domains, immediately killed the old site (did everything properly with 301s, Webmaster Tools etc etc etc) and lost rankings completely for weeks. Turns out the site had been 'burnt' by the previous owner and it took a reconsideration request from Google before things recovered. Cost them rankings and cash with extra PPC spend. My question is: In order to avoid this potential hazard, what are your thoughts on submitting a change of address in Webmaster tools, but then leaving old site live for a few weeks to see how things pan out? I have never tried it and it seems to go against the grain, but interested to hear other people's experiences and how they have managed to change domain with minimal temporary damage. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0