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As it turns out the problem is with Yoast's Google Analytics plug-in per Yoast.  However, he has not yet released a fix nor given a date for the fix as of yet.  So one either needs to deal with it until fixed or switch plug-ins.

Hi Sha,

Well, that is a new possible lead, but unfortunately Pictage is basically worthless when it comes to any technological issues.

Hmm, is there some way I could add "noindex" tags to anything link that appears on the Proof page as they are dynamic in appearance?

Thanks,

Joe

Hi Egol,

Hmm, I have never heard of that possibility.

How can I change the resultant search URL with a Wordpress install?

Thanks.

Hi Sha,

I made the changes weeks ago, but more pages keep appearing which tells me Google is still trying to index them?

There is already an "s" parameter set in GWT, but I don't really see many options in this screen - are there some settings I'm missing?

There are also page URLs like this one, can they be blocked as well?

www.francesphotography.com/search/no-results:no-results:no-results:no-results%25253Ano-results%252525253Ano-results%252525253Ano-results%252525253Ano-results%252525253Ano-results%252525253Ano-results%252525253Ano-results%25252525253Adanna/feed/rss2/

Yoast's WordPress SEO plug-in automatically does the following:

• RSS feeds are now always noindex, followed. No search engine should ever list an RSS feed as a result in the resultpages.
• Admin, login and registration pages are always noindexed now for the same reason.
• Search result pages are now always noindex, follow.

In GWT I started seeing very strange pages indexed a few weeks, and Google is no reporting over 21,000 of pages (blocked by robots.txt) with weird URLs like this:

http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525252525253Ano-results%2525252525252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results

http://www.francesphotography.com/?s=no-results:no-results%2525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%25252525253Ano-results%2525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Ano-results%25252525252525253Adanna&cat=no-results

The current robots.txt looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content

Disallow: /wp-admin

Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /data
Disallow: /slideshows
Disallow: /page/*/?s=
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search

This website is running an up to date WP install with Yoast's Google Analytics and SEO plug-in.  I can't point to anything specific that happened with the site when these URLs started appearing even after I modified the robots.txt.

What can be done to try and stop Google from creating and indexing these goofy URLs?

I see lots of sites having this issue when I search in Google, but no one seems to have a solution.

Hi All,

Recently moved a friend to a new WP back-end website as they were on Flash which is pretty, but not necessarily the best for SEO.

http://francesphotography.com

My question is that once Google finally indexed the site, I noticed in Google Webmaster tools that it found the most significant keyword to be:

automatically

On the following top pages:

| tag/snow-boarding-photography/ |
| tag/style-photography/ |
| tag/underwater-photography/ |
| tag/vacation-photography/ |
| tag/wedding-photography-beaver-creek/ |
| tag/wedding-photography-copper-mountain/ |
| tag/wedding-photography-denver/ |
| tag/wedding-photography/ |
| underwater-photography-scuba-diving-cozumel-mexico/ |
| wedding-photography/ |

The goofy thing is I can find anywhere that "automatically" is used - perhaps it is coming from a plug-in or magically keyword beans that Google found?

Any guidance is appreciated.

Interesting.  However, as Ryan points out you still have perhaps the best content, and only slightly below Google for "change" - nice work.

Hey James, don't forget the Wild, Wild, West is not a static lab environment.

How old is your site?

What has changed with your competitors - look specifically at any new entries into the top ten and try and determine why they might have moved up to replace you.

Any server/page load speed issues?

It is supposed to be an algorithm, but I doubt there is a single person (probably by design) that has any clue what it really is doing and barely what is supposed to be doing

It could be a million different things - is your dev sub-directory blocked from crawling, did some high quality comment links get archived, did some of your quality links go away, did someone you are linking to get whacked or go away, etc, etc

Are the pages that dropped still ranking for other terms - i.e. was it a "surgical drop" that I have experienced on another site of mine that I'm still trying to figure out.

Just do an audit of everything and keep doing quality things... and theoretically, as we tell ourselves, your rankings should come back.

Finally, were your ranking drops in the 10-50, 200+, or 950 range?  The smaller ones are supposedly algorithmic and "easier" to correct while the higher ones are manually and "time out" once the offense has been corrected - all kind of witch craft

Good luck.

Good long authoritative sounding post and showed for me as I'm in Boulder and you are in Denver - have you tried searches from other geo proxies?

A couple other things to consider:

1. Google loves fresh content - as long as the article keeps getting traffic/attention it will stay, update us in another 30 days

2. You do rank for "google places changes", but are no where for "google places change" so it is all about the long tail as I'm sure you know....

Hey Joe,

I noticed the same thing (large drop in indexed number/percentage of pages) a few days ago and thought that was related to a ranking drop I have experienced.  All I did was resubmit all (tag, category, posts) sitemaps via GWT and the next day Google had almost 100% of my submitted URLs back in the index.  However, that didn't fix my apparent Google penalty issue so I'm still searching for a solution:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/help-with-diagnosing-google-penalty

Oh, this was with a wordpress site utilizing Yoast's WP SEO plugin to create XML sitemaps.