Strange WordPress Google indexing issue

by 10 replies
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My friend has a health forum and I've been her IT guy as she gets it going.

Forum - Healthy Body Guru

It's running the latest version of WordPress and using Simpleress for the forum.

It's also using this SEO plugin: WordPress › WordPress SEO by Yoast « WordPress Plugins

After the site was live for about a month I noticed the Joost SEO plugin had set all the /forum/ pages to "noindex", so Google wasn't indexing them. I removed this HTML meta tag and then pinged and bookmarked the main /forum/ page and several inner pages.

But...about a month later still NONE of the /forum/ pages are indexed. It's very strange.

I was hoping one of you programmer types would have an idea, because I'm just confused.

Cheers!
Kane
#programming #google #indexing #issue #strange #wordpress
  • Hi Kane,

    Once Google has found a link to be "rel=nofollow" it is entirely possible it will ignore it in future for a certain period of time (no point following someone you've been previously told not too).

    Your best option to get Google re-crawling is to submit a sitemap to Webmaster tools and see if Google then starts crawling your /forum/ links again..

    I've checked a few links and can confirm they are no longer showing "rel=nofollow".

    Regards,
    Stuart
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks Stuart, the links actually weren't nofollow, the forum pages had a HEAD META tag of noindex, different animal

      But your sitemap submission idea is great, I'll give that a shot.

      Cheers!
  • Kane,

    You'll simply have to give it time - I'm in a similar situation right now waiting on a domain that I had 301'd - it'll just take time for Google to process the change..

    Buying a quick SEO service through the forums would be a good idea - articles, social bookmarks, etc - it will help influence Google to get back over and crawl the pages sooner.

    All the best!
  • Ok, so I went into Webmaster Tools and did a "fetch as Googlebot".

    And I discovered:
    Again from the Yoast WP SEO Plugin.

    And of course this isn't visible for human visitors, so I didn't notice it before

    I checked the plugin settings and nothing indicates it should be doing that, so I'm just going to disable it and use another SEO plugin.
    • [1] reply
    • Google Fetch is normally live and not cached so intresting that it can see it and you cannot... I wonder if Yoast dynamically add's it based on whos viewing the page...
      • [1] reply
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • The plugin is doing that in order to provide canonical content links to the SEs, in much the same way as domain.com/category/ and domain.com/tag/ URLs are marked as 'no-index'.

    Your individual forum thread URLs were not 'no-index', just the aggregated 'category'-type URLs.
  • We had something strange happen using that SEO plugin, too, regarding the meta page titles. After removing it (and re-installing All-in-One SEO) it straightened out.

    But with your friend's site still not being indexed, try submitting the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

    Also on Webmaster Tools there's Fetchbot, which you can tell to *quickly* go get certain URLs and index them. Not sure how this would work out for a forum, but sounds like you'd better try every indexing tool that you can.
  • hi guys,

    I'm experiencing a little issue too. I have built 3 new niche sites, added content and submitted them to google webmaster indexing. This was about 2 months ago. 1 out of 3 got indexed in 2 days, the other 2 haven't.

    google is actually crawling the sites (I can check the diagramms), but refuses to index them. it shows that out of 10 pages 0 is indexed. posts are 500 or so long. the sites have a few backlinks, pinged them, but still nothing.

    I even deinstalled them waited for a week and started the whole process again. fetched as googlebot, look everything fine, but no index.

    Any idea what's happening? Thanks!
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