Disaster on the home front " Wordpress" + "Google" Need Help

[ak]

I need some help, recently I had a word press guy change the layout formation a bit on the main page and the post page. I'm thinking by doing so somehow must have messed up when Google goes to add content from my blog to the search engine it's just showing the keyword title text on main page for the main url and not the blog url page. So for example when a guest searches: "Jeremy going to get spanked in Fantasy Football" instead of it going to site.com/misc/jeremy-going-to-get-spanked-in-fantasy-football/ and number 1 on Google its getting ranked on like page 8 for the "cache" of main page with that content.

wtf happened, Willing to pay!! loosing 500 unique an hour on this

anyone understand what I'm trying to explain here?

Got 2 pros looking into it right now! Thanks

[Michael Martinez]

PM me your URL and I'll be glad to give you a free opinion.

[Michael Martinez]

Well, I don't see anything obviously broken in your code. The links are all followable.

If I search on article titles in Google's Main Web search your pages appear first. If, however, I search for only the most important keywords (such as "NAME-1 vs NAME-2 and SOMETHING") then I don't see your articles. If I understand you correctly, previously your articles would appear first or near the top for the second kind of search.

Here are a few suggestions to check:

• Did you or the programmer disable pinging in the blog?
• Did you allow a link contract to expire (where links may have been pulled)
• Were you using other artificial links (such as link wheels, forum profile links, blog comment links, article directory links, etc.)?
• What specific changes were made to the layout? Did you change themes? Did you add stuff or delete stuff?
• Have you changed the way you write the articles?

It could be you're unfortunately just seeing a tweak in the search algorithm. That happens up to 10 times a week. It could also be something very minor that you did to your site and for some reason the search engine just needs to recrawl and re-index everything.

On the other hand, sometimes these kinds of lost rankings reflect a loss of PageRank. Links that the siteowner believes should be working simply stop working.

[ak]

Hello Michael thank you for your time invested in trying to help me. I was given some excellent advice on a few coding situations. Mike brought up the sidebar is loading first and not the page main content which is what I guess we need to have loaded first. Yes we are only talking milliseconds but I was advised on such a simple swap on layout coding may actually "weaken" the inner page articles I want guest so badly to read. Peter Willis also brought up the idea of writing a unique line for each excerpt which is different from the post itself which could save the headache of having duplicate content. I have always used "No Index" for Categories which I think offers a similar concept Peter mentioned. Peter also found out there is a worm out there scraping a majority of my articles. I have reported that instance to Google as he/she is not a gambling affiliate more of just a full blown web scraper.


Regarding your questions:

• Did you or the programmer disable pinging in the blog? "No"
• Did you allow a link contract to expire (where links may have been pulled) "No"
• Were you using other artificial links (such as link wheels, forum profile links, blog comment links, article directory links, etc.)? "No"
• What specific changes were made to the layout? Did you change themes? Did you add stuff or delete stuff? Yes changes was made to the layout a day prior the huge drop in traffic, we widened the post page and aligned the main page articles to look better. We also added a text ad link within all new post which was a duplicate conflict as the text header for the add was in <h2> format for all post pages. Thanks to Mike for catching it!
• Have you changed the way you write the articles? "No"

So with the few changes we did and now have corrected hopefully within a few weeks it will be functioning the way it supposed to. I really appreciate the help Peter, Mike, and Michael!! Kudos

[Michael Martinez]

I don't believe in NoIndexing categories, as that deprives your site of natural opportunities for sitelinks. However, that's more advanced SEO than many people care about.

The article scraping could be a major issue if your articles are being outranked by scraper sites but generally speaking it doesn't really impact your search optimization if YOUR site outranks the others. SEO Theory is scraped by a number of other sites but my site outranks them. One easy defensive tactic to use against scrapers is to only publish partial feeds but some people feel it's more important to publish full feeds. That's a business decision and the SEO has to support it.

All that said, it sounds like the text ad link may be a good candidate for what sank your ship. I doubt having 2 H2 elements on the page is a problem.

It's possible you made enough changes to trigger several minor factors.

Then again, like I said, it might have nothing to do with any changes you made to the site.

If you have the ability to revert to your previous layout quickly, I would try that first. If your rankings return, then bring back the new layout. If the rankings tank again, that confirms that it's the new site design.

If after reverting to the old layout there is no change then that would suggest the problem is not with the layout/design. It might be the text link ad, it might be something else.

[Race Media]

Might be completely irrelevant but I added an "adult" text link to one of my sites and it dropped it from #1 to #5 immediately.

Took the link off and it came straight back to #1. Make of that what you will.

[ak]

Just wanted to give a heads up appears everything is back to where AK solid type of sites should be. #1

[faststeady]

thank god you're not a lollipop. or you'd end up licking yourself to death

[Rak]

Just wanted to give a heads up appears everything is back to where AK solid type of sites should be. #1

What ended up happening? Google just doing a reindex on your site? Or did you have to revert back to the old theme.
When I first read your post, I though it might have to do with canonical URLs being dropped from your post page.

[ak]

Hey Rak, good question I have no idea however now its back to worse then ever.. I think I need someone to do a complete overall and change the layout/theme.. Fuck looks, I want dependability..

"canonical URLs being dropped from your post page. " I think that's what is happening, still ranking on main page for things I shouldn't and not post pages. Crispy Poker is not a theme you want to use IMO