Blog posts not showing in serps for exact match title search

[Ezpro9]

hi-

my first client ranks #1 for the exact phrase of each blog post title

the 2nd client doesnt rank anywhere when i search for the exact post title

2nd client has robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

so that shouldnt noindex any posts right?

his site ranks for many kw's - but oddly none of his blog posts are anywhere to be found - i dont mean for a kw search - i mean for searching for the entire title he doesnt rank anywhere in first 5 pages for any of 6-7 posts i checked

any idea what could cause this?

thanks

[KeriMorgret]

Also check Google webmaster Tools. When doing a site: of your site, there are some odd-looking SERPs and at least one page has a message that the site might be compromised.

[ThompsonPaul]

Taswir, every page on your website has a meta-no-index. no-follow tag in the header. This explicitly tells the search engines NOT to include you pages/posts in the search results.

On WordPress sites, this is usually caused by having the "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box in the Reading section of the Settings checked. This is often set this way during development, then folks forget to remove it when the site goes live.

Remove the check mark from that box and the engines should start indexing your pages within a day or so.

If that box isn't checked, check for plugins that might have the same settings - like SEO plugins.

That should do it.

Paul

[Included a screenshot to show where in the navigation to find the setting to change]

03d13ae1bc

[Taswirh]

Hi Paul would you please also have a look on my blog http://www.thetopblogger.com as I am also facing the same problem. When I search with the URL at Google, the URL appears on top but when I check with "Exact Post Title" from my bog, this doesn't pull the related post from my blog.

I checked more than 15 posts in this way and so far only 1 post ranked on #6 though the post title is exactly matching with my search.

I am not a expert at Robots.txt but you can check my blog's robots.txt file too. http://www.thetopblogger.com/robots.txt

Waiting for your reply Bro. Thank you.

Regards

Taswir

[ThompsonPaul]

There are a number of issues that are likely causing indexing problems with this site, Eric, but I'm going to have to be up front with you.

The site's business model is so completely against the search engines' terms of service, and is contributing to the low opinion so many in the public have of SEO, that regretfully I must decline to provide any further help with this particular site.

This is my own judgement call and is not intended to reflect on you in any way.

Paul

[William.Lau]

I must've gotten confused with wp-content. Thanks for clearing up Paul!

[ThompsonPaul]

Wp-includes doesn't include any user content, William. The wp-content folder is where all user-uploaded images, pdfs etc are stored, so removing wp-includes from the robots.txt won' t have any effect on whether posts/pages are indexing or not.

But even if such content were in that blocked directory, posts and pages are in the database and are output from their respective pseudo index pages, none of which are ni the /wp-includes directory.

I'm just on my out the door, Eric, but if you want to PM me a few example URLs/pages, I'd be happy to have a look. Or of course you could post them publicly here for others to give you a hand, if you're comfortable with that. It's pretty hard to address problems like this without being able to research the actual pages.

Paul

[William.Lau]

I'd troubleshoot the site by removing /wp-includes/ mainly because from what I understand images are pulled from that dir usually. Or a lot of content is from wp-includes.

Remove it and see if that helps.

I'd also check WMT and use Googlebot to fetch the site. Usually that works on getting things indexed quicker. I would also check WMT messages to see if there was any manual action taken on your client's account.