Lately, I've been doing a lot of testing and checking on how my site is being crawled and indexed on the SERP ( Search Engine Ranking Page). In this case how my site will look like if I run a search in Google. Oh you may be asking, why do I bother to run a search on my site? The reason is simple. The better I rank on SERP or Google, the more traffic I shall gain. And why is traffic important to me? With traffic, comes Money! Yes, as simple as that. If you are still clueless about why I'm so concern about this, go do yourself a favour and start Googling on SEO. Yep! Haha.
Right, back to what I'm talking about earlier. ..
I've no problem getting my site indexed on Google. What I don't like is that most of my older posts are being indexed from their tags instead of their post title. I know that should not be an issue or anything but it's just that the way things are being indexed are just not uniform. I think, I only got one person to blame for this case who is myself. Haha.
You see, since I made another major theme change on this site, the indexing and crawl on my latest posts pretty much went hay wire. I'm not sure what I did wrong during the theme change but I reckoned it got to do with the WP-Cache plugin that I deactivated after the theme change. Google were not able to see my site's latest change in the site cache and I was stuck with the old theme right until I activated the WP-Cache plugin right up. I was also not able to search for latest posts published right after the theme change anywhere in Google. It's as though, it never got crawled.
With all those issues suddenly appearing out of the blue, I finally figured out to do a verification unto all my sites with Google Webmaster Tools. It's particularly important to verify your sites so that you can track how your site is being crawled and indexed by the Google bots . From here, you will learn the importance of getting a sitemap for your site, doing all the necessary no-follow, no-index on your archive, tags, categories and etc to avoid duplicate content penalty by Google or worse getting your whole site to be totally Google Sandboxed, and making those necessary changes on your robot.txt and .htaccess file. I've also religiously resubmitted my sitemap on the Webmaster in hope to get the search that I wanted to see from my site after the fix that I've done.
So far, I can say that my posts are getting crawled by the bots and I'm pretty happy with the changes I've made and learnt from all those adjustments in Webmaster Tools. Nevertheless, I must admit that I do get a little 'butterfly in my stomach' going about whenever I'm running my site ranking in Google. The thought that you are ranked no where in Google is plain sucky and that means you got to learn your way through more in SEO. I've always known SEO is something you cannot afford to miss out in the Internet business and that's one area I really need to work hard on.
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