About to give up on wordpress

  • I’m at the end of my tether.

    I’ve spent all year dilligently writing a new post a day on;

    https://www.eversostrange.com/

    The site has received some great back links; the Guardian had it for their site of the week, and it’s been bigged up on Neatorama and Mental Floss.

    But google just doesn’t seem to like it.

    I’ve asked many times many different people what I can do and no-one can give me an answer.

    My articles appear in google and then quite simply slither out of the top ten, sometimes just disappearing altogether.

    What am I doing wrong?

    It’s all getting a bit pointless I must say…

    Do I really have to get involved in this SEO nonsense, and if so what is the simplest way to do it?

    If anyone can help I’d be appreciative.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • For starters, are you using Google Webmaster Tools and submitting your XML sitemap? I’ve found that Google is much friendlier to my sites when I provide it with a sitemap through that service. There’s a plugin that will generate the map for you called Google XML Sitemaps, or some such thing. All you have to do is verify your site to Tools and submit the link the the map.

    Another part of your problem may be simple lack of text. Web crawlers can’t read images or video, so they rely on the page text to provide them with clues as to how that page fits in with other potential search results. Most of your posts only appear to have a sentence or two of text.

    Moderator Jan Dembowski

    (@jdembowski)

    Forum Moderator and Brute Squad

    Also fix your hosting. That page takes forever to load and that will effect your ranking.

    Pingdom times out after 20+ seconds

    https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/?url=https://www.eversostrange.com/&id=5843856

    Also look at it with Pagespeed
    https://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/pagespeed/

    Thread Starter sirps

    (@sirps)

    Hey,

    Thanks for the tips!

    Yep I’ve done the XML sitemaps.

    Hmm yes I’ll work on getting more text in posts in future.

    Though it just doesn’t make sense for the long form episodes, eg take my page for Lake Titicaca Frog;

    https://www.google.co.uk/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=lake+titicaca+frog

    My old blog has it down as the number two on google, sometimes even the number 1 above wikipedia!

    With the new blog it appeared in google on page four a few days ago and has since simply disappeared…

    Anyway the thing with the pagespeed is interesting, ta!
    I’ll look into it!

    Any other thoughts appreciated…

    D

    If you have two blogs and the old one is still up, your new site may be flagged for duplicate content.

    Perhaps the plug-in All In One SEO Pack could help? Its available for free or for a small price includes support to set-up/guide you through the process. Just a thought, good luck!

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    There’s also the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.

    But.

    If I look for https://www.google.co.uk/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=lake+titicaca+frog+strange I get your site as #4 (for US and UK) so it’s a keyword thing. Basically, too many people are using “lake titicaca frog”

    Since your OLD site is WordPress.com, I’d consider paying money to have the old site redirect to the new one, and thus build up your rep that way.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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