Sometimes I can be really dense
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I’ve slowly been building up my discount code site at Easy Discount Codes over the past couple of weeks. I’m using Wordpress so I can hit the ground running without having to do any up front development work and I’m hoping to get purely SEO organic traffic to keep the profit margin up.
I’ve used the Wordpress category pages to display SEO optimised copy for each merchant and then list their offers below. I’ve tweaked around with the templates so that it doesn’t show the post text on the category page so that I’ll avoid the duplicate content problem.
Several weeks have passed by and my individual posts are getting indexed but not the category pages. I’ve been scratching my head over it, wondering why Google is being so damn slow at indexing the whole site.
And then today I had a close look at the HTML of the category pages and it hit me like a wet kipper about the face : I’ve got a meta noindex on the page. I’m actively telling Google I don’t want that page indexed. Grrrr! What a pillock I can be!
One quick untick operation in the All-In-One-SEO plugin and the metas gone. One little tick and it’s lead to me wasting about three weeks waiting for my site to be indexed. Moral of the story: check and double check what you’re doing. And try not to be as thick as me.
March 28th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
For conversions into sales, I’d rather have the individual pages indexed than an index page.
March 28th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Unless you manipulate the category page like I have on the discount blog. It displays all posts in that category where each post is a code, and a big fat link is automatically generated and put underneath the code. Then I give the category pages a higher rating in the sitemap. Tada!
March 28th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
That’s pretty much what I was trying to achieve Phil. Except you’ve carried it off better than I have!