I don’t know if it’s me or if it’s something happening more often these days in general, but I’ve seen more & more of my pages on the SEO Rant site being crawled but not indexed.
So I made some changes. Lo & behold the pages are now indexed
Here’s what I found fixed my issues
To start, the pages not indexed suffered from a problem:
The topics I cover can sometimes be super-niche. Take an interview I did with @DasfNYC
- We talked about learning SEO by building off what other SEOs have done in the past. Really niche.
So my theory was - Google didn’t index the page because it didn’t think these pages had any value because it couldn’t determine the specific meaning of the page in a pointed manner.
There are 3 parties that push the search engine ecosystem:
1. Google (duh) 2. Content creators/SEOs 3. Content consumers
I think there's a breakdown in the system causing an issue, & I don't think it's Google 😲🧵
Change to the ecosystem fundamentally requires all 3 to be in symbiosis. Currently, I think 2 out of 3 are and that’s why you see the discrepancy between what Google can do algorithmically & how people feel about the results.
What do I mean?
Content creation doesn’t happen in a bubble. There’s a latent incentive structure built into it.
That incentive cycle depends on each of the parties involved in the ecosystem.
I really like tools like @AlsoAsked (or @semrush's topic research tool is a personal fave as well) bec they give you the info you couldn't get without a tool but at the same time put you in a position to use the ol' noggin a bit.
Here's an example of what I mean 🧵
For the KW "Is a floral business profitable" you could take the 4 questions & write a post about each or plop em into an FAQ or a whole buncha diff things.
Or, you could profile what those questions mean - as in - what is the intent of a person who would ask such a question?
Take Q1 - What do florists do with unsold flowers?
Again, you could research & answer that question or you could create a HEAP of content around the deeper Q here:
🔥How do you keep profits up when so much inventory goes to waste (since flowers don't last forever)?
If you want to do away with the out-of-the-box markup we create on these kinds of pages for a SPECIFIC page you can just click to remove the markup.
Again, you can now EITHER bulk create/edit markup at the PAGE TYPE level (via our SEO Patterns Tool - see image)
OR
Custom set whatever markups you want for a SPECIFIC page (talking about dynamic pages such as blogs, products, etc. -static pages have been like this for a bit)
As SEOs we're almost conditioned to think that people search for something - they get the answer and they're on their way.
Not so fast... 🧵
Questions that are satisfied with a linear answer are a very limited subset of what's considered the acquisition of knowledge.
That's not how knowledge is constructed, generally.
Not to go all Piaget on you, but people create schemes. We need multiple pieces of content from multiple vantage points dealing with multiple topics and subtopics to have a sense of familiarity with something - to create a scheme.