General question about GS SEO Blogs Posts Pages Robots and Sitemaps

[Timbow]

I have a site to support one of my other professions set up with GS. Four Pages: Home - Services - News - Contact and the News page being a kind of blog with the News Manager plugin. You can see it here.

When I check what google has indexed by putting site:www.domain.com in the search box I see it has indexed the four pages. GS has put the four pages in sitemap.xml too. But there are only the last ten posts showing on the news page (enough I think for slow connections) while I have thirty quality posts saved on NM. All thirty posts could and should be generating pageviews and backlinks along with new contacts and enquiries. really I should have thirty-four pages in my sitemap and thirty-four pages being crawled and indexed.

So How do I manage this? Does another blog plugin do things differently? Or should I really be using google blogger and putting links and a feed to my GS site. I am pretty sure old blogger posts still attract Search Engine hits. Or is that just going to look like duplicated content and count against me? Or is it just a matter of getting decent sitemaps, xml and html on my GS site? Or putting all 30 pages in the Nav menu manually with categories and fly-out menus?. sounds like a lot of work, but maybe a News Manager isn't what I need any more. In another year I might have 60 different texts/readings/pages and might need a more serious system of tags searches and indexes. How would I do that?

Any thoughts?

[shawn_a]

sounds like your blog plugin does not add to sitemap.
You could also have a link to archives, so crawlers can find them all that way.

[Timbow]

News manager Doesn't add posts to the xml site map as pages and GSBlog doesn't either as far as I can see. Then again how important is the XML sitemap? Google says it's spider should navigate through your pages the same way a human does. The Blog page has a link to older posts and all the post titles are links to posts as individual pages but google somehow doesn't recognise them as pages. How would you make an html sitemap? Just list internal links to pages?

[mvlcek]

News manager Doesn't add posts to the xml site map as pages and GSBlog doesn't either as far as I can see. Then again how important is the XML sitemap? Google says it's spider should navigate through your pages the same way a human does. The Blog page has a link to older posts and all the post titles are links to posts as individual pages but google somehow doesn't recognise them as pages. How would you make an html sitemap? Just list internal links to pages?

You can use I18N Special Pages for your blog. Thus all blog entries are pages and are included in the site map. You can create a HTML site map using e.g. I18N (display all pages independent of whether they are in the menu or not).

[Carlos]

@Timbow

SEO for News Manager:

- Change your template's get_header() to get_header(false).
This way your site won't have the canonical meta tag (all posts have the same canonical url, that of the news page)

- Do something to have the post title in the <title> tag. You can:
-- install and activate the News Manager Title plugin
or (better, if your News Manager 2.3+)
-- use the new template tag nm_post_title - see here

This has been implemented successfully in get-simple.de, BTW. After doing these changes, in a couple weeks most of its (NM) blog posts were indexed by Google.

[Timbow]

Excellent thanks mvlcek and thanks Carlos I will get to work on this site again and get it functioning properly.

BTW Carlos I enjoyed using your code for a one-page site, ta.

[Timbow]

I have done the get_header(false). Posts have their own urls , checking to see if indexed.

I am unable to see how to get a sitemap out of I18N , or even a list of posts. they don't show in Page Management - View All Pages (I18N)

[Carlos]

I am unable to see how to get a sitemap out of I18N , or even a list of posts. they don't show in Page Management - View All Pages (I18N)

Sorry, I don't understand... Do you mean News Manager's posts? They're not GS pages but separate items, so they're not included by I18N (nor GS since 3.1) Sitemap, and of course not in the View All pages (I18N or GS)

---

Anyway even if NM posts are not included in the Sitemap, they will be indexed by search engines (with those two changes I said)

[Timbow]

So although I can open individual NM posts as individual pages they aren't actually GetSimple pages? It's me who didn't understand I think.

What about the archived posts, I could put links in the sidebar or the footer to
www.domain.com/news-blog/page/1
www.domain.com/news-blog/page/2
www.domain.com/news-blog/page/3
If a browser can see them as pages then a robot should see them as pages I think?

[Carlos]

NM posts are not normal GS pages, that is, they're not stored in /data/pages so they're not in the admin page manager. They're stored in /data/posts and only available in the NM admin section.

As for the frontend (the public site), a post is a normal web page with its own URL -- no problem with users or robots. So,

http://www.example.com/news-blog/

and

http://www.example.com/news-blog/post/my-post-title
(or http://www.example.com/news-blog/?post=my-post-title )

are different web pages. (unless you have the default GS canonical meta tag, that seems to make search engines believe they're the same)

[Timbow]

It is working. I have fifteen pages indexed now but still waiting to get all 30-40 done. I found some online sitemap generator services to make an xml sitemap (which should be automatically updated) and an html sitemap which I put on a Sitemap page and will have to update manually.