Are you there Google? It's me, antonymous

September 27, 2012 10:07 AM

Why is google indexing my personal domain "better" than my work's domain - both have WP blogs, but only posts under my personal domain show up in the Google Alert I have for my name. I am responsible for the visibility of my employer's blog and I do not think it's being crawled effectively (or something).

I'm fairly certain that this is related to the poor SEO practices that were put into place at my employer's WP blog, which I am trying to fix. But essentially, when I post an item to my personal site, I'll get a Google Alert in my inbox (in a few hours) that I have set up for my name. When I post something to the company's site (which does include "author name" which I'd think would be indexed), I have never gotten any type of alert, and I do post there more frequently.

Of course, my personal domain has the blog front-and-center, but my work has the main page and it's blog is at employer-dot-com-slash-blog. I can't see that making too much of a difference, but I could be wrong. I will also mention that our main blog page does not list authors (and I cannot fix this due to some poor hardcoding by hired SEO "experts"), but if you drill down into an individual post my name is listed. (and yes, that's listed as my full name and not just first initial and last name)

FWIW, when I google my own name, my author page at my employer's blog comes up 3rd (which is great), but again, I'd like to understand why Google Alerts does not ping me when I write for work.

posted by antonymous to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Are you using an XML sitemap with your work Wordpress installation and feeding that to Google's Webmaster tools? Are you using Webmaster Tools?
posted by beaucoupkevin at 10:12 AM on September 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

Yep - I've submitted a sitemap (and do so regularly for both sites) and am using webmaster tools and have it tied into Google Analytics as well. I'm fairly comfortable with both - is there data there that I could post here which would help?
posted by antonymous at 10:15 AM on September 27, 2012

In general, that's fixed most blog problems I (or my clients) had when it comes to indexing. There are some fairly good SEO-oriented plugins for WP that I've used, but in this case, I am pretty sure that it's down to the main page not displaying your name and the sub-pages having a lower indexing priority. Are you able to see those pages when you do a specific search like "antonymous site:companyname.com/blog?"

(Also, it should be fairly easy to add the author name in the index.php file as it's a regular call built into the software: http://codex.wordpress.org/Author_Templates. It stinks that you got some bad advice there. I've got a client whose cousin misread something about consistency in metatags and I've got at least a week of cleanup to do there.)
posted by beaucoupkevin at 10:25 AM on September 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

Just as a follow up to those who may run across this question, I was never able to resolve this problem. Again, I think the problem is related to the anti-SEO optimization done on our site, so I'd recommend a WordPress/SEO audit/reinstall to press the ol' reset button on Google.
posted by antonymous at 3:06 PM on January 3