What Is Wrong With My Blog?

You don't have a meta description tag. This is normally what Google shows underneath the title of a page and is heavily used when searching Google. Try adding in different meta descriptions for your different pages. I think this is the main problem actually since your site is *in* Google, just not easy to find.

Hope this helps.
ChrisNTR

Well just out of curiousity I ran it through this tool http://websitegrader.com/site/www.codethinked.com/ you might want to check that out?

@Jake

This will probably get you more of what you want - websitegrader.com/.../...ering-LINQ-Challenge.aspx

I don't have any advice but the following searches show your blog first on google:

being smart does not a good developer make

cost of cleverness don't be clever

When I tried your post titles with programming specific words your post did not show up but most of the top results were links to your blog.

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What Is Wrong With My Blog? [ CodeThinked ]

Super interesting, can't wait to find out what it is. I hate to say, but your pain is a fantastic gain for someone on the fence who wants to learn.

Please continue to share your findings.

Good luck!

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Just a few thoughts/comments:

Although in the past page load time did not impact ranking, according to Matt Cutts it is something likely to be coming in 2010.

Running this page through YSlow, it comes up with an F ranking, with too many HTTP requests (25 external javascript files, 6 stylesheets, 11 background images) being the primary culprit. On an empty cache it took 5.6 seconds to load.

Looking at your site in Google's index, the lack of meta descriptions may be more negative than you think. It will certainly reduce clicks when results come up. I haven't seen a definitive answer (which doesn't mean there isn't one) on whether poor click response will penalize your page rank, but it certainly impacts rankings on paid traffic; I wouldn't be surprised it was also true with organic.

The H1 tag on your page is:
<h1><a href="../../../../" id="ctl00_A4"><img src="dx7tw0ckw5qzr.cloudfront.net/images/logo.png" alt="CodeThinked by Justin Etheredge" />          </a></h1>

and you have an H2:
<h2>
    <a href="/post/2010/01/17/What-Is-Wrong-With-My-Blog.aspx">
            What Is Wrong With My Blog?
        </a>
  </h2>

While you see this pattern (the .NET MVC default template uses it for example), most sites render the H1 as the primary unique title for the page, not the site name/logo.

Every time we chat about this, I view-source on a few of your pages to look for anything egregiously wrong.  I think there's room for a bit of marginal improvement, but nothing that would explain other sites ranking better for your own content and/or coined phrases.

It must either be a penalty for something like asking for specific links on that contest (John Chow made that taboo) or a penalty for duplicate content that's being wrongly applied to you instead of DZone.

Hope it gets straightened out.  I hate seeing your good content being buried.

Probably almost everyone who find you with Google immediately subscribes to RSS and doesn't need to google your posts anymore and even visit your blog at all (unless they want to post a comment).

At least it is what I usually do: if I find relevant and interesting answer to my question to Google in someone's new blog, I quick look on other posts in this blog and if they also are interesting for me I add this blog to Google Reader. I don't return to this blog site for a long time reading it thought Google Reader. Sometimes I wonder how awful is the original design of the site and how much pretty it looks in Google Reader. I hate people who don't provide full post's content in RSS. There is no any good reason to crop text in RSS. If they want me to see advertisement in they site, then it's much more convenient to add single banner at the end of the post in RSS.

The last two isn't about you. My point is only that how content is looking in RSS is more important than how it looks on site itself for people like me, and count of RSS subscriptions may be more important than count of site visitors.

Here are some ideas, hope they help:

* The author link immediately under the post title: http://www.codethinked.com/author/Justin%20Etheredge.aspx is basically the same as the homepage. Either make it plain text, or link it to your about page.
* You don't appear to have a Google XML sitemap in the default location:
http://www.codethinked.com/sitemap.xml
* href="../../../../" is generally not recommended. Try to use full absolute paths, or relative paths from the domain root.
* The 2 links in your footer don't have proper href's set.

From my experience Google should look at these 3 elements:
- url
- page title
- Headers (mainly H1)

I linked a few resources that you might find useful on a blog I wrote one year and a few months ago:
codeclimber.net.nz/.../...g-guide-for-asp.net.aspx

I also suggest you add a sitemap (if you already don't have one) and that you register for the webmaster tools on Google and see if there is ban or something about your blog.

Another thing I see is that you don't have a text in the H1... for SEO purposes you had better add something, and use some image replacement technique to replace it with an image. Have a look at this:
http://css-tricks.com/css-image-replacement/

I used this html code:
<h1 id="Hp"><a id="HeaderTitle" title="The Title Of This Blog." href="/Default.aspx">CodeClimber</a></h1>


h1#Hp {
background:transparent url(images/header-logo.jpg) no-repeat scroll 0 0;
height:180px;
margin:0;
text-indent:-6000px;
width:604px;
}
what it basically does is moving the text off the screen and shows the background instead.

I think that the fact that you don't have an H1 might be a problem.
Or you should even consider using H1 as title of the post instead of the title of the blog. (I'm considering it myself for my blog).

HTH
Simone

Take a look at this, it may provide some information:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/.../...al.html

I'd heard anecdotal evidence that getting this right makes a large difference. I'm guessing you know about this already, but SEOMoz has a lot of useful information.

Have you tried to analyze your robots.txt with Google Webmaster Tools? www.google.com/.../answer.py

Tapio

No need to guess, Google will tell you - setup your site on http://www.google.com/webmasters/ - this will tell you what Google sees and how google sees it.

Also, there is a .Net framework bug that has appeared on and off again that can cause your site to 500 error when a bot tries to spider it.  Since Bing and Yahoo can see your site I think it's probably not in play, but can't hurt to check.  I've written about this in the past www.vinull.com/.../google-can-you-hear-me.aspx  You can test this with Fiddler or using the Webmaster tools "Fetch as GoogleBot".

I would recommend also checking into the sitemap protocol (http://sitemaps.org) and adding canonical link tags (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/.../...l.html) to your site to provide Google better hints at how the site should be indexed.

Hey Justin, I wish I knew what the problem was, I can say I'm not doing anything really other than using BlogEngine.NET out of the box.  

I did just do a search for "tekpub linq challenge" and this post of your's was first:

www.codethinked.com/.../...ve-Of-Eratosthenes.aspx

Hi Justin,

One thing that I noticed is really odd about your site.  Is that the article lines goes on forever.  While I don't think that is causing the problem, it is very atypical, and who knows what kind of parser Google uses.

Second your domain has a PR of 4, which is about average for bloggers like you.  It is very rare for a blogger to get a 6 like codinghorror.com.  

Third, make sure to fix up all the errors listed in Google Webmaster Tools.

http://google.com/webmasters/tools

Fourth, your robots.txt seems very restrictive to the web bots and specifically calls out Googlebot twice.  Once for * and once as Googlebot.  Try removing that stuff.  Just in case.

Try moving as much of your content to the bottom of the page, such as all your JavaScript files.  The Googlebot understands JavaScript now, so if it is in your header it downloads all those before getting to your content.

Run Y! Slow and follow most of the directions.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Also if you have a lot of posts, you may consider gziping your sitemap so that it takes Google a lot less time to download.

You are on a dedicated server, so that is good, because it limits the amount of others sites that may be on the same IP.  Ideally you want 1 site per IP.

Last, your domain is not that old, and you seem to be only registering it in 2 year increments.  Show some commitment to the Googlebot by registering your domain for 5 years in the future.

Nick

If all else fails, I've got a few thousand emails from people (read: bots) who have kindly promised to "get my page on the first page of Google."

Have you tried Google's webmaster tools?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

This:
<h1>
<a href="../../../../" id="ctl00_A4">
<img src="dx7tw0ckw5qzr.cloudfront.net/images/logo.png"" rel="nofollow">dx7tw0ckw5qzr.cloudfront.net/images/logo.png" alt="CodeThinked by Justin Etheredge" />
</a>
</h1>

Should really be:
<a href="http://www.codethinked.com" id="ctl00_A4">
<img src="dx7tw0ckw5qzr.cloudfront.net/images/logo.png"" rel="nofollow">dx7tw0ckw5qzr.cloudfront.net/images/logo.png" alt="CodeThinked by Justin Etheredge" />
</a>

The H1 is "supposed" to be your main on-page header/title, so it's probably a good idea to have it "reflect" ('though not necessarily duplicate) your head/title element / primary page subject/KW's.

<title>What Is Wrong With My Blog - codethinked.com</title>
<h1><a href="/post/2010/01/17/What-Is-Wrong-With-My-Blog.aspx">What Is Wrong With My Blog?</a></h1>

Lower your HTTP requests and add in some description tags. Also, there are ways to move the JavaScript generated by ASP.NET to the bottom of the page, would also do that. Then give google 3 or 4 weeks to make some positioning changes and see how you do.

I would also consider removing the Archives by Year/Month on your right nav and move up the category links. Increase your "Top Posts" to 15 and add a section called "Latest Posts" with the 15 most recent posts.

On your Category pages I would limit each post to a 500 character preview with 10-15 posts per page (add paging or Facebook style lazy loading W/ JQuery)

Also, on each post page list 5 links directly below the post content to "Related" articles in the same category.

No problem, hope it helps. BTW - GREAT job on the first LINQ video, cannot wait for the rest of the series!

Increase your "Top Posts" to 15 and add a section called "Latest Posts" with the 15 most recent posts.

Second thought, 8 links for each would keep your link count where you want it to be.

you might try appealing to authority: matt cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ is reputedly responsive, he might be willing to take a look

Meta-description tags...OMG.  Seriously??  NO, that won't help.  I was at a loss too until you mentioned you syndicated your content.  You can play around with on-page factors all you want, but so long as the SAME content shows up on a higher authority site (which I take DZone and others are), Google will filter your content out of its index.  So you need to consider the tradeoffs: pro/con, of syndicating versus the SEO value of having original content.  The only other thing I'd add is the Web is not Costner's Field of Dreams; if you simply build it, people won't come.  Unique content is part of the equation, but there's more.  If you see - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com - you'll notice you only have 30 backlinks.  That is a major part of the problem.  If you want traffic, you can't wish for it- you need to go out there and have a link-building strategy.  That should include building links from relevant, authority sites; you can do link exchange (within reason) with fellow bloggers, you can use social marking (ie: Digg), you can submit on Blog directories like Blog Catalog, the list goes on and on.  Doing something/anything is better than nothing so long as its white-hat.  So personally I think it comes down to resolving the syndication issue and implementing a backlink strategy.

Hi Justin
There are some great pieces of advice in the comments above, and you'll more than likely find them helpful. I'll leave you with a link to an article about why Google tends to 'hate' certain blogs and sites, hope it will provide you an insight into just what is wrong with your blog.
blog.directorymaximizer.com/.../

You're featured fairly high up here: www.noop.nl/.../...ogs-for-developers-q3-2009.html

You may be reading too much into this.

As someone who doesn't have to worry about traffic on his blog because there isn't any, I'll just second the suggestion to fix your (text)empty H1 tag and wait a week. Also the dzone crossposting can't be helping.

I suppose this is a SEO problem. It really deserves a lot of words to make a site search engine friendly.

Justin, I think GoogleBot isn't doing its job.  I remembered this article I read and thought I would share:  www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001174.html

The good news is that since we set up our sitemaps.xml, every question on Stack Overflow is eminently findable.

work on getting the sitemap generated.

Justin,

No idea how much traffic I get at all, let alone from search. Stats haven't been working for some time now. I don't really worry too much. If people hit me from a search engine, they're trying to solve a specific problem. And if that's the case, I just assume that if they aren't hitting my site, they're getting their problem solved somewhere else.

Everyman Links for January 24, 2010

Everyman Links for January 24, 2010

I just checked the stats of my blog and found that 67.34% over past 12 months came from Google alone. So, there is definitely something(s) amiss.

Unfortunately your choice of platform adds bulk to your HTML and it also causes google to have to work harder.  

A couple of tips:
- Move your title tag to the top just under head, you have a bunch of script there and a quick pull of your site the spider has to work harder.
- Change your urls, remove the .aspx (try IIRF) and make sure you use ALL LOWERCASE.  Google likes lower case and '-' separating words.  If you have caps it actually goes into another queue that is delayed because it has to index on lowercase and upper.  

'What-Is-Wrong-With-My-Blog.aspx' should be what-is-'wrong-with-my-blog' also with IIRF you can remove the '/post' from your url.

- You have lots of extraneous HTML that makes it harder to get a higher hit for content in your site.  Extraneous <br> tags, the cruft that is .NET at the bottom.  Google searches your content and if there is more cruft it will not put as high an emphasis on your actual content.

- A meta description won't help much but it will help to up the impact of the actual content over the cruft.  So adding one will help re-enforce your main content.  That is really all Google cares about.

- Take a look at a wordpress site, they have been so successful because their output works great with Google's spider. Or look at another non wordpress site that does it well like codinghorror.com.  When yo view source see how much content you see.  

HTH

@Justin

If it isn't the platform a test will solve it.  Take 2-3 articles from your site and post them in a clean url setup on wordpress.  See if those show up in a week or two (make sure to use a sitemap.xml as google expects) and see which one shows up. I think you are underestimating what bad HTML and bad url formatting can do to your results.  I have never had success with a .net based blog platform and have developed .net for some time.  Anytime we need a blog we use wordpress mainly.  They almost have a backdoor at google and the auto pinger really does work wonders. .net is just not good for SEO and blogger type sites.  Even the .net hero Jeff Atwood uses another platform.  

Also take a look at stackoverflow...  You will note is is using the MVC or a custom handler so that the .NET ASP.NET WebForms cruft is gone.  That has a massive impact like it or not.

I run some decent sized blogs, drawlogic.com being one of them.  And about 75% of my traffic comes from Google, AFTER I moved to wordpress which does most of this by default...

My guess is that google thinks that you have paid links on your website:

www.google.com/.../answer.py

You need to nofollow the links under the sponsor area.

@Ryan, @Justin,

I have an out-of-the-box BlogEngine ASP.NET Web Forms blog - no SEO work done whatsoever and receive between 6,000 and 8,000 unique visitors a month which ain't bad considering I barely publish a post per month. I'm so tired of hearing this nonsense about Web Forms, not to mention "Wordpress having a back door to Google". Nobody is disputing the importance of good markup which is achievable even with Web Forms.

As Justin pointed out, there is something fundamentally wrong here. His site is being penalized for some unknown reason and is probably stuck in some as-yet-to-be-publicly-acknowledged sandbox.

I would start with the IIS SEO toolkit and eliminate every SEO warning or error it gave me and then resubmit my site and sitemap to Google. I'd also recommend partaking in other Google offerings such as local adwords, etc. Report bogus sites and become part of their machine. This is a case where ass-licking in the correct manner is justified

as many people have said you don't have a description meta-tag, the only keyword you have is 'help' -- that is NOT very much at all -- you need several -- preferably different ones for each page,

also, just cause you have a couple hundred links coming into your blog does not mean a thing -- you need links that are not nofollowed.... like the comments on your page are not so that will not help you out if those are your only links

try talking to various blogs that you watch and see if anyone wants to trade some links with you;

also I don't know how your stuff is setup but you need to tell every search engine you can every time you make a new post about it -- send them a url to your RSS feed and also make sure your sitemap is up to date

in today's internet it is not enough to have great information -- you MUST be able to find it otherwise it's useless

hth

Have you changed your ip lately?

Looking it up your ip 71.6.217.200 is listed on a blacklist. mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist:71.6.217.200

It's not a big one so it probably wont effect outgoing email, but the fact it got flagged (you should go fix that) might mean google will silently ignore it. This normally happens with shared hosts, where a spammy site shares the ip with a legitimate one.

In your case, it's probably the previous owner that's to blame.

You have a pagerank of 4 which isn't bad.

Helpful links
ask.metafilter.com/.../How-to-get-unblacklisted-from-Google

Justin,

You should give your posts titles that you think people will search / are searching for.

Things like meta descriptions and meta keywords make 0 difference, in my experience.

For example, I rank first for "rails authentication" simply because I titled the post with what I knew people would search for.

For example, nobody is searching for "Beginning Mocking With Moq 3 - Part 4" but they might be searching for "moq tutorial" or something.

www.google.com/search%3Awww.codethinked.com&aq=f&aqi=&oq=

Take a look at the sites linking to you.  Only 187, and the top of them are  all junk.  If the rest of your site is well done as you say, you simply do not have enough back links.

I know you site google on the meta tags and descriptions, but if you do not have unique one on each page, you are doing yourself a disservice, and a large one at that.

Per Mischa, I can personally avow to this and openly admit to creating my title with the audience in mind. Looking back at my results, I can clearly see where I hit the nail on the head and it does make a huge difference overall. Most bloggers I know get this one wrong. First thing I ask myself before hitting the Publish button is how I would search for that info myself.

@justin, copy the link, your comment system is not properly url encoding links.  All I am doing is plain google searches for site:www.codethinked.com" rel="nofollow">www.codethinked.com and link:www.codethinked.com" rel="nofollow">www.codethinked.com

or http://tr.im/MRyl

While I understand there is GWT, that shows you everything the site has ever seen, and it is ambiguous at best as to when they put it in parity with their index.  Doing a link:domain.example.com google search is about as real world as it is going to get.

Probably the best suggestion I have heard here is to use meta title to title your posts as you believe people will search for them.  But that will not get you better index results.  It may get more people reading, and in turn, more people linking, and in turn, a better page listing.

Hey Justin.. something wierd happened to my blog too.  When I changed the theme from QuickPress to Arclite my traffic from google went from 100 a day down to 1 a day!  I just noticed now.. I am not 100% sure if this is the reason but I just changed it back to see if the traffic comes back.

@Scott: The link:domain.com search isn't remotely accurate.  For example, site:encosia.com suggests that my site only has 204 backlinks, but I've received traffic from more separates pages than that today alone.

Hi,

I ran this page through the online version of AOL page test.  The results are at:

www.webpagetest.org/result/100204_4WXT/1/details/

26 seconds on an empty cache?  That reddit button is killing you.  You are also missing a .png on your own domain.  Maybe the server load at reddit is impacting your SEO.

@Dave,
I think you are missing the point, yes, it is not accurate in how many links, but it is a good metric to tell the quality of link.  You rank poorly in google, a link:www.codethinked.com search shows poor numbers, I am saying there is correlation there.

If the top 10 in link: type searches were top tier sites, i am pretty confident that your problems would not exist.

@Scott:  If that were the problem, how do you explain my site getting over 40,000 visits from Google searches last month and Justin's getting only a handful?

Both our sites show about the same number of backlinks in a site:domain.com search.  It is clearly not a very good measure of anything, relative or absolute.

Agreeing with the very few others here that it is not on page SEO that you should worry about. I would change the H1 tag, but I cannot imagine that that has that much influence. I have much worse sites, with very few backlinks, that rank much, much better than you. Especially when you search for a reasonably unique title of your post, you should be the first result.

I would make a sitemap, make sure your site loads fast enough, and remove the robots.txt for now and see if that helps. It could also be the duplicate content if your entire entries are duplicated on other sites. I read years ago that Google's duplicate content filter was terrible (see www.seochat.com/.../ ), but you would think they fixed that by now.

I haven't got the same problem as you, but similar. My blog is 4 years old and Google traffic is increasing very very slowly, while traffic from Yahoo and Bing is non existent ~1% of Google traffic.

What I did try:
- Change domain (set me back in PR but I hope it pays off), buy a domain for several years (wasn't possible with the old one)
- Remove all cruft from the urls, like "archive", "2010/01/17", "blog", "post", ".html" etc.
- Optimize with YSlow, but Wordpress has limits

I think it's very hard to get beyond a PR of 4, codeinghorror got it by heavy linking from other sites right from the beginning (like Reddit).

I fear duplicate content (DZone), but assume Google is clever enough now to detect duplicate content for ad farming and one for good reasons (also like scientific papers).

Cheers
Stephan
http://codemonkeyism.com

With >8000 backlinks I wouldn't switch either. I had a bad feeling even with only a few backlinks. Redircting everything was a pain, and cleaning Googles view of the site was a pain too (duplicate content etc.).

Keep up the good work, especially like your posts with drawings,

Cheers
Stephan

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EastZoneSoupCube -   Querbeet 8

Is still a problem?
This site is first for
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+blurring+lines+of+languages%22
and some of your other examples.

Hi Justin,
Not that I know my arse from my elbow, and to repeat what Dave Ward, charlotte and Stephen Schmidt have said, I wonder if your problem is DZone.

When the articles are syndicated there can they be published with "noindex"?

www.google.com/.../answer.py?answer=66359