Hypothesis: Changing Wordpress URL publication structures screws up your visibility in Google Blogsearch.
Background: Last year when my then-new Webmaster set up SEO-Theory.com, he registered it with Google Webmaster Tools per my request. Alas! I had not yet brainwashed — er, instructed him in the value of consistent domain URL naming conventions.
So SEO Theory has been recorded in Google Webmaster Tools as “seo-theory . com”, but we had set the canonical URL to be “www . seo-theory . com”. Now, normally I would not expect a problem. Google has been very good about indexing our blog in both Blogsearch and Web Search.
However, when I finally became curious about what an XML sitemap could be used for on this domain, I found to my surprise that Google Webmaster Tools won’t allow us to upload a sitemap because we set a canonical URL that is different from the one we verified.
While this might seem weird to some people, I have actually seen two different Web sites served from a www and non-www URL (same domain, two different sites). I’m sure Google has encountered this rare but interesting phenomenon in its crawls. Hence, their conservatism with respect to URL canonicalization makes sense to me.
Nonetheless, I was a bit annoyed and mildly intrigued. “I wonder,” I said to myself, “if I could right this wrong through Wordpress, well, I suppose the lazy way might win once after all.”
So our admin reset the published URLs to include “www”. We promptly fell out of Google Blogsearch (although Bloglines handles the transition gracefully). The why SEO Pundits can’t explain search algorithms post made it into Google’s Main Web Index but did not appear in Google’s Blogsearch under a certain query (actually, it fails to appear under a couple of queries but shows up in others).
Uniformity of reporting across different query structures is a huge problem with Google (even with Google Web Search). You really cannot trust what you see in Google’s search results because some queries will consistently tell you that certain pages are not indexed and other queries will bring those pages up. These disparities have nothing to do with URL canonicalization, but it was the URL canonicalization issue that led to our experiment.
So we turned the www back off this morning and wrote a post called this is an SEO test and that post appeared in Google Blogsearch across all test queries.
Now we’ve turned the www URL structure back on to see if this post appears in Google Blogsearch as expected. If it does not, our hypothesis — changing Wordpress URL publication structures screws up your visibility in Google Blogsearch — is confirmed.
Who knows? Maybe a dozen other people have discovered and blogged about this phenomenon already. It’s new to me and piqued my curiosity. In any event, the only way to be sure is to repeat the test. If you get the same results every time, the behavior is predictable and therefore your hypothesis is confirmed.
And as for the Google Webmaster Tools registration for SEO Theory — well, I may fix that. Some day.
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