This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.
Irman asks:
I want to know how many blog posts in percentage normally Google indexes from a blog. I have been running a blog for a year, and I noticed only 30% of my posts are indexed by Google. What steps should I take to improve that?
Provided that you respect some basic SEO guidelines, 100% of your posts should be indexed by Google. The basic SEO guidelines are:
1. All your posts must have unique and quality content. By unique I mean that the content of your posts should be found only on a single place (i.e., avoid duplicate content both inside and outside your domain). By quality I mean that the content should be useful to potential visitors. If you repeat the letter “z” one thousand times you would end up with unique content, but it would have zero quality so Google would probably not index that.
2. All your posts must be accessible through static links on your site. You need to have a sound site structure in place, else the Google bot might not be able to find some of your internal pages and posts. If you use a modern CMS, like WordPress or Joomla, this shouldn’t be an issue.
3. Your domain must have some backlinks. As you probably know backlinks are the search engine currency. You need some of them if you want Google to discover your website in the first place. Secondly, if you want to have all your pages indexed and some good search rankings, you will need to have a decent amount of backlinks. Keep in mind that there is a PageRank threshold that your pages must pass before they get included in Google’s index.
It is normal for a new website to have only part of its internal pages indexed. Over time, however, this should be fixed. If you have been blogging for around one year and still only 30% of your posts are indexed by Google you might have a problem. I would start investigating duplicate content issues. Once you are sure you don’t have that, work on getting more backlinks.
About Mark Felix
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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