[RayB]

Originally Posted by sally

Thanks Ray, I just hope there is a solution. I understand what you say about what google picks up but if you click a link expecting to see a post about dating and see a post about gundogs you are going to get confused and click away. :sad1:

Hi Sal - the links in your post above don't seem to be correct - the blog post is a dead link and the search result link is for the KW "first"

[sally]

Thanks for letting me know Ray, very strange I checked them when I first posted that. Will try again:

The blog post I want it to link to is here:

http://www.country-couples.co.uk/blo...ack-out-there/

The search is here (6th on the page):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&r...dating&spell=1

As you can see if you click the google link the first thing you see is a gundog competition so I doubt people will scroll down to find the right post, they will assume they are on the wrong blog.

[sally]

Have checked those links and they seem to be working fine for me.

[RayB]

Hi Sal,

Yes, it's just as I posted before - google has picked the post up from your homepage and indexed that - if you look at the cached page on google you will see that post was first on your blog homepage when last indexed - when it re-caches the post itself may well out rank the homepage so it's totally normal.

That said, to improve the blog SEO:

We could alter the permalink stucture to a custom one - /%postname%/ which would shorten the url. Also, you can use post slug to create an even shorter url with just the keywords when you write the post.

In this case if you'd have typed "first step dating" in post slug with my suggested permalink structure then the post url would be:

/blog/first-step-dating/

This will be more powerful in the SERP's than the current post url which is:

/blog/2008/03/20/first-step-dating-4-easy-steps-to-get-back-out-there/

[sally]

Thanks for looking and explaining, I will go and have a play but if I break it then it's your fault

[RayB]

Originally Posted by sally

Thanks for looking and explaining, I will go and have a play but if I break it then it's your fault

I can alter the setting Sal - I logged in to have a look after your last email - but I may need ftp access if i need to add a .htaccess file to make it all work properly with the permalink settings

[sally]

The email I sent has my ftp details, would you like me to resend?

If you do go in the blog is in www/blog (I know that sounds obvious but there are blogs on the site too so lots of filename with the word blog)

I have changed the post slug for that post and just put in the custom structure /%postname%/ but not sure if I did it right. If you have time to go in and press things I would be very grateful.

[sally]

Ray there is an htaccess file in there at the moment, it says:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

[RayB]

Yep is all working fine Sal - please update Robots meta to latest version 2.9.3 - decativate old plugin - then overwrite to the new version via FTP and re-activate (the latest version will allow us to enforce a trailing */* as per the other thread).

I've optimised the settings for all the other SEO related plugins for you as well

[sally]

Thank you, thank you, thank you

Have installed the updated robots meta and activated it.