Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math support, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
If your homepage/category page is ranking better than your posts, then Google thinks that your homepage/categories are more optimized than the posts for that certain keyword.
Please note that ranking on Google depends on so much more than just your on-page optimization. You could have the perfect article and still struggle to break the top 10 in SERPs. Here are some of the factors Google considers when ranking you:
1. Your website’s authority
2. Your content’s quality and how better it is than the other article currently ranking.
3. How competitive the keyword is.
4. How many backlinks you have and if they are better than what the other guys ranking for that keyword have.
5. Your website’s crawlability.
6. Frequency of new content and content updates.
7. So much more that there is a dedicated blog post on it by Brian Dean 🙂 https://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
I would recommend that you keep at it and work on acquiring more links to break into the top SERPs.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything.
The post I am talking of was ranking in the first page before now. It was bringing traffic to my site. Then all of a sudden, it disappeared leaving the category page to be ranking. Anyways, I will look into your suggestions to see if that is the cause.
Thanks.
Hello,
Sure, do let us know how that goes.
Also, you may check for URLs in your Google Search Console and look for any coverage issues so we can identify why your content is not ranking well.
Looking forward to helping you.
My main worry is that each time a post from my website starts ranking on the first page, the next thing I will see is that it has disappeared leaving only the category to be ranking.
Also, my blog is not a news site, can I still use instant index?
Hello,
All the pages within the category have duplicate content on the category page, which might be a reason why Google is ranking the category instead of the actual post. The only way to prevent this would be to set the categories to noindex.
The API can be configured on any website but Google recommends that the Indexing API should ONLY be used for Job Posting and Live Streaming websites.
https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/1134829160587812865
Please proceed at your own risk.
We look forward to helping you.
Google has finally removed all the pages of my website from its SERP. I can’t even see any trace of the site again. Please help me.
Hello,
I directly search your website URL in Google and it currently returns 150+ pages as you can see in my screenshot below:
Can you please confirm if the page count corresponds to the number of pages/posts/taxonomy you have on your website?
If your website is currently indexed but isn’t ranked by specific keywords, then you may need to optimize your content further and change your SEO strategy a bit so Google can rank it over your competition. You may also refer to the recommendations my colleague previously provided here.
Looking forward to helping you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Hello,
Glad that helped.
Please feel free to reach out to us again in case you need any other assistance.
We are here to help.
Thank you.
