Simon Owens has done the legwork and he’s revealed that the Litblog Co-Op site has been blacklisted from Google. In fact, I’ve performed a few Google searches for “Valerie Trueblood” and “Stephen Graham Jones” and these names don’t come up at all in the first five pages.
This issue has been broached to the group and we’re now discussing options, including switching over to WordPress if need be. It’s a great pity that the hard work of the nominated authors kind enough to volunteer their time to guest blog and answer questions, the many contributors and readers who have discussed the books, the podcast interviews, and the like simply aren’t accessible to the search engines.
The moral of the story: if you have a Typepad account, you may want to check your search engine ranking. It’s very possible that you’re speaking into dead air.
[UPDATE: It appears that there’s a line in our source code deflecting search engines.]
That’s funny. I’m on Typepad and most of my traffic comes from Google.
The downside to that is what search strings bring people there.
Most frightening was Harry Potter slashfic.
Squick.
That’s what I initially suspected, glad you were able to get to the bottom of it. Google search engine traffic is valuable, it would be a shame if it couldn’t be used to promote the books at LBC
Yeah, I noticed that recently, too. Thought it was strange but then forgot about it. Is it something that can be easily corrected (in the source code)?
I saw what bloggasm wrote about the noindex problem.
You don’t need to leave TypePad, just go into the “configure” tab for that blog and select “Yes” for “Publicize this Weblog:” Then republish the site (in the design tab). That’s it – you’ll soon be indexed.
In fact, other than the noindex thing, which must have been inadvertently set on the LBC site, the LBC site is more SE friendly than Edrants because One thing search engines like is post names rather than numbers or characters in URLs (on Chekhov’s Mistress I’ve even put my name in my URLs).
You can change your WP URLs on your blog here – In your WordPress Admin screen, Go to the “Options” tab, select the “Permalinks” tab and select “Date and name based” or do a custom one with post name.) You’ll get a slowdown in google hits until the search engines reindex you (although you can speed that up by submitting a sitemap to google), but it won’t last long.
Oh, while I’m at it. If you were going to switch, you may want to look at expression engine (pmachine.com). It’s what the Valve uses and what I use for Metaxucafe because it’s great for groups (of course, it’s not free, but it’s a superior system to the rest).
Bud is right, you don’t need to move to WordPress. If the LBC does decide to change platforms or move to its own domain be VERY careful how you handle the change or you may end up losing your link traffic in addition to being dropped from Google.