Subfolder ranks worse than the rest of the site

[karasd]

We recently deleted that page. It was ranked at ~1000 in SERPs, so that indicated to us that Google had a major problem with it. Since we couldn't figure it out, we got rid of the page.

[evolvingSEO]

Do you reactivate it? It's still live:

http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/health-more/benefits-alkaline-water-hair-loss

[karasd]

My mistake, we deleted a page with a similar URL. That page was published on Dec 9th. Three days is not an uncommon lag for Google to index a new blog post. WMT shows that we are only indexed to the 7th of December. Google appears to re-index our site once per week:

Lastest index 12/7

Previous index 11/30

Previous index 11/23

Is this unusual? And thanks for your help! This has been a very frustrating problem!

[evolvingSEO]

Hi - I wouldn't focus too much on that - I would take the suggestions made in my first answer and start with those! You really don't want to block crawling of categories!

[karasd]

I've unblocked the categories in Wordpress. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

[karasd]

You were right about the Fetch and Render. I found tons of scripts and images that were blocked. We're unblocking them all. I'm still working on your other suggestions, we do have a lot of old content. My plan is to leave all the evergreen content, and purge everything else

[evolvingSEO]

Great! So glad it's helped so far, please keep us updated

[karasd]

Got to work on those blocked scripts. It turns out they are all outside resources:

• Hubspot
• Zopim Live Chat

According to Google, if outside resources are blocked, you have to contact the vendor about unblocking them. I contacted both Hubspot and Zopim, they will get back to us in about 2 days. Thankfully, we didn't have any of our scripts/CSS blocked.

I'm also working on that redirect. It turns out that if I shut it down, and redirect to the 200 OK page, that the blog will then render search result pages that will be indexed. That will give us a massive duplication problem. Its because of this that we did the redirect in the first place.

We're considering getting a Wordpress pro to come in and fix it right. Any suggestions?

[evolvingSEO]

I would definitely check out the list on Clarity: https://clarity.fm/browse/technology/wordpress - and for developers it's often best to look in your own network - so I'd ask friends / colleagues for referrals, or you can search your LinkedIn connections as well.

[karasd]

UPDATE: Organic traffic to the blog has doubled in the last few days. It started going up about 4 days after I unblocked the categories from being crawled. I'm not certain that it's all Google organic traffic, but it sure looks encouraging since the blog hasn't responded to any SEO fixes for nearly two years!

[evolvingSEO]

Awesome! Thanks for the update.