Google Indexed Homepage with Snippet Instead of Article
This topic primarily discussed a WordPress based website.
When posting an article a short snippet appears on the index page with a link to the article. When you searched for that article topic in Google or any other search engine you’ll find the index page ranked for the term or title and not the actual article.
Also, when an article is indexed properly it sometimes causes other articles to become indexed improperly. This is happening because the anchor text of links pointing to other articles is ranking more highly than the other articles and so a search for blue widgets will result in serps with red widgets ranked highest and the words blue widgets in the description.
How do you resolved this?
As discussed in the Webmaster World here are some pointers by “ergophobe” to taken care of.
1. Custom excerpts, which is a ridiculous nomenclature because in fact a custom excerpt is not an excerpt at all, but custom text that is not taken from the page itself. This means it is not overlapping content, so at least they aren’t competing on the exact same phrases in all cases (obviously there will be some overlap, especially for single-word phrases). To do this, you’ll need to use the_excerpt() in your theme.
2. Custom “read more” text. Instead of just “read more” you can have “Read more about blue widgets”. I’ve heard that google may not give much consideration to the anchor text in second and third links from a given page to another, the first-link priority issue (Ted?), but assuming that there is some consideration of anchor text in second and third links on the page, it gives you a chance to get another variation in your Read More link. The Headspace2 plugin will handle this.
3. Custom meta title to allow semantic variation between H1 and meta title. Matt Cutts has said this is a good idea (in a Wordcamp presentation). The meta title will be unique to the article page and won’t appear on the index page at all. You can do this with Headspace2 or the All in One SEO Pack.
4. Try removing the permalink on title of the actual article. Make your article title just plain text. After all, why make it a permalink if it is linking to itself.
