Hello,
Thanks for contacting us and sorry for the inconvenience caused.
If Google is ranking archive pages or homepage instead of actual posts then it means they are not finding your posts’ content helpful enough to be ranked higher. In this case, you will have to work on optimizing the content of the posts for the keywords you want them to rank for. You will also have to work on improving the overall SEO of your site to compete with other sites that are ranking higher. Here are a few resources I think you will find useful while devising an SEO strategy.
1. Keyword Research: https://mythemeshop.com/blog/keyword-research/
2. Identify Keyword Intent: https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-identify-intent-in-search/
3. Writing Awesome Content: https://neilpatel.com/blog/ingredients-of-great-content/
4. On-Page SEO: https://mythemeshop.com/blog/how-to-do-seo-optimizing-your-site-for-google/
5. Off-Page SEO: https://mythemeshop.com/blog/how-to-do-seo-off-page-optimization/
6. Building Backlinks: https://rankmath.com/blog/link-building/
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
The issue is that all my articles were ranked previously. now not only were some of them withdrawn from top results, but also, new ones can’t rank anymore no matter how well I optimize. It looks like there is a setting in Rank Math that is causing my website to compete with its posts. For example, if I search Jovithe Alexandros, it ranks within the also-read section of another article or category, instead of ranking independently. As far as I know, simple keywords should show up in top results within 48 hours. However, it’s not happening for very long. Please help me. It started with losing all my featured snippets. Currently, I lost all m featured snippets and Google treats my website like a last option. It seems to be more serious than it looks ever since someone injected some codes into my site that tricked Google to rank Chinese keywords and pages that don’t exist on my real website. How do I get back to ranking my posts and eventually rich results and featured snippets?
Hello,
Please note that it isn’t necessary that your posts will start to rank higher in 48 hours. It completely depends on the quality of content and your website’s authority.
Since your site was hacked and generated spam pages, that could be the reason Google is not ranking your site like it used to. In this case, you will have to keep working on publishing quality content and acquiring quality backlinks to get the position back. It can take some time to gain back the positions and reputation of your site back in the SERPs.
Also, the spam results are still indexed in the SERPs:
You will have to wait for Google to recrawl those URLs, detect that they no longer exist, and remove them from the SERPs.
Hope that helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.
Thank you so much for this comprehensive answer. I also found an option in Rank Math to prevent paginated pages from showing up in search results. I agree with you, these spammy results could be the root cause for the huge failure and ad sense limit on my site. Super grateful for how useful Rank Math is and how you even helped me prevent directory listing of my site. Does preventing directory listing by the 711 rule also prevent the injection of spammy scripts?
Hello,
You’re very much welcome! We are glad that we could address your concern with regard to your website’s current ranking situation.
Preventing directory listing with the 7-1-1 rule helps improve website security, but it doesn’t directly prevent spammy script injection. Additional measures like updating software, using a web application firewall, validating user input, implementing strong access controls, scanning for vulnerabilities, and following secure coding practices are necessary to protect against script injection and other security threats.
To get more info about this, we would suggest checking with your hosting provider to improve your website’s security further.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.
Super grateful for your advice. I am doing all these things via Cloudflare and my site speed has shot so high. Away from that, I love RankMath because of the numerous features that others may find confusing. It takes one to go through a situation to understand the value of options. In case another person may need this advice, Google accepts clearing cache within the Search Console as well as temporarily hiding particular pages from search results for some time. I expect Google to start showing the correct results with relevant results soon. As for now, they have cleared the previous spammy search results that had been indexed a month ago. I recommend RankMath as the best tool to handle technical SEO issues. Thanks for the support and for this wonderful information that’s increased my knowledge!
Best Regards!
Hello,
We are super happy that this resolved your issue. If you have any other questions in the future, know that we are here to help you.
If you don’t mind me asking, could you please leave us a review (if you haven’t already) on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/seo-by-rank-math/reviews/#new-post about your overall experience with Rank Math? We appreciate your time and patience.
If you do have another question in the future, please feel free to create a new forum topic, and it will be our pleasure to assist you again.
Thank you.
