Okay, I've had the Google Search on my site for many years now and it always produced great results. I utilize it via the Adsense to add a few cents to my AdSense revenue...

Well, the last few weeks, the search results absolutey STINK. I mean they're just awful and 90 percent of the time they don't return any relevant result. Does anyone know what's up with this? Did Google change the search functionality? The way the one site of mine is working now, it forces people off my site and searching the Web because it simply is not returning relevant results.

My page titles are all concise and clear. I have meta tags, keywords, etc. The results were always outstanding before... Clues as to why this happened, anyone??

Here's an example...I have an article titled "Yogurt". I search for "yogurt" and the first result is an article titled "Building Global Burgers". No where in the results does the actual article on Yogurt come up! The full title of the article is "All About Yogurt". Right now the page has no page rank, but that never made any difference in my site search results before.

C'mon here -- how does something like this happen?? Any insight would sure be appreciated .. thanks in advance!

As stupid as it sounds, have you changed your site layout recently? I've heard of this once before (although I don't use GAS search).

Actually yes, I did but it was late last year, so it's been like this for at least 7, 8 months.

But I didn't change any of the links, just the layout and the navigation -- could that be enough to botch things up this badly??

Any idea how to "fix" it or am I just stuck with it? As it is right now, it's almost embarassing to have that search on there with such ridiculous results showing up!

Jeni could you post a link to the specific article on yogurt? I have an idea, but I want to check the page.

What I do notice is the 9 results Google is giving all seem to mention yogurt so it would make sense for them to show up in results. There has to be something on the specific yogurt page. If you post a link I'll take a look.

Sure -- no problem at all! Here's the link:

http://www.fitnessandfreebies.com/food/yogurt.html

And thanks!

I have noticed that the results that show up usually do have something with the keyword I'm using to search but they're usually most the irrelevant instead of relevant! I don't get that!

Jeni I have a theory as to why that page won't show up. I can't even get it to show up searching for it with an exact match (in quotes) for its title.

Here's what I'm thinking. I noticed you have what's called canonical issues with your URLs. What it means is that your pages are accessible as both www.youdomain.com/page and domain.com/page. Google sees the non www and www versions of your site as two different sites so when it encounters a page it makes the choice of which site the page belongs to.

You should use a 301 redirect to point one to the other.

Google has that page indexed as the non-www version and I'm guessing when you grabbed the code for the search engine you probably told Google to use the www version of the site.

I think as far as Google is concerned your All About Yogurt page is not on the site the search engines us trying to search so it never shows up.

I think if you set up the 301 redirects (The link above takes you to a post on my blog explaining it a little more and links to further resources to help set them up) this will fix itself.

Again this is just a theory, but I have a hunch it's right.

Oh wow...how on earth does something like this happen?

Okay, I did change servers a few months ago -- had this one on a different server but have been moving all domains to GoDaddy.com as they expire. Could that have done something like this? Because my sitemap, etc., are all done the same as always.

You know, I've read about this and heard of it, but never fully understood it. I'll definitely read the resources you graciously shared and see if I can't rectify this.

I have a feeling your hunch is right, too.

Thanks so much for taking the time to take a look at this. It used to be I could put "yogurt" -- or whatever word I was looking for pertaining to an article -- and the first result was always what I was looking for. This latest mess has really messed with my head!!

Hey hey...I read the info and think I understand the 301 redirect fine; however, I have another question...

Okay, in my admin panel for my domain names, I have the ability to set the 301 redirect -- I did it just for my home page. Will that suffice for the rest of the site? I mean, I don't have to go and do every single page, do I?? Oh PAHLEASE tell me that isn't so!

Oh -- and was that the right thing to do -- redirect my home page just to add the "www" in the URL?

Thank you sooooo much!

I just checked your site and it doesn't look like the 301 redirect went through for all the pages.

I see you're on an Apache server. Have you ever created an .htaccess file? The code I used to set this up is

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Naturally you replace domain with your actual domain.

Another simpler way to set this up is through Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need an account and then you'll need to verify your site, but both are easy. I think it's on the first page after logging in where you can tell Google which version (non www or www) to use.

Feel free to keep asking questions if you're having any problems. We'll get you through setting this up.

Thank you (again!) vangogh -- I do have a .htaccess file, yes but confession session here ... I only know the very basics of using one. The example you posted for it is something I've never seen before, but I'll gladly put it in my file and give it a try.

And regarding the Google Webmaster Tools, I am already a member and do have my site verified so I went in there and look what it said:

"The preferred domain name fitnessandfreebies.com was set on Jun 23, 2007."

Now I sure don't recall doing anything like this intentionally on June 23rd, but the way I fool around with things always trying to do better, I suppose anything is possible. However, could this be part of my problem? Well, just in case I went in and changed it to "display URL as www..." just now.

Now it's sit back and wait time again, isn't it! Well, hopefully this is a start. Just wish I could recall what I was up to on June 23rd!

I think either the code to .htaccess or the switch in Webmaster Tools will do the trick. I wonder why the preferred domain has the non www version selected. I think by default the preferred domain option is off.

I bet it is part of the problem though. When it got changed Google probably started dropping all the www pages and changing to the non www version. It might take a little while to change them back, but it should happen. I bet when it does you'll be able to find the yogurt page through searching on your site.

Originally Posted by vangogh

I think either the code to .htaccess or the switch in Webmaster Tools will do the trick. I wonder why the preferred domain has the non www version selected. I think by default the preferred domain option is off.

Boy, I sure hope so and thanks again for the assistance -- so much! This has been driving me batty lately and I confess I was clueless how something like this could have happened.

I went and checked my other domain and that, too was set for no "www" on the links. Again, no clue when/how or why I did that.

I bet it is part of the problem though. When it got changed Google probably started dropping all the www pages and changing to the non www version. It might take a little while to change them back, but it should happen. I bet when it does you'll be able to find the yogurt page through searching on your site.

LOL! And hopefully all the others, too right? (shhhh...but I don't even care much for yogurt...)

All this and you don't even like yogurt. Too funny. Hopefully this will fix everything with the site search and also a few other seo related things.

Keep us posted. It will probably take a little time for Google to sort out the change.

To know when they indexed the yogurt page the way you want try searching

info:www.fitnessandfreebies.com/food/yogurt.html

at Google. When they show a link to the page then the page will have been indexed with the www and hopefully you'll be able to find the page in the site search.

I know ... I'm a strange one, no doubt.

And I'll probably start doing that search tomorrow already just out of impatience, but I know -- must wait a bit.

Thanks again so much -- another lesson learned. A valuable lesson at that!

Glad to help and hopefully what I suggested works. The 301 redirects are good to do whether they work to fix the site search issue anyway, but hopefully it fixes the site search too.

Thanks, Vangogh...sure hoping it does. Just as I knew I would, I went and checked yesterday and of course, not quite yet, but I know I need a little patience. It's just so frustrating and I think it's hurting my traffic, too. Hopefully I can turn this back around before much more damage is done.

This is something I will definitely keep my eye on from now on, that's for sure! I've been working web sites for 8 years and never ran into this one before...always can learn something, huh.

I've been working web sites for 8 years and never ran into this one before...

These kind of canonical issues are never a problem until you bring Internet Search Engines into the mix.