This is part 2 in our series on how to optimize your Wordpress blog for Google. In our earlier post we discussed how to avoid the duplicate content penalty when blogging with the Wordpress blogging software; today, we are going to share how to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engine friendliness especially for the Google search engine.

Interlinking your blog posts

Since your blog should be topically related anyway, you should have no problem referencing previous post from time to time in new blog postings. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to edit your older blog postings to include topically related links for new posts. Not only does this help to improve your internal linking structure, it can also help improve keyword relevancy for certain pages if you’re using keyword focused, or descriptive, anchor text for your internal URL’s.

Another approach to boost the link popularity and improve the visibility of your blogs internal pages is to offer a sitemap, one which will benefit users and work to help with search engine spidering. (more…)

How to avoid the duplicate content penalty when using a Wordpress blog

There’s no denying it, Google is the powerhouse of the internet; more than capable of showering targeted visitors on your website like a torrential downpour backed by gale-force winds. That is, if you happen to be in Google’s good graces and rank highly for popular keywords.

Bloggers often times find themselves in the position to receive great traffic from Google simply because of the way that blogs work; namely, they allow for quick inclusion into major search engines even when using the default setup. Being the most popular blogging software on the planet, Wordpress blogs are the content management system (CMS) of choice for bloggers due to ease of use and the large community of supporters that help to develop plugins for this open source blogging software.

However, just because Wordpress blogs can help websites to get noticed by the major search engines easily, this doesn’t mean that they are inherently search engine friendly; in fact, the default settings for Wordpress blogs almost guarantee that, if left untouched, your blog will end up suffering from the duplicate content penalty.

The duplicate content penalty and Wordpress blogs

The duplicate content penalty is a term that is used to describe what happens when a web page is removed from the primary search results for a certain keyword phrase due to identical content elsewhere on the internet. In Google, the lower-ranking websites and individual pages that contain the duplicate content are hidden, and this phrase is displayed instead: (more…)

Like a lot of other weblogs this “Web Development Blog” has lost today 2 points in PageRank (went from 5 to 3). A week ago I had the idea that this blog will get a PR6 based on the information I got via the Google webmaster tools. After reading about PR drops from Andy Beard, Tim Nash, Darren Rowse and several others I noticed that all of them (including me) thought the reason could be some link sales. So maybe all of us tried to sell a link some time ago?

Text Link Ads

I think most of all websites with content for webmasters link to this website because they pay $money for referrals and I saw a lot of high quality blogs on their “Link Market Place”. Maybe is the affiliation with TLA is the reason for lot of this PR drops. TLA has a PR zero since several weeks and was maybe one of the first sites getting a PR drop (edit: they got a penalty from Google, you can’t find them on their company name). I remember me that TLA has send us new affiliate links using a TinyURL; some action to safe what was left? I removed my website from the TLA market place because I never earned something and also the prices from my TLA competitors are so high that I can’t believe that there are a lot of people making the “big” money there. I know some webdev site with a PR6 (or 7) was selling links for several hundred $ a month, this website has a PR 4 now. (more…)

Any web developer knows it:

Create websites according the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines!

If you read the current blog post from Google Webmaster Central these Guidelines are not changed. Only the help pages are extended and give more information about each rule.

About the rule “Hidden text and links” there is the following information available:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including: Using white text on a white background, Including text behind an image, Using CSS to hide text, Setting the font size to 0

(more…)