Comments on: Optimizing your Wordpress Blog for Google: Part 1

By: Olaf

Olaf — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:42:25 +0000

Part 2 of this article is published…

By: Barry

Barry — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:38:27 +0000

I don’t like your advice about going to partial feeds. Here’s why. First of all feed readers don’t want to have to come to your site - that’s why they reading the ‘feeds’ instead. Also, I read an article recently from a high profit website that compared the number of hits to their site once they switched to FULL FEEDS - it was dramatic. This article removed the fears of full feeds out of my head. Using Full feeds doesn’t mean these readers will never come to your site - I use feed burner and a lot of my readers end up coming to the site. Anyway I’ll shut up about that subject.

On my blog, at the main index page, I only show an ‘excerpt’ of each page. This limits the duplicate content - and also allows readers to more quickly scan the latest articles to get a feel for what they want to read. Next on my ‘categories’ page - I only list the title. I’m trying to help my readers find what they want and fast before they take a hike!!!

Also, I removed the ‘archives’ section of the sidebar. From my perspective it’s a complete waste of space and gets longer with each passing month.

Thank you for the info about robots.txt - I copied your example and updated my file. Anywho - I enjoyed the read and will be back!!!

Barry

By: Rogi

Rogi — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:17:45 +0000

An interesting and useful article, thanks. I have been wondering about SEO for Wordpress blogs recently as I have a new one that I have just set up (see my URL).

I use ExpressionEngine mainly and so I’m used to that, but Wordpress is, it seems, a bit of a different kettle of fish when it comes to Google.

Anyway, I’ve been playing about to see what combination of things gets better posts-only results whilst at the same time not being too brutally restrictive to search bots in general.

So far, I’m trying an ‘archives and cats in drop-downs only’ approach and using the all-in-one-SEO optimisation plugin as well. Added to that a xml sitemap restricted to posts only.

Too early to tell what the results will be yet as google already grabbed the archive pages so I need to wait for them to drop out of the index before I can see what’s left.

I’m optimistic that, hopefully, and with luck — there will be something left.

By: Russell

Russell — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:46:58 +0000

Thanks for this helpful information. I put the evermore plugin up, I rather like the shortened versions on my category pages and in the feed into my home page. Looks nice thanks. I thought that part of the reason that blogs do so well in the SE’s was because they can access the feed? Why block?

By: seo pixy

seo pixy — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:45:59 +0000

Thank you for these great advises! I loved your article and I also found it very helpful because I had problems with duplicate content penalty on one of my blogs. Now I know what to do:)

By: Olaf

Olaf — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:54:25 +0000

@Nicholas Mullen,

sure the RSS feed could helpful to index your website, but is not needed for that purpose. Within Wordpress a ping is send to the Google blog search and your new post is included after only a few hours.

The risk for indexing a blog’s RSS feed is about content duplication, the best thing is that only the pages with your posts are indexed by Google. The other pages need only to get followed

By: Nicholas Mullen

Nicholas Mullen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 20:28:32 +0000

Uh oh..! Google reads rss feeds, and I am quietly confident that it also monitors them, so you might want to take that out of your robots.txt file.

Google has publicly stated that in the event of syndicated content if the article appears on multiple websites and contains a link to the original source that the original source will be rewarded and not the site with the greater page rank. Therefore one can assume that google knows a thing or two about the world of blogging and duplicate content not only site-wide but net-wide.

keep in mind that google will see link data for the article in the
RSS feed, category page, archive page and the unique Unique page and therefore easily figure out what the original source is.

If you could find an example of a poorly SEO’d wordpress blog with search terms returning the archive and not the original post then I would love to see it.

cheers
Nick

By: Olaf

Olaf — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:42:16 +0000

… sure but you need to wait until article part2

By: seo

seo — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:16:57 +0000

Its not that easy to get done for dup content. You need to copy up to 90% of the text.

By: diarioTHC | Wordpress para Google

diarioTHC | Wordpress para Google — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 19:57:47 +0000

[…] echo (que puede cambiar pero que por el momento está así). Desde Web Development Blog publican la primera parte de un texto con la claves para optimizar nuestro blog montado con wordpress para google. Gracias a […]