Comments on: Optimizing your Wordpress Blog for Google: Part 2

By: Olaf

Olaf — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:03:52 +0000

Enrico, please continue here:
http://www.finalwebsites.com/forums/

this blog is not really a place for this kind of specific questions.

By: enrico

enrico — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:57:25 +0000

For instance, i got this on my .htaccess:
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

After modifying it according to the sample, I get a 500 error…my blog resides under http://www.site.com/blog, and the code I made was:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site.com/blog/$1/ [L,R=301]

What did I do wrong to get the error?

By: enrico

enrico — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:16:59 +0000

I found this, so maybe it’s not really my fault…
http://enarion.net/web/apache/htaccess/trailing-slash/

By: enrico

enrico — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:05:28 +0000

Besides, the templates are not involved just the header of them, and since I have only 1 header, the code there is:
see no other way apart from robots and htaccess, but still not sure why google sees both links with slash and without….

By: enrico

enrico — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:57:26 +0000

Hi there Olaf,

I use a sitemap, but didn’t exlude tags and archives from robots file…maybe this caused that. I have to check templates for tag and articles than…

By: Olaf

Olaf — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:30:12 +0000

Hi Enrico,

sounds like that something is wrong with your links (check your templates).

it should be possible to remove this trailing slash with mod_rewrite (search for these terms on google). Use also a sitemap for your weblog and don’t index pages like archives or tags.

By: enrico

enrico — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:59:25 +0000

Well, I got some double titletags recently on google webmaster(about 200). The problem is that i get them double since it calculates links with or witout slash ending, and that’s weird!
For instance: http :// www .site. com/tag/something/ and http :// www .site. com/tag/something, which obviously resolve both on my website to the same page, with thesame title, but I guess it does for everyone. Any way how to solve this?

By: Olaf

Olaf — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:05:20 +0000

Hello.

what you’re saying is not true. If your server is right configured and you enter a URL like http: //domain.com/something you get a 404 error (try it on this blog as I did).

I don’t understand the problem with webmaster tools validation process, it’s not a problem to upload the file or just adding the meta tag. I did it many times for WP blogs…

By: Austin Web Development

Austin Web Development — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:28:28 +0000

One word of caution regarding the .htaccess code. The rewrite rules you’ve posted simply redirect the user to index.php if the request filename is not a file or directory.

The challenge with this approach is that any page which should receive a 404 status will instead be redirected to the index.php page and return a 200 status.

The Google Webmaster tool requires you to upload a unique xml file (or include a unique value in a Meta Tag) to validate you are the site owner. The service checks for a file which shouldn’t exist (e.g. noexist_(some-hex-values).html). If this file returns a 200 status, Google will know you are employing a redirection technique that it doesn’t approve of.

By: barryb

barryb — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:29:37 +0000

Oh yeah – sorry – reading a little deeper on the google webmasters page clearly says “if you’ve blocked access to these links using robots.txt then you shouldn’t be concerned about these errors” – or something like that. I always speak to damn soon…..