I started this blog over six months ago, with a vague idea of what I was actually doing, and with a hope to have a virtual place to write about whatever I find or think is interesting in technology. I did not know and still don’t know much about Internet marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or other tactics bloggers use to bring traffic to their sites. But I have learned during this time that the most important medium to bring traffic to websites are search engines, so I started doing some research on how to optimize this blog to be easily found on the search engines when people search about stuff I write about.
One of the first problems I found with my site was that content was being duplicated in Google, and as I found out, it seems to be the way wordpress is designed. In wordpress, we have an archive pages, category pages, single page, etc. and according to some SEO gurus, to Google each of these pages count as different one even though they are the same posts. the same gurus say that Google hates duplicate content, and whenever Google finds a page to be a duplicate, it sends it to a blackhole which the gurus called “supplemental pages” once your posts fall into this blackhole singularity they are no where to be found when people search on Google for related stuff. This got me thinking for a moment; I had read somewhere that I could use a technology called “robot.txt” to stop crawling certain things on my site, I would just add “disable” to the entry and then add whatever I wanted to block, the text file would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /archives
Disallow: /category
But using this robot.txt as I found out, Google stops crawling those pages, and I did not want that, I wanted Google still be able to send the spiders to the archive and the categories, but somehow not to crawl them as often as my home page, where the fresh content actually is, so I got into a research on how to accomplish that, and I found out this lovely wordpress hack, like the author calls it. This hack actually prevent duplicate content on your blog, by prioritizing the homepage and the post page content, and putting just an excerpt on the rest of the folders, like archive and categories, but unlike the rebot.txt file this hack will let search engines going through the archives and categories to check if it’s anything interesting there. Nice, this is what I was looking for. To use the hack, you need to get to the “index.php” file and insert the the code between the <head> and </head> tags, here is the code:
<?php if (is_home() && (!$paged || $paged == 1) || is_search()
|| is_single() || is_page()) {
the_content(‘Read the rest of this entry »’);
} else {
?>
<p>
<strong>Excerpt:</strong> <?= substr(strip_tags($post->post_content), 0, 300); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>”¦</a>
</p>
<?php } ?>
Put the code and give time to the search engines crawlers to index your new wordpress setup. If the trick does not work after 3 or 4 weeks try changing another thing, like installing and using “All In one SEO pack plugin”, but don’t go crazy with SEO though, as long as you know your wordpress setup is fine, get more interested on writing good stuff for your blog rather obsessing about getting traffic from search engines when you don’t have anything interesting to show off. Instead of trying to fool Google spiders to put you on the first page of the SERPs, try writing interesting stuff the average Joe might find interesting, believe me, that latter could work better.
If you are a new blogger, please leave your comments here, and we can start helping each other. two are always better than one.
If you want to learn more about the above hack, and many other ways on how you can improve your blog search engine rankings visit learn SEO blog
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