When I first started blogging I was what you might call a lazy blogger, SEO wise that is. I didn’t try to optimize any part of the blog for the first month or two of its life. Well my position has changed completely (as I knew it would), not that I was never going to optimize, but that I finally got around to it, starting the SEO process that is. I like to keep track of my pages in the serps so when I started to see the dirty little words “Supplemental Result” I knew I had to get started.
If you’re like most bloggers you want as many pages indexed, and not classified as “supplemental result,” as possible. I chose Wordpress to manage the content on my business blog and now I have to to take a few steps to help the search engines find the pages.
WordPress is a great product, but they aren’t so search engine friendly. It’s basic SEO knowledge that duplicate content can hurt your blog. The problem is how do you avoid duplicate content on a blog with each page ending up in several spots on your site? Graywolf provides a great video explanation of how to make Wordpress search engine friendly while discussing how to get the most from your content.
One of the methods used by several SEO’s (also discussed in Graywolf’s video) is to use the <span><</span>!--more--> code into your blog posts. This code cuts your posts off at a predetermined spot to help with the “duplicate content dance”. If you want to save yourself some time, instead of using the <span><</span>!--more--> code in every single post to optimize your pages you can just use the evermore plugin to get the job done. I just installed this plugin and it seems to work great. You have the option of where to cut the posts and you can also turn it off in any post if you wish.
There are tons of different ways to optimize your blog content. Not everyone does it the same way. Take a look at SEO consultant John Andrews’ blog and then step over to take a look at Dave Naylor’s SEO blog. They both use completely different methods to optimize their content. Now that you’ve started to get a feel for how to optimize your content, you just have to choose a method, wait for the serps results to kick in, analyze, then start to tweak. I still have tons of work to do but at least I’ve started, let’s see what happens.
Chris Walker writes about business web development and other related topics. You can find other posts by Chris on his internet business blog.
Comments
9 responses so far ↓
Michael Martinez on Jul 25, 2007 at 10:24 am
It would be easier and more informative for readers to just embed internal links to older content (and even category pages) within posts to help tighten the linkage.
Business Blogger on Jul 25, 2007 at 11:02 am
I completely agree with you there Michael. An internal linking strategy is a good strategy to have. That’s one thing that most bloggers could focus on just a bit more.
Steven Bradley on Jul 25, 2007 at 1:36 pm
One thing that happened to me about a year ago with WordPress was Google indexing the feeds in addition to the posts and my entire blog ended up going supplemental.
I found a couple of threads on Webmasterworld that led me to the solution which I blogged about (apologies for the link)
The gist of the solution was to block the feeds in my robots.txt file with the use of wildcards for Googlebot. In about a week all the posts were back in the main index.
Derek on Jul 25, 2007 at 4:21 pm
We just released a new blog, on domain on our website and one of the concerns was how to prevent the blog posts from going supplemental. Here’s what I’ve done thus far that has provided (as of today) the right mix for success.
First - I modified the permalink structure so that only the post title appeared after domain.com/blog/
Then, I blocked Google from indexing category pages and yearly archives (robots.txt). In the perfect world, I’d love to create unique content on each category, but that would have been incredibly time consuming and past efforts had failed to get other blogs out of the supplemental results.
For whatever reason, Yahoo and MSN don’t have issues with the duplication of archives.
Our posts are now individually indexed in Google’s regular results
Note - I actually have to give the props to Scoreboard Media. I’d been fishing around other people’s Robots files (that were using WordPress) and I liked their solution the best (and it’s working).
I may try to expand upon this whole thing on our blog, as it all happened in coordination with a web hosting change, redirect etc etc.
Steven Bradley on Jul 25, 2007 at 6:31 pm
The feeds were being served however WordPress serves them by default. However your question made me realize that I am using the Permalink Redirect plugin. It’s the only plugin I have installed that might be having some effect, though I couldn’t say if it has anything to do with the issue.
The robots.txt solution did work for me and within a week my posts were out of supplemental. I know some others have seen the same thing I did, but some didn’t. Now I’m wondering if the plugin might be the reason.
john andrews on Jul 25, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Thanks for the mention, but be careful when looking at blogs like mine for live optimization tips. Yes there are methods at work in there, but there is also a ton of SEO negligence. The absence of some factors helps us “see” the impact of our efforts in the search engines. If you are advanced enough to see the difference, great. But if not, be careful because I don’t want to mislead.
Derek on Jul 26, 2007 at 6:47 am
BB - I struggled with that for a some time while testing other WordPress blogs. For example, for another blog I created, I specifically added unique text, title tags and meta data to each category to avoid the supplemental index. I’m pretty certain that the blog (as a whole) will come out of the supplemental index eventually but I’m not being as proactive as I should about actively seeking out high quality links or doing other things to address the supplemental issue.
I took a step back to think about what value the category/archive pages have in relationship to the entire content when looking at our company blog. Essentially, the core value is in the individual posts - with the categories providing a user-friendly way to access specific content, but not necessarily unique within itself. If I block the duplication from being indexed, even though its just part of the user experience (and not meant to be misleading), the logic is that the Google can crawl and index exactly what I want.
The key difference here are that the domain already had some (not great but some) age and value with inbound links versus working with an entirely new domain. It’s also pretty early in the launch, so it may be too early to tell.
Interestingly, Google is crawling and indexing the material at an incredibly fast rate. Posts written 2 days ago are already in the main index.
Andy Beard on Jul 27, 2007 at 5:07 am
I know what I should do, but I like playing around and testing things slowly.
I also want easy solutions for other people to adopt if I make changes myself.
Wordpress duplicate content can actually be used to your advantage if you want to go a little geeky in your SEO
http://andybeard.eu/2007/06/wordpress-seo-masterclass-for-competitive-niches.html
SEO Web Design on Jan 21, 2008 at 8:50 pm
As long as you do not show the full content of the post more than twice, it should not be a problem. Yes, i agree that there are more than one way to solving a duplicated problem.
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