WordPress is brilliant blogging software with thousands of plugins, templates, developers and designers with infinite possibilities for functionality and design. But straight out-of-the box, it’s not particularly search engine friendly. However, with a little tweaking, google loves wordpress. One problem is duplicate content.
Today video is by Michael Gray from thegraywolfweb, who shows you how to optimise your wordpress blog by reducing duplicate content. In it, he gets out his whiteboard and draws a few pictures. WordPress places duplicate content in several different places. When you write a post, the content doesn’t just appear on your home page, it’s on the post page, category page and archive pages. Google doesn’t like the same content in multiple places and will suppress your search engine ranking as a result. So, you need to structure your site better.
Only keep posts in one category. This also gives the category a stronger theme. Place a short introduction or ‘teaser’ copy of your latest post on your homepage, with the full content on a separate page. Use the search engine ‘robot’ tags to block google from indexing your archive pages. In other words, archive pages must be ‘no index’ pages.
Many of the new premium themes, for example thesis and frugal, have easy to configure checkboxes to add ‘no index’ to all of your archive pages in whatever format they may appear. This could be a calendar, listing by month, or an archive menu button or link. If your theme doesn’t have this feature, you’ll need to dig into the page code.
Make the right tweaks to wordpress and you’ll get better search rankings.
