Posted September 23rd, 2008
WordPress producing duplicate content is an issue which I’ve heard about a couple of times recently, and it seems to me that it’s something that every blogger should spend a little time in correcting.
The problem is that, by design, WordPress takes your posts and reproduces that content in archive pages, tag pages and feeds. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and will typically exclude pages they see as duplicates. But, they seem to have a habit of indexing those copies of your posts, and not the actual posts themselves. Not only that, but the duplicates that have been indexed don’t get very good rankings at all.
As Paul from themakemoneyonline.net has pointed out, this could be a simple, 5 second fix. However, while fixing the issue on your site might only take a few seconds, reversing the effects in the search engines may take considerably longer while they re-index your pages, as Kirsty found out here.
I think the word needs to be spread about this because as Kirsty proved during her testing, this problem can have a drastic effect on a sites organic traffic numbers, and therefore the overall success of the site.
I’ve actually found that if I search Google for pages it has indexed from my site that alot of my posts are there, so hopefully this hasn’t affected me too much so far, but I am going to be implementing Paul’s fix and also some of the suggestions from Kirsty and hopefully avoid this problem.
Hopefully this also helps some of your guys out there.
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Posted July 27th, 2008
As many are no doubt aware Google has just completed their latest page rank update. As a result of this update this site has been dumped down from a PR 1 to PR 0. Now, i’m not too upset by this (although it would be nice to at least have kept the 1…) as I know the blog is new and has still got a long way to go so PR 0 is probably fair. I am, however, slightly surprised as I have had the PR 1 for a good while now, and before I started this blog the domain c-online.co.uk was just sitting there for a good few years not really being used for anything except the occasional script/site testing.
So, not really sure why I was given the PR 1 in the first place, but I do think it’s strange that now the domain is being used and the site is being updated fairly regularly, and is getting some visitors, Google have decided to take it away.
Anyone else had any weird/good/bad PR changes after this update?
Posted June 3rd, 2008
I haven’t really touched any of my sites in the last couple of weeks as i’ve been really busy with other stuff. I really want to try and keep up some momentum and try and get things going so i’m going to make some time this week to work on some things.
So, I have a couple of mashup sites up working nicely, but now obviously I need to start getting traffic to those sites. SEO isn’t something i’ve done much of in the past so I think it’s time for me to dedicate some time to get clued up.
From what I’ve read I guess these will be what i’ll focus on to start with:
- Submitting to search engines - so far i’ve only submitted to Google and set up Google sitemaps (using this sitemap script).
- Submitting to directories - i’m not sure how easy this will be for a mashup site. I guess the content can be valuable to visitors (that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?), so hopefully it won’t be too much of a problem.
- Getting links - this is the main thing I need to learn about I think, where to get good links back to my sites.
There’s probably a ton of other stuff I need to do to really help build traffic, and i’m sure i’ll pick up loads of information as I look into this, and i’ll post anything I think could be useful for anyone else who’s starting out. Any advice would be gratefully appreciated.
I’ll attempt to get an hour of reading in now while my 2 year old son buries me in toy cars…
