Eat My Business

Further to my blog entry that was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 about SEO optimizing Wordpress to avoid duplication issues.

It is now 23 July 2007 - so its about time I told you how it all turned out.

Well, the techniques described in the original blog post worked brilliantly at first …. ahem…but in the long-run it failed miserably. That page is currently a dreaded ‘Supplemental Result’. (See the graphic).

However, the fact that it did work extremely well, when the page was young, means that it was not a total disaster. For a short while it was ranked within the top 5 for some very apt search queries, but as the link to it dropped off the first page of my ‘Latest Blog Posts page‘ it crashed down the rankings of the Google results pages like a lead baboon. (sic, ;o)

Possible Causes of a Drop in Rankings

• HTML Validity:
  I suspect the drop might be caused by weird goings on with the validity of the html code that displays the headlines of my earliest blog posts, (hence the page that links to the post in question).
• Robots: NoIndex rule on ‘Categories Pages’:
  My previous plan was to take a purist’s approach to avoid duplication. Done to the extent that I told Google not to index anything other than the ‘Chronological Blog Post Listing Pages’, pages and posts - not even letting The Big G take a peek at my Categories Pages. (See my optimistic theory on “Why NoFollow?”)
• Time:
  Google knows the page was getting old. Coupled with the knowledge that this is a blog website, it probably thought the page was too stale to care-for.

Rather than trying to fix the HTML Validity problem, (that kind of thing hurst my brain), I’m going to listen to what Michael Gray has to say about SEO optimizing Wordpress and let Google Index my ‘Categories Pages’ .

I had previously agreed with most of what Michael had said, but disagreed with the idea of trying to tag posts under ‘only one category’. This, to me, seemed to go against the fantastic tag features that Wordpress offers.

So, because my livelihood does not depend on this site’s search engine rankings, I have the freedom to experiment a little more:

Plan B

• I’m going to ignore Michaels advice about trying to keep things in only one category
• But, I’m going to accept the idea of letting Google index my ‘Categories Pages’

Making the changes is a simple matter of adding an extra ‘OR condition’ to my handcrafted code in my header.php script.

The new code fragment, now looks like this (bold text was added):

//—
if ( is_single() || is_home() || is_page() || is_category() )
{
echo(’<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />’);
}
else{
echo(’<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />’);
}
//——carry on with the rest of the script…

(See the full tutorial on how to technically make these changes)

The Moment of Truth

All that remains, now, is to wait and see if I crash and burn or rise like Pheonix from the flames.

Smell ya laterz my friends!

Update (again) 26th July 2007:

Ok, so now things have moved on a bit. 3 days after creating this blog post I have checked my rankings and am number 1 on Google for the search “SEO optimising wordpress” (see picture).

I suspect that this will not last long. But lets wait and see how quickly I drop off the rankings.

Update (again) 05th October 2007:

Yes: its still number 1 for “SEO optimising wordpress”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 3:09 am and is filed under SEO, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.