Reaper-X » SEO

Wordpress 2.3, tags, categories … and duplicate content

Reaper-X — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:19:48 +0000

I guess you’ve already heard about the new tags feature (basically it’s just the same as site categories) that is built into the core of Wordpress 2.3. But now if you’re wondering does the new tags function can really give you some benefit from Search Engine and your site visitors point of view ? The answer of course is depend on your site visitors itself and whether you care about duplicate content or not, so it’s up to you to decide it ;)

The first is all about tags / categories (since both of them offer the same view so i consider it to be exactly the same). Do you really think your site need to use tags if basically they just shows you the same content ?

Previously Google Webmaster Central published a great article about duplicate content issues and how to prevent it but in this case, here are the most important point you should take note :

Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.

Understand your CMS: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.

If it’s for me, i’d rather choose to block it (the category page i mean, because i’m not interested on using tags on this site) … and of course that’s because i always believe that most people came to this site mostly from search engine, but what would happen if those visitors arrived at your categories page and couldn’t find matching article because search engine shows them the old description from your category page / tags page ? well … there are two possibility for this :

They’ll use the search function on your site
They’re going to leave your site by pressing the back button on their browser and continue with the next results

Though most people are going to choose the second option instead

Of course the above points does not applies to your site if you consider your site at the same level as Darren Rowse of Problogger (because you’ll always get many links to your post) just as Aaron Wall of Seobook said on how to get your blog out of Google’s supplemental result :

If you get strong editorial deep links from other bloggers that should also help search engines crawl that portion of your site better to make up for any information architecture related issues that may be causing certain portions of your blog to be inadequately crawled.

As a side note, according to this site Google Analytics for the previous month, this site only received a total of 265 Pageviews from only the Category view, while the total pageviews for the previous month reached 200.718 to be exact it’s 200.453 with the category view excluded … so if it’s for me i believe that most people who browse this site isn’t interested on looking at the category view page (although i’ve made it so it’ll looks like a tags page … and that’s all thanks to my big mistake i made when i still hosted at wordpress.com)

0x87485B96 | Tags : SEO

Live Search Webmaster Portal from Microsoft

Reaper-X — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:12:58 +0000

Microsoft has announced that they’re currently accepting private beta requests of their upcoming Live Search Webmaster portal which is basically the same like Google Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Siteexplorer

And according to the Live Search Weblog, the upcoming webmaster tools from Microsoft Live Search are going to provide you with these features :

Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot effectively crawling and indexing your site
Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
Statistics about your website
Consolidation of content submission resources
New content and community resources

They say it’ll be available for public in late Fall, but to those who’s interested on participating in their private beta program. You can try applying to be their a beta tester by sending an email to lswmp@microsoft.com

0x87485B96 | Tags : SEO, Webmaster Tools

No More Supplemental Results Label from Google ?

Reaper-X — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:11:22 +0000

I just found out about this today from the Official Google Webmaster Blog :

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as “Supplemental Results.” Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google’s supplemental index being deeper and fresher.

At first i thought i was having a big success on getting out some of my pages from the Google Supplemental Index, but I guess that’s explain why i didn’t see supplemental results label on when querying this site using Google since a few days ago (or perhaps more thought i can’t remember exactly)

In my opinion, it’d be more useful if Google keep displaying the supplemental results label because it really help the webmaster to improve their site even more, but that’s just my opinion …

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, SEO

Google Webmaster Tools Now Reporting Anchor Text Phrases

Reaper-X — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:58:19 +0000

Yesterday Vanessa Fox of Google announced that Google Webmaster Tools now reporting the anchor phrase used on various site that link to your site and this is really important for seo. Here’s what Danny Sullivan (the GodFather of search engine) said about this :

How They Link, Not How Many Links, Influences Ranking

As you can see, the data is great information. The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors — often the most important factor — for how you will rank in Google.

Let me repeat that. The anchor text used to link to your pages often is the most important reason you’ll rank well for particular words.

And what about this site ? what is the most used phrases that link to this site ?

Unfortunately .. the most used phrases that goes to this site are only .. Reaper X, Reaper X ID, and Reaper X ID Reborn :( (test) and that’s why i ranked really well using that words but .. i’m sure no one are going to use that keywords when searching

So if you’re interested on linking to this site .. maybe you could use some other anchor text instead ? :P

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Internet, SEO, Webmaster Tools, Website

Block search results on your site from being Indexed by Google

Reaper-X — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:37:01 +0000

Wow .. i just read this today regarding the search results getting indexed by search engine (in this case Google), because now Google gives you a warning about making your search results page from getting indexed by Googlebot

Here’s what Vanessa Fox from Google said about this – link :

Typically, web search results don’t add value to users, and since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index. (Not all URLs that contains things like “/results” or “/search” are search results, of course.)

Other than that, Matt Cutts also suggest you to use robots.txt to block search engine from indexing your search results, and here’s what he said about this :

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines

And because of this issue, Google also updated their quality guidelines page

Thanks to Danny Sullivan for posting about this matter, because i’ll never know about this issue if he’s not posting it on his blog

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Google, SEO, Website

Between using Subdomain and Subdirectory

Reaper-X — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 07:21:13 +0000

Recently i’ve seen various people asking at various webmasters forum out there, whether they should use a subdomain or subdirectory for their own site. And i asked myself, why they should be confused between choosing subdomain or subdirectory ? because like most of you already know that subdomain is just a subdirectory in your site. With the exception that search engine think that your subdomain is a separate site. And that means Google PR on your main domain and on your subdomain would be different

And to make things clear for you, here’s an example from my site. If you type this on your browser address bar : http://www.reaper-x.com/forums you’ll get redirected automatically to http://forums.reaper-x.com. And as you can see from that example, basically my forums is located under subdirectory of this site, but because i prefer Google or anyother search engine to display it as http://forums.reaper-x.com i’m using a permanent redirect using modrewrite and if Google decided to give PR to my forums in the future, all PR goes automatically to the forums.reaper-x.com

But what if i’m using http://www.reaper-x.com/forums instead of using subdomain ? of course the Google juice from this site are going to be passed easily because Google considered it’s as a subdirectory, which means you do not have to wait longer to get pr into your new forums

Although that is depend on your point of view, if it’s for me i prefer to use subdomain rather than using subdirectory because subdomain looks more professional to me and you can manage subdomain easily because everything inside that subdomain is considered to be in the root directory :) .. although it’ll really take sometime before your new subdomain get the Google Juice .. but that’s just my own opinion of course :)

As an addition, if you’re interested on using modrewrite on your subdomain or add-on domain, you might take a look at my previous post about using modrewrite on addon domain / subdomain

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Page Rank, Google Pagerank, SEO, Website

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Wordpress

Reaper-X — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 12:03:49 +0000

Well .. let’s say you’re using wordpress to power your website. And what should be done next to make sure your website is ready to be crawled by search engine ? Here’s the answer on what should be done after installing wordpress to your web server, and it’s called SEO / Search Engine Optimization

As a side note, this should be done before you go submitting your site to various directories, doing some link exchange, or to various search engine itself to make sure they’re not indexing your unfinished website :)

1. Choose Whether you want to use WWW in your domain or not

This is the most important thing to do, so this come first before anything else. This is done because having one canonical url version for all of your page will help you improve your search engine ranking

And here’s what Matt Cutts said about this :

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

And now how to use it on your blog ? Well .. you can read my previous article on how to force www on domain name. And if you don’t like WWW in front of your domain, with a slight modification you can also force the non-www version on all of your webpages

If you’re using add-on domain, you might take a look on my previous post on how to configure add-on domain so it’ll looks like a single domain placed on a single server

2. Control how Search Engine Robot visit your site

The next step would be creating robots.txt file and placed / upload it to the root folder of your site. This is done to control how search engine crawling your page, so they do not index your secret page

Read here for more info about this or here. And if you need real world example about this, you can click here (Google Results) for robots.txt example from various live sites

As a note, there are different opinion on whether you should let Google or other search engine bot to index your /feed/ address, archives page, etc or not. Personally i’ve tried them both and i don’t find any differences (in traffic, because of Google putting my site into it is supplemental index) between blocking them or not

If you want to read more about this issue, you can read Aaron Wall from Seobook post about this Google Supplemental Index Issue

3. Change your Permalink Structure / Using Nice URL

In order to change it, just go to Options -> Permalink from your dashboard and choose the Date and Name Based Permalink. So your url will looks like this for an example :

Default URL Structure : http://www.example.com/?p=123
Optimized URL Structure : http://www.example.com/category/post-name/

If you need more information about Permalink Structure in Wordpress, you can read it from here

4. Use unique title and meta description for each page

I know that inserting each meta description to a custom field (as for title, im sure no one are using the same title every time) for every page is time consuming especially to those who’s moving from the free wordpress.com blog

Fortunately there’s one plugin for wordpress that can help you with this situation, and it’s called Head META Description plugin by Kaf Oseo (if i’m not wrong, because i couldnt find his about page) :P which will automatically create Meta Description tag for your wordpress blog

And now the next step to do is optimize your blog post title by installing another plugin, and this one called Optimal Title created by Elasticdog that can be found here

5. Create Sitemaps for your Wordpress Blog

Creating sitemap is necessary especially if you want Search Engine to index your pages properly (deep linking). And in order to simplify creating sitemap for your site, you can use the Wordpress Sitemap Plugins which can be downloaded from here

That’s all about it, as an addition you might be interested on reading my previous post about DIY SEO

0x87485B96 | Tags : Blog, Google, Google Sitemaps, Guide, SEO, Tutorials, Website

Using Feedburner MyBrand ? Why not

Reaper-X — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 07:10:14 +0000

Feedburner MyBrand is a premium FeedBurner service that allows publishers to showcase their feeds by serving them from their own domain. And i think most of you already know that if there’s premium words attached to every service, that means you’ll have to pay for it

Now the question is, why you should use Feedburner MyBrand instead of using the default feed address from your blogging platform or the free feedburner address ?

1. Easy to set up and easy to manage

Your blogging platform software doesn’t provide stats tracking, and you’ll have to use another service / software to track it. And if you decided to track everything using various free stats tracking script on your own host, you’ll have to set up everything first, and managing it so it not causing more load to your host or server

2. More visibility to your domain

If you choose to use the free service from feedburner, you’ll notice that the url of your Feedburner address would be like feeds.feedburner.com/your-feed-name . And what’s the big deal with that address ? here’s a good explanation written by Jennifer Slegg from Searchengineland (tip #22) :

Don’t always think your free blog hosting company will be around forever. What will you do if you build up a loyal readership then one day you discover yourblogname.examplebloghost.com no longer works because examplebloghost.com has gone out of business? You want to make sure the search engines have a URL they will always find your blog at, rather than have to worry about them re-indexing your previously well-ranked blog on am entirely new domain… that is if you are lucky enough to get your blog posts from your free hosting company. Both Google’s Blogger & Wordpress allow you to use their hosted blog service while displaying it on your own domain instead of their own branded one.

She said don’t always think your free blog hosting will be around forever. And of course this applies to Feedburner too (see Danny Sullivan post about this for more info), and so that’s why i prefer to use my own domain name, instead of using feedburner address. And if you ask me why i choose Feedburner MyBrand instead of using default feed address from Wordpress, see point #1

3. Do i need to use it if my blog only has a small number of subscribers ?

Well .. actually it’s up to you, whether you want to use the default feed even without tracking it’s statistical data, but if it’s for me i’d rather choose to use hosted service from elsewhere (Read: Feedburner) simply because by using Feedburner i can also track who’s scrapping my site content without permission and try to make money from it (by placing Adsense next to it, of course) ..

4. How much does it cost ?

$2.99/month for up to 3 feeds
$6.99/month for 4-9 feeds
$13.99/month for 10 or more feeds

Well .. if it’s for me, i signed up with the plan number 1 .. :P .. and that’s all about it, if you need to get more information about Feedburner MyBrand you can read more about it here

0x87485B96 | Tags : Advertisement, Internet, Opinion, SEO, Webmaster Tools, Website

301 Redirect can cause traffic drop

Reaper-X — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 05:48:31 +0000

I just read a very interesting information about The 301 Redirect Headache from Search Engine Watch Blog. It says that moving web pages that have been indexed by search engines to a new URL using a 301 permanent redirect can cause serious dips in traffic once the search engines discover that the old page has moved

Other than that Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable highlighted a discussion at Google Groups in which Google’s Adam Lasnik claimed that it only takes them a couple of weeks for things to smooth out

Here’s what Adam Lasnik said at Google Groups Discussion for Webmaster :

There’s no universal/intentional sandbox. But, as Matt has noted and MRG has quoted (hey, that kinda rhymes), there are algorithms which have a sandbox-like effect on some sites
301s pass PR and related signals appropriately. Usually takes a couple of weeks for things to smooth out, though

And here’s what MRG said at that Google Groups :

The only thing I remember about the “sandbox effect” was something said by Matt Cutts when he made a reference regarding how webmasters go about promoting/marketing their sites. It was implied that the more you try to get traffic in other ways, the more Google will notice it and this alone could override the effect. It was also implied that the true goal of whatever had been put in place wasn’t to reproduce such ’sandbox’ but that this came about as a side effect, which make them very pleased

So the conclusion from the above discussion is, if you’re thinking on buying a new domain and want to redirect your previous domain to the new one, you’ll notice some traffic drops. Because it takes couple of weeks to pass PR to the new domain. Although in reality in takes couple of months or more to pass that PR to your new domain

A good example is .. if you previously using wordpress dot com subdomain (this is the default) and at later time you decided to bought / use the wordpress dot com domain mapping features, you’ll notice traffic drop

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Page Rank, Google Pagerank, Internet, SEO, Website

Finding External Links using Google Webmaster Tools

Reaper-X — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 16:07:07 +0000

Previously i have already talked about creating sitemap for your site, and why a sitemap is good for your site especially if you already created a lot of content in your site and submitting those sitemap file(s) into Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer. And now, Google expand their webmaster tools a little bit more by showing you a detailed link to your domain (main page) or your internal pages

But what is important from that information Google gave you ? because you can simply do the same query in Google by using link command ? .. that’s a simple answer .. because by looking at the external links to your site, you can see how well your site is performing (especially for the SEO stuff). Other than that, using the link command also gave you a different results

For example, if i tried to query my own site using the link command using my real ip address which is from Indonesia i only get 134 external links to my site. Although a few weeks ago, i can’t see any links to my own site and using site command also didn’t show any results. But when i tried to query my own site using a proxy (from various country), i can see there’s a results to my own site .. the answer to that problem is simply because Google showing results from different data center (unless you want to try to query your own site using each Google data center ip address directly if you’re not interested on using proxy)

So why you should use the new Google Webmaster Links Tool ? well .. the simple answer would be like this :

You can see how many links goes to your domain or to your pages (it is showing a separate results) .. and of course you can see where is the link came from ;) .. included also links from your subdomain

Although it’s not important for most people (especially if they’re not interested on doing SEO stuff), but i find it interesting to see which page on my site get most links :)

0x87485B96 | Tags : Google, Google Sitemaps, Guide, SEO, Tutorials, Website