WordPress SEO Adjustment Leads To Higher Traffic

447 words | Filed in: SEO, Web Traffic, Wordpress |

Please read the "Please Confirm" email from Manuel Viloria and confirm your request, and the info will be sent to you in a matter of minutes. We respect your privacy and will never share your contact info.

If you want more web site traffic, you'll need to adjust your WordPress theme so that the search engines will index the right pages. The secret lies in preventing duplicate content, and here's how to solve that issue.

When you create your site using WordPress, you'll unwittingly end up with a lot of duplicate content. For example, there's the actual post itself, the page containing posts made on a certain day, month, year, and even category.

Here's the code to place in the header.php file of your theme, between the HEAD tags:

<?php if((is_home() || is_single() || is_category || is_page()) && (!is_paged())) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">';
}?>

(Found this code in WordPress And Google: Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues, thanks to Steven Bradley's Problems With WordPress Posts Going Supplemental In Google’s Index. If you copy/paste code and later encounter errors, please check if the apostrophes or double-quotes are simple straight characters or slanted smartquotes. PHP requires simple apostrophes and quotes.)

What the code basically does is to tell the search engine robots not to index the page if it is a Date or Category page.

This helps a lot because I've noticed that WordPress category pages are shown first in the search engine results. The link to the actual post is not found, because the post is considered a duplicate of the Category page.

When searchers land on your Category pages, they usually have a hard time finding the post that they're looking for, because there may be tens or hundreds of posts in that one Category. What do you think is going to happen to your site traffic if people can't quickly find the info they need?

(NOTE: Sometimes, Google does eventually index your actual post rather than its Category page. Other times the post appears in the Google search engine results ahead of its Category page.

I don't know why that's the case, but I am concerned that my other WP-powered sites which predominantly display Category pages rather than actual posts in the SERPs. Are you experiencing the same thing?)

If you'd rather not deal with code, perhaps you can try getting rid of those sidebar links to your Categories or Monthly Archives. I've seen sites without those, and their listings in Google mostly show the permalinks of their actual posts and not of their Category/Monthly Archives pages.

Follow Me on: Twitter | Plurk | FriendFeed
To-do: Stumble this Post | Subscribe to the Full RSS Feed
To-read: Click Here To See How I Get 25-50 Free Visitors To My Website Every Single Day

---

Manuel Viloria is your helpful multimedia internet publishing coach who shows you how to make $100/day online. Whether it's through blogging, podcasting, article marketing, videoblogging, email listbuilding, or even through Web 2.0 or social network marketing, you can increase your website visitors today. For more information, please visit Get More Traffic | ManuelViloria.com.

---

Posted by Manuel Viloria | Filed in: SEO, Web Traffic, Wordpress

Review: How To Make $100 A Day Online.

« PayPerPost TrafficCreate An Online Gift Registry »

12 Responses to “WordPress SEO Adjustment Leads To Higher Traffic”

1. on 22 Feb 2007 at 4:24 pm 1 Manuel Viloria

   These are bits of code that I'll remove from the theme:

   
   <h2><?php _e('Archives'); ?></h2>
   	<ul><?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly&show_post_count=true'); ?></ul>
   	
   <h2><?php _e('Tags'); ?></h2>
   	<ul>
   	<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1');    ?>
   	</ul>	
   	
   <?php if(is_home()) {?>
   		<h2><?php _e('Links'); ?></h2>
   		<ul><?php get_links_list('name'); ?></ul>
   

   If ever I change my mind, I'll add these back. Anyway, I'll just post them here so I don't forget.

2. on 24 Feb 2007 at 8:14 am 2 reyna elena

   wow! i'm glad you visited my site or misclicked it! but i like this! i am learning a lot! i am new into all these and this is certainly great!!!!

3. on 24 Feb 2007 at 9:35 am 3 reyna elena

   how come you have overstack? there's something wrong with the codes?

4. on 24 Feb 2007 at 8:59 pm 4 Manuel Viloria

   Hi Reyna Elena,

   Thanks for dropping by! No, I didn't misclick when I visited your site. =)

   What is overstack?

5. on 21 Mar 2007 at 6:30 pm 5 Boni

   You also need to optimize your title tags in Wordpress:

   <?php if(is_home()) { bloginfo('title'); echo ' - '; bloginfo('description'); } else { wp_title(''); echo ' - '; bloginfo('name'); } ?>

6. on 02 Apr 2007 at 11:43 am 6 Boni

   Your meta adjustment assumes that your homepage does not extend to other pages. If your homepage has those "next" links (for older pages), you'll need this:

   (is_home() && ($paged < 2 ))

   Got that from How to Make a WordPress Blog Duplicate Content Safe

7. on 25 May 2007 at 11:43 pm 7 Manuel Viloria

   Made some adjustments in the header code, thanks to Chris Garrett's Blog SEO: Get Your Blog out of the Supplemental Index.

8. on 21 Jun 2007 at 11:40 am 8 Boni

   Check out this SEO Wordpress plugin (All in One SEO Pack)

   http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

9. on 16 Oct 2007 at 6:16 pm 9 Say Goodbye To Duplicate Contents - Macuha.com | Make Money Blogging About Anything Interesting

   [...] handle this. One is to put nofollow robots meta tag on pages you don’t want to get indexed. Manuel Viloria has details on his blog on how to do this. Another solution which I do is to use the “More” feature of Wordpress so that only the [...]

10. on 17 Feb 2008 at 12:18 pm 10 Dwayne Charrington

    Thanks for this. I've been looking for something like this to stop duplicate content hurting my pagerank with Wordpress.

    - Dwayne Charrington.
    http://www.dwaynecharrington.com

11. on 01 Apr 2008 at 11:11 am 11 Andos

    Thanks too. I'm forgot the setup my permalinks to avoid the double content

12. on 02 May 2008 at 12:13 pm 12 Temukan Roy Suryo

    It's an old post, but i just know it !
    pity me!
    
    thanks manuel !

Leave a Reply