Comments on: Excuse Me While I SEO

By: Kelly

Kelly — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:20:10 +0000

Sorry to hear about your hack.

Are you sure about the no follow comments not counting against the SERPS? The text would still be the same from post to post.

By: EricaStone

EricaStone — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:26:45 +0000

Actually, Kelly, I HAD a lot of stuff in my sidebar until my blog was hacked before I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress a few weeks ago. I had my blog restored by my host which saved most of my blog – except for my sidebar. I’ve been busy elsewhere and just haven’t had a chance to fix everything yet.

There is a way to include comments on your sidebar and not have it count against you in the SERPs. Make it nofollow or noindex through a plug-in. Good luck!

Erica

By: Kelly

Kelly — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:57:39 +0000

I noticed you have virtually nothing in your sidebar. This prevents duplicate content but it doesn’t improve the user experience.

This is the dilemma I have right now. After removing lots from my sidebar, I’m ranking well, but the bounce rate has gone up as well.

There must be an seo friendly way of adding recent posts/categories etc to pages without the search engines seeing this information not changing from page to page.

By: Erica

Erica — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:43:02 +0000

Keep ‘em coming! Soon I’ll have as many plug-ins as you! LOL These are great tips, Patti. Appreciate the help!

By: Patti Meador

Patti Meador — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:19:35 +0000

I use a plugin that’s pretty handy
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/noindex-archives/
it allows you to turn off indexing on categories, archives, and tags just by checking a box

By: Erica

Erica — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 23:10:51 +0000

Patti,

Check this post on Yoast about sidebars and this Nathan Rice article on duplicate content. My site was not set to stop robots from indexing almost everything on every page. As my sidebar was the same for every view, it could be indexed with a view of each of my four categories, a view of each single post, a view of each archive query, my about me view, and my lenses page. All together, it would be the same on at least 36 separate site URLs.

The same goes for my single posts. Each post shows up on its own single post URL, at least one category URL, the main page URL if the post is recent, and an archive URL. Without telling robots not to index those, Google could see my single post (exact content) in more than four places. I used robot settings in my dashboard to turn off some of it but couldn’t get to all of it so went to work on the formatting of my actual theme.

Let me know what you think. I’d love more input on the topic as it’s all still pretty new to me! Thanks!

By: Patti Meador

Patti Meador — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 22:46:22 +0000

I’ll have to check out that plugin…though I have 43 plugins already in use on a blog that’s less than 3 months old! YIKES! It seems there’s a plugin for just about everything in WordPress isn’t there? One of the things in my opinion that makes it so great and much easier than traditional website maintenance.

I have found a theme that I’m currently using for my store that makes a LOT of things much easier with customization (you can make your blog look just about anyway you want), SEO, etc. It’s called Atahualpa and you can download it here http://wordpress.bytesforall.com/. One of the many options is to choose pages the sidebars show up on! So easy I just haven’t gotten around to changing my blog theme yet though Atahualpa has an export settings function which in theory should make it a breeze!

Just curious…where did you read that the sidebar specifically is considered duplicate content by search engines?? Or that it’s considered content at all? I’ve never heard that.