Fine Tuning Your Wordpress Blog For SEO?

[flexnds]

I'm starting this thread to discuss more in depth on fine tuning your wordpress blog for SEO. Not to just mention what plugins you use, but also to discuss settings on those plugins and what works best for you.

Example topics

Tag archives: ********, noindex?
Category archives: ********, noindex?
In your experience what ranks better and gets more traffic on the above mentioned? Do you allow google to index your tag archives?

How do you set up your .htaccess? What do you find are the best settings for your .htaccess?

 

[masteraffmarket]

well your smart... I'll give you that

 

[roberteb]

I don't bother changing the defaults I let google index everything including tags and catagories. Since I've started doing that I've not noticed any adverse effects except sometimes a tag page will rank much better than the original post.

 

[flexnds]

Ya, I agree. Though, I tend to use 8 to 12 tags per post and running experiments recently i've noticed a lot of bloat. For example: my 100 page website shows as 406 pages indexed in G. However, running a site:domain . com search many of those results get omitted from the results anyhow meaning, allowing G to index those tag archives is causing a lot of on site duplicate content. I would think this goes for the same with category archives.

So why is this important? Well, we write posts around a specific keyword and then build backlinks to those posts with that keyword as anchor text. So, we would be linking to the post permalink and not the tag archive permalink that G is preferring to rank while omitting your actual post from results. I would think this could cause your link building strategies some problem.

 

[roberteb]

Ya, I agree. Though, I tend to use 8 to 12 tags per post and running experiments recently i've noticed a lot of bloat. For example: my 100 page website shows as 406 pages indexed in G. However, running a site:domain . com search many of those results get omitted from the results anyhow meaning, allowing G to index those tag archives is causing a lot of on site duplicate content. I would think this goes for the same with category archives.

So why is this important? Well, we write posts around a specific keyword and then build backlinks to those posts with that keyword as anchor text. So, we would be linking to the post permalink and not the tag archive permalink that G is preferring to rank while omitting your actual post from results. I would think this could cause your link building strategies some problem.

I don't believe the tag pages cause a duplicate content problem. For one I only use a maximum of four tags and second the tag pages are excerpts of all the posts containing the tag. I don't notice my pages not being indexed in favour of the tag page. I do however always backlink my posts whereas I don't backlink my tag pages.

 

[flexnds]

So, if G has indexed the tag archive and prefers it and ranks it over the original post and or omits the original post from results, then that could hurt our back linking efforts to the respective post we are back linking to in an effort to get it to rank for the specific keyword phrase.

 

[roberteb]

True but it doesn't tend to happen. So long as I send a few links to the post it always outranks the tag page. What can happen though is a tag page gets ranked for some long tail keyword I hadn't specifically targeted. If it gets a decent amount of traffic I'll send some links with the long tail anchor text to a suitable post and the problem goes away (it's a very small problem and I usually ignore it anyway)