Well. I should have done this earlier. After switching from my old hosting company to the new one at ANHosting.com. I have upgraded my blog from WordPress 2.0 to WordPress 2.2 from scratch. I have decided to change my layout to a simpler and lighter color theme. I have also tried to import my blog entries from my secondary blog site from blogger.com.

What was happening in the pass few weeks just shock me the big time. 50% of my previous blog entries are all in the Google’s supplemental index. Even my about pages, which used to have page ranking 3. It was cached with old dark theme. Nothing has changed since I switch from dark them to lighter theme, except few new WordPress plug-in to enhance my meta tags and to add related posts. What the heck was going on with my blog?

I should remember to optimize my blog when I changed the theme. Now I have to recover all of the damage I have caused. Fortunately, this is just my not-so-popular personal blog. Not many people care about who I am anyway. Now work has to be done.

  1. Customize meta tag for keywords and description from now on for every post. Start getting used to with Windows Live Writer, I will just post the draft to the server and edit the keywords and description online.
  2. Add 301 redirect to .htaccess to avoid none www.terencechang.com domain. Add the following lines into .htaccess should take care of it.RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.terencechang\.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$     http://www.terencechang.com/$1 [R=301,L]
  3. Add disallow /feed/ in the robots.txt
    Disallow: /feed/
  4. Use <!–more–> tag to avoid duplicated content
  5. Add noindex robot and googlebot meta tag to archive, page # to avoid index the duplicated content. Add the following lines in the header.php template file in the theme.
    <?php
    if((is_home() && ($paged < 2 )) || is_single() || is_page() || is_category()) { ?>
    <meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, noarchive” />
    <meta name=”googlebot” content=”index, follow, noarchive” />
    <?php } else { ?>
    <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow, noarchive” />
    <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex, follow, noarchive” />
    <?php } ?>

I should see the improvement in the Google search engine in few weeks. Maybe it will take a year to remove some of my pages from Google’s Index hell, but that is at least better than stay there forever.

For the past few months, I have learned a lot about Internet marketing and search engine optimization. I thought I already know so many tips and tricks and have done everything I supposed to do. There is always something that I forgot to do. Shame on myself as web developer for so long …

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