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.
- 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.
- 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/$1 [R=301,L]
- Add disallow /feed/ in the robots.txt
Disallow: /feed/
- Use <!–more–> tag to avoid duplicated content
- Add noindex robot and googlebot meta tag to archive, page # to avoid index the duplicated content. Add the following lines in the header.php template file in the theme.
<?php
if((is_home() && ($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 …
Awesome! I have been very lazy about updating my robots.txt, but your steps are so simple, I’ll just do what you did!
Thanks for coming. I hope you find my blog useful. I pretty much records everything I did, in case I will forget in the future.
I have changed my WordPress many times. I always forgot what I did.
here are some more tips. use your googlewebmaster account to enable www. or without www indexing for google bots. instead of using the more tag why don’t you just use the_excerpt function on your index.php and archive.php and use the_content function only on your single.php and page.php template files. if you do that then you don’t need to do step 5
Thanks Arpit!
Yes. I, indeed, use GoogleWebmaster tools for all my web sites. I have implemented the_excerpt Reloaded. Now it shows the excerpt. I heard some negative feedback about the excerpt a while back. So I was not very sure if I want to do it. Some people prefer to keep read in the home page so they don’t need to click away and read the details. However, some people like people to read detail while gain more page clicks.
I still use the meta tag check for archive page to not index the content, because I found there are huge chance the content look duplicated in archive page and category pages.
Again, I am learning new stuff everyday. That’s awesome.
Hey Terence .. stumbled on your blog while googling for ideas to optimize my blog.
WOW!! I am newbie.. wondering how can i further optimize my blog? Can u make the above in more lay man’s language? Or have u posted up anything simpler for newbies?
Tks ..
Terence, I think you have covered the basics. This (not mine) might be worth checking out: http://www.sizlopedia.com/2007/08/21/wordpress-search-engine-optimization-seo-plugins/
@Steve:
Thank you for the great list!