WordPress & SEO

  • chronotron · Member ·

    Okay, I’m not really sure as to where to post this as it includes two parts which complement each other so I thought I’d better get it here.

    1) Does wordpress have some automatic SEO Magic? Cause most of my posts are automatically indexed by the BIG G. I’ve currently got 229 pages indexed in Google. site:http://chronontron.wordpress.com. Morover, for many premier terms @ Google, my blog manages to come in the first page and no wordpress blog has meta tags.. Surprising? And recently for the term “Gmail Chat”, my blog was the 3rd in Google until ofcoure news.com.com and all other biggies decided to post it. Has wordpress got some special SEO super optimizer or something. And the wp.com domain has a PR of only 6.

    2) To Complement the above and further increase the SEO’ing of WordPress, I request users should be given the choice to enter their own Meta Keywords and descriptions atleast for the main page.

    And for all posts, if there was something called “Tags” introduced, it can serve a dual purpose, for both TEchnorati Tags as well as for meta keywords, what’dya say?

  • drmike · Member ·

    Note that I’m not an SEO expert. I’ve had a lot of issues with Google and Yahoo in the past (ie 10k incorrect links for a website that Google got from somewhere. I still don’t know…)

    Google seems to have picked up on the blogs fairly quickly although MSN was a lot quicker. Here’s a tool that allows you to compare the different Google datacenters to see how well your site is indexed. (I’m ranging from 59 on the main servers to 216 on the backups.)

    Here’s another tool you can actually add to your site that shows your PR value. I have it on my blog.

    There’s a thread here (and I’m sure we’ve talked about it a couple of times) that mentions that Technorati will pick up on your Category tags. Technorati says that as well in (the unhelpful crap that they call) their help pages. You may want to claim your blog over at Technorati to make sure it’s being picked up. Mine is still listed as unclaimable, it is not being indexed by them, and they still won’t respond to emails.

    I’ve been thinking about doing up a SEO FAQ for both here and for my clients. I have a few clients who do SEO as a profession but I don’t totally agree with their *cough* methods.

    Easiest method to use here would be to have good categories for your posts and make sure that you’re using them. Remember, Google is also using pingomatic it appears.

    I’m sure it helps also that we’re using the rewrites. :)

    Hope this helps,
    -drmike

  • drmike · Member ·

    Heh heh heh.

    Although it is kind of fun seeing what Google send yours way sometimes.

    Google

  • donncha · Staff ·

    Yet another advantage of running a blog here instead of rolling your own is that wordpress.com already has a relatively good page rank. That pagerank is going to help get your blog to the top of Google searches.
    Unfortunately, the same pagerank benefits we enjoy is what attracts spammers and SEO people but we’re successfully fighting them off.

  • drmike · Member ·

    That pagerank is going to help get your blog to the top of Google searches.

    I’ll have to go bounce that off of my SEO clients but I could have sworn that machine names of domains didn’t benefit from the PR of the main domain, just that domain and it’s subpages.

    I’m kind of slammed so I can’t go looking for a link right now.

  • chronotron · Member ·

    Hmm…To be honest, I’m quite good in SEO myself though I wouldn’t claim to be an expert.

    Currently my PR is 0 and http://link:chronotron.wordpress.com shows nothing though I know there are around 50 – 60 pages that link to me.

    @Donncha, Nope. Subdomains have completely different PR from the main domains, but however the main domain does influence it’s appearence sometimes.

    And I haven’t got any reply as for my request for Meta tags.

  • matt · Staff ·

    We’re not going to support meta tags. No one important uses them anyways.

  • chronotron · Member ·

    Well, Meta tags would help WP Blogs more and come on, it’s not gonna give you guys much of a security error or something and what do you mean by no one IMPORTANT uses them. Let me show you a couple of links, view their source

    1) BoingBoing
    2) Gizmodo
    3) ProBlogger
    4) LifeHacker

    No one important still?

  • andy · Member ·

    Come on, post something worth linking to and you’ll earn a pagerank. Call me a purist but I don’t care for SEO tricks.

  • chronotron · Member ·

    Dr.Mike, I need you to support me here while I’m being crushed and I have 50 links from other blogs and 5-10 from decent sites and a 10 or so from Forums, from what I know.

  • drmike · Member ·

    No one important still?

    Matt means the major search engines no longer use them. ie: Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo.

    Call me a purist but I don’t care for SEO tricks.

    Ditto but there are a few things that I’ve been taught by SEO’ers that help in my line of business that I don’t consider tricks. Like an Archives page to make sure search engines see your entire website. :)

    I don’t see that as being sneaky.

    chronotron, please remember Google only updates PR’s every few months. It’ll take time for a PR to be generated. I’m still at a zero myself.

  • ehab · Member ·

    I have been worried about the fact that my PR is zero ! I have added the HTML code that allows my visitors ( and myself included ) to see the rank of my page. Just simple add it in a textbox, since WP supports HTML.

    However,upon a very little search on Google I have found a pretty decent plugin which would Generate a Google Map for your site so that the crawlers and bots have an easy time.

    Here is the link :
    http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

    As someone said earlier, that WP Bloggers should be allowed to use their own Meta tags and such, I think it would be a good idea as well.

    I will stick on to it. Oh good, now I can add a page to my blog, where I would keep the RSS for these pages :D — ( yea, i get lost easily :D )

  • drmike · Member ·

    Please do a search for Google sitemaps. This has been covered many times before. Also if you read Google’s own sitemap, you’ll note that they themselves don’t use them for the search engine spiders.

    Please note that that code you link to is for the regular version of WordPress, not the WordPress multiuser version we run here. There has been some testing on getting it to work on WPMU (mostly by myself) but it’s not perfect.

    Um, you’ve been here for a grand total of 1 day. It takes a couple of months to have a PR generated.

  • nosysnoop · Member ·

    I think you said too last time that the Google pagerank updates like every 3-4 months. Should be updating this summer again I think.

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