EzSEO Newsletter # 274

In this issue:

1. Duplicate Content on WordPress Blogs

2. Market Samurai PBR

3. Using Firebug to troubleshoot designs

Hi Again

Hope you have had a good week.  We have had a storm this week and so Mount Teide is covered in Snow.  I suspect it won’t last long because its warm and sunny today. 

Let’s get on..

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1. Duplicate Content on WordPress Blogs
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WordPress users:  I am sure you know that WordPress creates a lot of different "pages" on your site, rehashing the posts that you make.

A post could end up in its entirety on the post page, the homepage, an author page, multiple tags pages, archive pages etc.  That mean the same article can appear many many times on your WordPress site.

You have probably been told that it doesn’t matter because Google knows all about this and your site won’t get penalised.  That may be very true, but have you considered that if you leave all this duplicate content on your site, Google will decide which of the pages the article appears on is important.  Maybe you want the post page to be the main one for that content, but Google decides that the tag page is better.  Where does that leave you and your attempts to optimize and monetise your WordPress site?

While there may be WordPress plugins and even special links to help sort out this mess, I am a big fan of trying to reduce the duplicate content at the outset – by editing the template files.

A couple of tips:

1. Always include an excerpt with your posts.  This excerpt can then be used for post descriptions instead of the first visible text of your post.

2. On tag pages, author pages etc, don’t show the full post – show the excerpt instead.  This is fairly easy in most themes because you just look for the code that is printing the entire post, and change the_content for the_excerpt. 

From:

To:

Then the template will draw the descriptions from the exceprt you have written (if you have one), or the top visible text on your post.

This week I have been looking in more detail at a site that did not include excerpts with each post.  The big problem was that without the excerpts, WordPress was grabbing the top content from the post.  In this case, a number of the posts only had a single paragraph at the top, followed by Javascript to insert the advert.  A large chunk of the top paragraph was being taken for the excerpt (because there was no excerpt explicitly written for the posts), and being published on tag pages, creating a lot of duplicate content.  If I was Google, I would probably ignore the post "pages" and rank the tag pages higher, since they have more content (that is all relevant by nature of the way Tag pages are created).

Whenever you build a WordPress site, I advise that you take the issue of duplicate content seriously.  Sort out the template pages that want to repost the entire post on multiple pages (NOTE: You can even remove the description/excerpt if you want and just show post titles), and create excerpts for every post. 

After a new site of mine is indexed, I like to search for text from one of the posts, and see how many pages on my site include that same text.  I can then determine if there are any remaining duplicate issues, and hack the relevant templates.

e.g. On my bloodsugardiabetic.com site (that was built in my WordPress for Affiliate Sites Course), if you take a sentence from a post and search in quotes at Google, you should hopefully only find one copy of that text in Google.

However, that’s not to say you wont have any duplicate content, because the excerpts you add to your posts will popup on multiple pages. 

That’s not so bad though, as its only a sentence or two, not the full blown article, therefore only a tiny part of the content on any page is duplciated.  To see what I mean, do a Google search for the first sentence of my Sugar Spike article:

"When you eat food, the carbohydrates are digested into simple sugars and absorbed into your blood through your intestinal walls."

You should only see my diabetes sugar spike article listed in Google.

However, search for the excerpt I typed in for that post, and you’ll see that sentence replicated several times on the site:

Since this tiny bit of duplication is such a small part of the overall content on these pages, I haven?t noticed any real problems.

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2. Market Samurai PBR
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PBR is a metric provided by Market Samurai which is extremely useful in helping you decide which phrases you want to target on your site.  Whether you have Market Samurai or not, I suggest you watch the video I created here:

Market Samurai PBR

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3. Using Firebug to troubleshoot designs
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In the last newsletter I mentioned a cool Firefox add-on called Firebug.  I have had a few questions about this plugin, so I recorded a short video to highlight why I love Firebug, and how I use it to help me change my website templates and debug my code.

Well, that’s it for this issue.  If you want to ask a question or have a comment about anything in this newsletter, please leave a comment at the end of this newsletter. 

Have a great week!

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The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2010 Andrew Williams.  If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.

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