Jun 05 2007
Blog Tweaking
Most of today was spent tweaking some elements of my blog. As per my own advice, and some fresh discussion on that post), I thought it was time to follow-up how my blog was looking according to Google. It seems “supplemental results” are a concern – although the jury is out as to how much of a negative impact on your search engine ranking this actually has.
To check how Google sees your “supplemental results” you can do a modified site search – for me this is
It appears that out of 357 results, 274 are “supplemental”. As I haven’t been blogging all that long I have less than 150 posts, so I’d hope to have around that many that weren’t supplemental. The maths works out to 83. Of course this could also have something to do with the new blog having no PageRank.
Advice ranges from special plugins, a ten step plan, tweaking your robots.text file, creating a Google sitemap, to altering your header template. I’m hoping it’s not that involved!
As a first step, I’ve altered my archive.php to change the word “the_content” to read “the_excerpt”. The effect of this is that now my archives and categories only list excerpts rather than the full post. I’ll know in a couple of days if this has helped.
The other thing working against me is that I have 100+ posts on this blog, that were originally on my old (WordPress.com) blog. So I’ve painstakingly gone through and stripped down quite a few of the old posts to just the first paragraph or two with a “continued LinkToThePostOnThisBlog” at the end. It’s quite conceivable that Google thinks the post here is a duplicate of my old blog (grr a redirect would have been so much nicer).
My old blog is still getting between 50-200 visits a day, from old links, comments, trackbacks, search engine results and blogrolls which haven’t been updated with the new URL. Conceivably without the content, they’ll lose their place in the SERPs, but so be it.
Another thing I did was went through all the posts now on this blog, and updated all my references to earlier posts (my internal links) to make sure they are all pointing to this domain (sorry if anyone got pinged with a trackback from a really old post).
Anybody got any words of wisdom?
8 Responses to “Blog Tweaking”
Meg,
You don’t have description meta tags defined for your posts. I would use a plugin so that you can add them. I think it will have a bearing on the supplemental problem although as you’ve already found out there are a multitude of opinions on this. Even if you don’t do it to solve the supplemental problem it’s good to define meaningful descriptiona met tags as they often show up as the snippet in the search results.
I use “Another WordPress Meta Plugin” but it’s not the only one.
Email me if you need any more info.
Cheers, Christine
Hi Christine,
Many thanks for that advice. I just had a look at your article on the subject of Google Supplemental Index – some good tips.
Gee there’s so many bits to getting it right!
quote “It appears that out of 357 results, 274 are “supplemental”. As I haven’t been blogging all that long I have less than 150 posts, so I’d hope to have around that many that weren’t supplemental. The maths works out to 83. Of course this could also have something to do with the new blog having no PageRank.”
Hi Meg, You answered your own question right there! Get rid of all the dupe content via robots.txt (never leave a SE to guess what and where your real content is) and get some good authority links. You where using expcerts a while ago when I looked, going back to that’s a good thing. Your blogs fairly new so don’t be over concerned.
This video may help: http://www.wolf-howl.com/video/make-wordpress-search-engine-friendly/
Hi Rod
Thanks for your input. I did watch that video a couple of months ago, but it wasn’t all that relevant to me then (on the WP domain), so I really must revisit it for some fresh ideas.
Will look at the robots.txt too.
Actually, your not using excerpts, sorry! In your category pages full posts are displayed, an easy way around this is to use the ‘More” link.
Rod
Are you sure? They were excerpts yesterday.
Your right, under the archives it shows excerpts. It’s a little different to how I set things up in relation to url structure and categories – got me a little confused!
Phew!