Hi Mike

I can hardly thank you enough for all this advice and support.

I am [slowly] beginning to see what's required.

There's one outstanding question in my mind - that is, how and where to
implement the 'follow, no index' instruction

But I will downloaded Joost's SEO software - maybe the answer will be
apparent to me there

Fingers crossed. I'll let you know how I get on

See you next Wednesday by the way

Keep a Q + A slot open for me just in case J

Cheers

Roy

From: manchester-wordpress-user-group@googlegroups.com
[mailto:manchester-wordpress-user-group@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mike
Little
Sent: 12 October 2012 10:57
To: manchester-wordpress-user-group@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MWUG] Re: Query on new/existing posts strategy

On 11 October 2012 18:05, Roy <r...@mantex.co.uk> wrote:

Thanks for the further support Mike

There's some of  this stuff I don't quite understand (quite a bit in fact)

Google does have the page indexed, see here:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:mantex.co.uk+%22How+to+edit+yo...
ing%22

But as you have discovered it doesn't seem to rank very highly.

In fact Google has 3,790 pages indexed from your site
(https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:mantex.co.uk)

But my site only has about 1,400 posts plus about 150 pages - so do I take
it that the other stuff is 'archives' ?

And are the archives pages that I have changed or deleted or somehow left
around from the past ?

The archive pages are automatically provided by WordPress, they are not real
pages but are dynamically generated just like the front page of a blog.

Are they of any use? And how would I get rid of them?

They are of great use, both to your readers and the search engines, however,
read on.  

WordPress provides a way to browse the posts on your site in chronological
order, by date, by category, by tag, and by author.

Let's say you have a post (My Fantastic Article) created a few weeks ago,
with a category (Cat1) and three tags (Tag1, Tag2, Tag3) assigned. That post
could be found on the following urls:

http://yourdomain.com/2012/09/28/my-fantastic-post/  (this is it's permalink
or canonical link - the one true url)

http://yourdomain.com/page/2 (the second page of your blog)

http://yourdomain.com/2012/09/28 (A date archive, but only if you posted
more than one post on the same day)

http://yourdomain.com/2012/09/ (another date archive)

http://yourdomain.com/2012/ (ditto)

http://yourdomain.com/category/cat1 (a category archive - one of these for
each category assigned)

http://yourdomain.com/tag/tag1 (a tag archive)

http://yourdomain.com/tag/tag2/page/2

http://yourdomain.com/tag/tag3

http://yourdomain.com/author/roy (an author archive)

It can also be found on feeds for most of those URLs (I suspect Google
sometimes indexes feeds too). And even on your search result pages too
http://yourdomain.com/?s=fantastic. (Though WordPress will never
automatically generate search links.)

Now, all this great. Honestly! For your readers and for Google. Your reader
has many, many ways of discovering your content. So too does Google and all
the other crawlers.

The key difference is that Google will see lots of duplicate content (at
least 10 copies just for one category and three tags), so the important
thing is to tell Google to follow the links on all those pages (which will
take it to the one true URL), but not index the archive pages themselves.
Hence "follow, no-index".

The goal is to have Google index each post, each page, and your home page
(1400+150+1) and nothing else. But to follow the links on all those archive
pages to make sure it finds every bit of your content.

That's probably way too many. By the time you get to page 61 of those
results you start seeing archive pages like this
http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/page/54/ That are ranking above other pages
like this
http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/08/09/the-awakening-and-other-stories/ you
definitely don't want that.

I certainly don't want pages competing against each other - I know enough to
realise that duplicate content is a No-No

Hopefully my explanation above will have explained how to sort that out.

And I have noticed that sometimes Google lists zip files in its search
results from my site - how on earth do those get there?

Just like other content, the names of the zip files, the words used in the
links to them all contribute to Googles understanding of what a thing is on
the web. The same is true for images and videos, documents and spreadsheets.
Of course these days, Google can also look at the contents of documents
(especially PDFs) and spreadsheets (and images a little)

I'd take some of Joost de Valk's advice and "follow, no index" all your
archives using his WordPress SEO plugin.

At the moment I have got these two plugins - AOF SEO Site Verifier and All
in One SEO Pack

If I install Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin, will  that cause any conflicts or
clashes?

And if you do advise me to install Joost's plugin, is it OK to de-activate
either of the other two

I would definitely recommend Joost's SEO plugin over all others. It does
have an importer for your All in One settings, so it should help you get
started with it straight away.

I don't think there's any bigger endorsement of Joost's plugin than the fact
that Woothemes are deprecating their own built in SEO functionality and
recommending Joost's plugin. That's a multi million dollar company saying
this one guy does SEO better than we do, use him! StudioPress do the same
thing.

Yoast plugin will provide the functionality of both the plugins you mention
and create XML sitemaps too.

Do you have Google Webmaster tools? That will tell you what Google thinks of
your site in terms of keywords. It will also tell you about how many
impressions pages on your site get in SERPs

Yes - I've got Webmaster Tools, but the problem (link with some of the stuff
above) is that I am not sure how to interpret the information supplied

Could this be a 'suitable case study for treatment' ?

That's an idea.

PS with paged comments and hierarchical categories, there are even more urls
that will show the same content!

Mike

--
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/

--
See the group blog at http://mwug.info

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