WordPress SEO Question
 

Hello,

I have a question for the SEO gurus out there that are familiar working with WordPress blogs. I use Permalinks.

If you have a WordPress blog, what is the optimal setting for the number of posts to show on a blog page?

I used to have this set to 20+. I found that many of my pages were getting indexed by their inclusion within the archives for that month. So when I had a page targeted for a specific keyword, Google would notice it on a page with 19 other posts, watering down the keyword effectiveness for that particular post.

When Google sees the same content in one post also appear on another page in your blog (for example, a monthly archive page), does it automatically ignore the post's individual URL? I read that Google will penalize a page if it has duplicate content as that on another page (presumably on another website). Does this also hold true for content within the same site?

Thanks for your help!

Regards,

Mike

ive also wondered about this..

I was just chatting about this yesterday. I think over 50 outgoing links is too much and about 20-25 is ideal. I also believe the links themselves are a factor. meaning if you link to low ranked web pages or even web pages not relevant to your genre then it will hurt you ranking.

we use 10-15 depending on the blog

I think you are losing perspective. Here's why.

The fundamental reason that blogs have gained a reputation for having an SE edge over other types of sites, is that genuine blogs tend to become much larger collections of text-based content, than other site formats.

In addition to scoring well for content volume, it is also natural for many blogs to evolve around a topic, albeit sometimes broad in scope. Thus without conscious effort on the part of the operators, they inevitably become rich in relevant keywords and phrases.

If the key factors are indeed content volume and site depth, then almost by definition, the impact of a single article on the SE score for a site is minimal. That is true both of its positive impact as well as any negative impact from considerations such as you mentioned.

Which is not to say that you cannot avoid those negatives, while at the same time reinforcing the positives: take a look at alistapart.com as an excellent example. Articles do not themselves appear on its main pages at all, instead you get a summary of what an article is about. Then you get the article itself. And on other pages you get article titles and/or brief excerpts.

This approach not only avoids duplication, but provides the opportunity for articles to be written naturally (making them generally better for their readers). They will include a random, although relevant collection of keywords and phrases and - although I doubt Jeffrey Zeldman bothers - a tighter keyword focus could be provided in the summaries. Probably the main advantage generally is that the summaries swell the content still further.

SEO nirvana is if your site is recognized as an authoritative source. There are many elements involved in that and only a relatively small number of sites achieve such status. But any movement you can make in that direction is a good thing and the key is not to try to fake the search engines out, but to actually try to make your site an authority on its topic from its visitors' perspective.

I don't pretend that a half-assed site cannot bump its SE score by using tricks. But unless the operator knows exactly what he or she is doing, such tricks are as likely to backfire as help. And if they work, we are still only talking about raising a poor or mediochre score a couple of points. For most people, it would be more certain and take no longer, to write two "natural" articles, than to labor over the SEO appeal of one. And your visitors, who after all are the people from whom you actually earn money, in most cases will respond better too.

Unless I misunderstood the original post in this thread, I'm not sure where linking comes into it. But I had to pick up on your post because it illustrates several common misunderstandings.

Popular, SE-strong blogs often do have blogrolls, list of links to other sites. But they are usually either credits (say for people who have contributed to the site) and/or links to sites which the site operator believes his audience will enjoy. Since they are "natural" links, they may enhance a site's appeal to its visitors, sufficient to outweigh their disadvantage as potential traffic leaks. In SEO terms, any direct advantage is almost entirely for the sites being linked to, not to the site doing the linking. However some of those links may (eventually) result in a link back and if any of those reciprocal links turn out to be from authoritative sites, the SE payoff can be major.

What the operators of commercial, especially get-rich-quick sites cannot stand, is that this natural cross linking is both slow and uncertain. Contextual cross-linking is more effective than lists of links, but either way, the concept of "throwing bread on the water" if you like, is of little appeal. Adult webmasters in particular want to be able to arrange formal link exchanges with other sites and hope this will be an effective shortcut.

Of course it rarely is. Not only are such links usually chosen on the basis of comparative traffic or PR, but the one thing you did get right is that they usually add too many links. Most sites do not have much authority in the first place. The more sites to which they link, the less value each link has.

I would guess that in SE terms, the vast majority of adult site link exchanges are a complete waste of time. Many probably do more harm than good and unless they can instead function as an advantageous or at least equitable way of exchanging traffic, sites would be better off without them.

So if I have a PR0 site, it doesn't benefit my rankings to exchange links with a PR5 site?

Even if we were discussing one inbound link on one site, there isn't an automatic benefit based solely on relative PR. And although from the very narrow perspective posed in your question, such a link would likely be more good than bad, any advantage would be very small: only one of many factors which determine the site's SE placings.

In the real world, what we see more commonly are lists which sometimes run to dozens of reciprocal links. Even if everyone involved has taken care over their choice of links (unlikely since most such exchanges happen when someone promotes them), the biggest flaw in non-natural linking is that it can easily be identified as such. When it is so identified, about the best you can hope is that you aren't actually penalized.

I set it to about 10 myself

I have to apologize in advance because I know very little about SEO but it fascinates the hell out of me. If non-natural linking is two sites that exchange reciprocal links, what would be considered natural linking? When you say natural linking do you mean a reciprocal link to a site that has a similar theme, content, or basis as your's?

no, he meant organic linking, not reciprocal. It's not the same to have somewhere inside your site post to interesting site that will surfer find useful and later to get back link from that site because you showed your respect to it and actually linked it from your site, than to have classic spammy looking crappy link in your sidebar among zillions of other crappy and spammy links that hold 0 value and actually just can harm your site more than to help it obtain good SERPS! That's what it is all about!

I always suggest my clients to not focus on getting links (reciprocals, not to mention paid links) but instead write unique and original content that will result in getting NATURALLY your links from other sites which respect your site and find it useful for their visitors. Me, myself have only very few links in my blogroll and that's only links to authority sites that I know my surfers will like, not just have them as links (and hope to get ses love cuz of that).

If you want more to know about this stuff....feel free to icq me: 944-320-46 . I am doing consulting work for responsible prices ;)

beta-tester got the theory right, so I shall try to come up with an example.

Let's say I have a blog about music. Whether my site is commercial in intent or not, I work hard to provide my visitors with something they will read and want to come back to read some more. Along the way, without a thought about search engines, I'm going to mention records, artists, tours, t-shirts, you name it... all kinds of things related to my topic. And I'm going to link to a bunch of other sites in the process: it's the equivalent of you telling a friend you went to a great restaurant last week, which he should try sometime. You give him the name and address, not just leave him hanging :)

Somewhere down the line, other site owners visit my site. A few of them like it. A few of those who do, in the same way I mentioned and linked to other resources, will mention and link back to me. And if I am really lucky, some of those who do will be owners of authoritative sites. That will help my site to be eventually recognized by the SE's as an authoritative site in its own right.

That is natural (or if you prefer, organic) linking. No-one has sat down to consider relevancy or any of the other factors which concern people who are trying to manipulate the engines. In fact if my site made the news because of its visitor count, or because I was making a ton of money from it, I could - for example - get natural links back from news sites or sites focused on the internet. But as in life away from the internet, all such references would build my credibility, not only with surfers, but also with the search engines.

This process is obviously hit and miss, often a long one, and since the number of authoritative sites is much smaller than the number of wannabes, there are far more losers than winners. Its biggest plus for many, is simply that linking in this way is never damaging.

Trying to manipulate search engines on the other hand, while not impossible, is not something to take lightly. Their programmers know all the tricks and while their algorithms may lag behind the most sophisticated black-hatters, they learned how to spot things such as big lists of reciprocal links (even if "cunningly" disguised by being a-b-c links) long ago. It's willfully naive to pretend otherwise, no matter how frustrating the alternatives.

This blog in question has a limited number of links to other sites. What I'm most curious about is how to get the individual post's URL indexed most efficiently. I often find that Google will index the post's content as it was included in the index page or on an archive page, but not the individual URL that displays only that specific post all the time.

What I see is that a post will get indexed first as it is included here:

http://sitename.com/
and then
http://sitename.com/2007/02
and then if I'm lucky, the actual post itself will get indexed:
http://sitename.com/just-one-single-post/

I wondered if cutting down the display setting of only 1 blog post at a time would be more beneficial.

Time is spent on some posts to make them more relevant in the search engines, and I see them appear on the index or archive page, but often google never indexes the individual post url of http://sitename.com/just-one-single-post/.

15-20 works for me :)

good discussion in this thread :)

thanks guys

/%category%/%postname%.html

This permalink setting works very nicely in WP, even though very little people use it.

probably because most people chose one of the few pre-set formats that are available...

You sound like Google's Webmaster Guidelines ... or worse, Matt or Adam spouting of on a blog to whitehat/newbies!
:winkwink:

Seriously, though, if you are in any competitive industry, esp. the no-nos like porn, gambling, meds, then good luck getting "natural" links from other sites (read: competitors -- what else is there?).

As for the original question, I've varied this to test myself and nothing concrete, but if you're blog's home page has some PR and your posts aren't all duplicates (cookie cutter) then I'd say go for 20 or so. Then watch Google and see if/how many of the post pages end up in supplementals and tweak accordingly.

Some people say maximum is 100 links but there is rule where maxium is top 10 links,but you can still try both to see what kind of results will be.

Watch out using %category% if you're one of those "100 posts a day" blogs - it may hurt you esp. in the context of this thread .... if you have 100 posts in your nav all pointing to /big-tit-breasted-boobs/%postname%.html... quite likely will end up looking spammy to Google.

Better if you mix up your categories or write *real* posts - not cookie-cutter, sponsor-provided, keyword-dense shiite.

I'm currently using:

/%postname%/


For a long time I used the WordPress default. Then I changed to the above file name structure.

This appears to work well, I went from a #30+ listing to a #6 for my keyword. I further optimized the page and hope to get it even higher.

I do write real posts on my blog; but I try to theme each post around a keyword or theme so that it is relevant to the surfer that finds that page. So the page is not spammy, I'm just trying to maximize the effectiveness of my blog.

How long did it take to notice the changes?

It took about two weeks, maybe less. I still have one more change that I'm waiting for. I removed one word from the post slug so it is 3 words instead of 4, I'm looking forward to see how much better the shorter slug will do when it gets indexed.

I hated losing some SE traffic to my 404 page while I redid the structure, but it was not practical to have the date in every URL when it has nothing to do with the post.

The question now is wether to go from 1 blog post per page to 10, 15, 20, or ??

I would never change the permalink setup for an existing blog, especially when you already have good rankings for your kws.

I hated making the change. But I decided, do I want to go another 2 years with URLs that are at a disadvantage, or do I clean house now and put my best foot forward from here on out? If I had some good rankings, I likely wouldn't have made the change.

Good question, I'm wondering the same, I know slow loading pages will effect your ranking as well.

yeah, especially from "authority sites"?! jayeff, how many porn authority sites are there out there?

Take a look at some blogs that rank well in google.

One solution I'm trying is the related posts plugin. We'll see how this helps certain individual posts get indexed.

Now this is good shit here. Thank you.
Bump for this thread.

I just had another page reindexed as /%postname%/, it did much better this way without the date in the URL.

Yeh I have it bookmarked.

I don't claim to be any kind of SEO expert, but I do one post per page. The plugin I use to make that happen is called Custom Query String. :)

Thanks Selena, I will check it out.

Most welcome. :)

The plugin has a little quirk in it. If you decide to use it, hit me up and I will try to remember what it is. I can also show you an example link.

Selena, one post on main page?

It is logical to have one post on its own single post page ;)

don't get ya...

great discussion! I don't really have much to add other than to read this if you are just getting started with blog optimization.. (taken from top rank blog. com)

Consider keywords when writing your blog post titles. Some blog software allows plugins that can suggest keywords. Otherwise, you can use Google Suggest or one of these free keyword suggestion tools: Digital Point, SEO Book or Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Keywords should NOT determine your content (unless it’s an AdSense blog).
Optimize the template. Make sure post titles appear in the title tag and append the title tag (hard code) with the most important phrase for your blog.

Example: ” Interview with Brett Tabke - Online Marketing Blog“
Online Marketing Blog is included on every blog post title tag automatically.

Also use the blog post title as the permalink. If you’re using keywords in the blog post title, then they will occur as anchor text in the permanent post link. While you’re at it, just make the post title a permalink.

I don't know that it's logical, I just know that is how I do it. ;)

How many hits a day would you say is a good amount from Search Engines anyway? 1,000?