The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

This is Part 4 of my field test of the Blogger’s Guide to SEO. During this series, I’ll be starting at the beginning of this guide and working my way down, trying out the advice (or noting why I’m not going to). In the end, my hope is to wind up with a more optimized blog while demonstrating the why’s and how’s of blog SEO.

The primary issue this chapter seeks to resolve is a problem known as duplicate content. (Click here for a concise but detailed overview of duplicate content and some basic how-not-to advice from the Googlplex itself.) Basically, duplicate content is when you have the same content on several different pages, and it can seriously affect your Google ratings and how your pages are indexed by said web overlords. Why? Because Google ranks unique, original content higher than stuff that’s repeated all over the place.

The problems is, Google hasn’t really managed to adjust their algorithm to account for the nature of blogging platforms. Why is blogging an issue? Because every time you post, you’re creating several pages of duplicate content - each post that shows up on your main blog index page is duplicated in the individual post’s permalink page and any category page the post falls into, as well as tag pages, archives and so on. Use a lot of tags and categories, and that can add up to dozens of pages of the same content.

And unless you know the steps to take to prevent this from being an issue, it can result in your posts being dunned as duplicate content and getting locked away forever as supplemental results.

Advice: The BGTSEO offers several options for protecting your blog from suffering from duplicate content issues and winding up in supplemental results hell, along with other ways to structure your site to improve visitor usability.

First of all, they suggest grouping your best content together where it’s easy for your audience to find. These posts are often referred to as “flagship content” or “best-of content.” Secondly, they offer a video on the dangers of duplicate content and some tips for avoiding it. Next up are some tips on how to create SEO-friendly category headings and tags, a quick section on such reader-friendly tweaks as “Related Posts” plugins and the “Next/Previous” links that many templates create and a note about the importance of proper blog headline displays and a few links to plugins that can help with this.

Monkey Status: As I noted last Monday, this is a big chapter, at least in terms of actually doing things to my site rather than just tweaking some habits. As a matter of fact, I just checked my supplemental results on this Supplemental Index Ratio Calculator and found that out of 212 pages available here on the OGM, a whopping 184 of them are listed as being in supplemental results purgatory. Not good. But not unusual either, given that a basic, un-SEO-tweaked blog is basically a duplicate content, and thus supplemental results, generator.

So I spent the last week putting some duplicate content SEO mojo into the backend of this blog, like a robots.txt file that will block indexing of major duplicate content trouble spots, a few plug-ins to help tweak out things like page titles and meta descriptions, and am considering some other, more visible options as well.

Comments: Getting your blog structured and tweaked to improve reader usability and to avoid being penalized for duplicate content is a big deal. Without such hacks, you’re losing page rank and search engine visibility with every post. But the reverse is also true - with a few simple tricks, you can reverse sliding page rank, boost your search engine results and rescue your precious content from the clutches of the supplemental results bin .Specifics, how-to’s and resource links are available after the jump.

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

Blogs are a wonderful platform for self-publication. They’re dead easy to set up, use and share. Unfortunately, some of the things that make blogs great - sorting by categories and tags, easily searchable archives, individual post pages - also make them a target for duplicate content penalties. But there are a few ways to prevent your content from falling afoul of the wrath of Google.

1. Create a Robots.txt file: First and foremost, you need a comprehensive robots.txt file. This is by far the easiest and best way to stop the prospect of duplicate content in it’s tracks.

A robots.txt file is simply a document that tells search engines which pages on your site are okay to index and which are not, and which pages to follow links from, or not, and any combination thereof.

You can check out this page for more in-depth information on robots.txt file, but all you really need to know is this: open your favorite .txt editor (like Notepad), copy in the requisite commands, save it as “robots.txt” (use lower case only) and upload it to the directory (folder) on your hosting site where your blog resides (usually, but not always, the top level directory).

Here’s what I have in mine (if you’re using Wordpress, you can just copy-paste this if you like):

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments/feed
Disallow: /feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/trackback/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/*/*/trackback/$

These commands tell the Googlebots and other search engine robots to not index any pages that are created as a result of admin pages (the “wp-” command: this wordpress-specific - if you’re on another blogging platform, you’ll have to find your own version of this), search pages, tag pages, comment pages, feeds, and trackbacks.

If you want to disallow indexing of category pages and static pages (about, etc) just tuck these in there somewhere:

Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /pages/

I’m disallowing these through a plug-in called Duplicate Content Cure, so I didn’t bother to add them to my robots.txt file.

Please note that my robots.txt file is specific to my current needs. Your mileage may vary, and some options will depend on your specific set up. However, except for the “wp-” line, this setup is a reasonable start for most blogs. You can Google “robots.txt” for tons of ideas for what to put in yours.

2. Optimize your meta descriptions. Whenever you Google something, there’s usually some snippet of content under the main link that tells you what’s on the page. If not managed correctly, that snippet can wind up being something unhelpful (like a random sampling of the first bunch of links, or a snippet that doesn’t actually tell you anything about what’s on the page) or even totally baffling (weird code failures and whatnot).

Optimizing this content is a must for making sure that search results are both clear and relevant, which increases click-throughs. Again, the Google Webmaster blog has some very good information on how to makeover your meta descriptions and otherwise pimp out your meta data.

Wordpress bloggers (like me) can simply install Head Meta Description, which creates summary excerpts of my pages based on the content of the post (or you can create custom summaries on the fly, if you want) that will display in the search engine results for those pages. Installing this plugin means that, as long as my posts start out with relevant info (or I add a custom summary to the post), my search results will include useful info that will hopefully encourage readers to click through (and, not incidentally, include keywords that could help me rank higher on the search engines).

3. Tweak those titles! If you look up at the top of your browser, you’ll see the title of this post followed by the blog title. It wasn’t always so. Before I installed SEO Title Tag, it was the other way around. This little gem tweaks my title tags for maximum SEO brownie points. I can set it to do a variety of fancy title footwork, such as tweaking individual page titles to include keywords and other relevant info without affecting the actual title of the post, or just cover the basics.

This means that the relevant info - the title of my post, not the name of my blog - is the most visible part of the search result. It may seem fiddly, but it’s really very important to maximizing those brief seconds of exposure you have before a searcher decides which search result to click on.

This is easy for those of us using Wordpress (shameless plug). For other blogging platforms, you’ll have to do a bit of research to figure out how to do this with your blog. Simply Google “change page title” and your blogging platform. There’s also a link on how to optimize page titles at the Google Webmaster site.

Another possible option for Wordpress users is to download the All in One SEO Pack, which bundles a lot of the above options into one plugin.

4. Use 301 redirects. Less a duplicate content issue than an SEO one, but every time you change a page’s url you should use 301 redirects to send folks clicking the old address to the new one. I did this by installing the Redirection plugin. This makes redirecting readers as simple as inputting the old url and the new one into a simple form and clicking a button. Without it, anytime you changed a category title or post slug, you’d either wind up with lots of folks getting dead end “404″ pages, or you have to go in and edit your htaccess file manually every time. Yuck. Again, Googling your own platform and “301 redirect” should guide you in setting this up for yourself.

5. Use excerpts only on the front page. This is something I’m still working on. The idea is that if your front page only has excerpts, rather than the full content (usually achieved by putting the bulk of the content behind a “more” tag), then you’re not duplicating the content found in the individual post page (the permalink).

There are pros and cons to doing this. On the one hand, it makes scanning the front page for interesting and relevant content easier, since it’s just a listing of headlines and excerpts. And it avoids creating duplicate content.

OTOH, some readers prefer not having to click through a link just to read the article (it’s one more step). Also, if you use the “more” tag, RSS readers are only going to get those front page excerpts as well, which some people find annoying (they’d prefer to read the entire article in their reader rather than having to come to the blog).

So I’m still looking at this. But I’m leaning heavily in favor of a hybrid sort of option that involves both excerpting and summary writing. Here’s my thinking:

Aside from the duplicate content thing, creating excerpts does make the front page easier to scan. And while reading through the full posts without clicking through is probably the optimal setting for a personal or narrative blog, on a business and marketing blog such as this I’m guessing that the majority of people would rather be able to scan for relevant topics without having to scroll through all the stuff in between.

Also, the Meta Head Description plugin is set to make the first 20 words (or whatever I set it at) of my post my snippet of text that gets represented under my links on the search engines. But even with the most concise and front-loaded writing, that’s going to mean a partial snippet that may not capture the full essence of the piece. So to be most effective, I would have to write a short summary for each post and put it into the application - not onerous by any means, but it’s a few extra steps.

To solve both of these issues, what I’m thinking about doing is writing my posts, then going back to the top of the page and writing a short summary within the body of the post and tucking the actual article itself behind the “more” tag. This will mean that when you come to the site or download my feed, instead of a page full of posts you’ll see a list of headlines followed by brief summaries. This way I’ll eliminate at least one source of duplicate content, the front page of the blog will be clean, tidy and very scannable, blog visitors and RSS readers alike will be able to tell at a glance whether the topic is of interest to them and it will result in complete, inclusive meta descriptions without me having to go through a handful of extra steps to include them.

I think I’ll go ahead and give this a try, and see what happens. In the meantime, if any of you readers have an opinion one way or the other, I’d love to hear it.

Improving Reader Experience

The BGTSEO offers a few notes on improving readership usability as well as your SEO in this section, as I mentioned. The first suggestion is to lump your best stuff together in one spot. For my part, I haven’t gotten around to creating a hard and fast set of flagship content yet (I know, I know - cobbler’s kids, bare feet, you know the spiel), but as soon as I do, I’ll be creating a page specifically for this.

Another suggestion they offer is to use keywords in your categories. Taking a look over my categories turned up a few that were barely being used (or not used at all), that weren’t keyword optimal and a few that needed to be merged. So I’ve changed a few of the category titles (don’t worry, I used the redirect plugin, so you shouldn’t have any problems) and eliminated a few. In case you had bookmarks set, here’s the rundown:

• Deleted “permission marketing” and “conversation marketing” (all posts originally appearing in these categories are now under “conversation economy”)
• Changed “advertising” to “advertising and marketing”
• Changed “ethics and marketing” to “ethics and business”

And of course, I’ll be adding more as we go. I definitely need an SEO category, as well as a few others.

Also, they suggest using a “Related Posts” plugin or feature that helps readers find other articles related to what they are interested in. I do have this plugin installed, but it’s not activated yet for the simple reason that it shows up too close to the end of the post and looks crowded, and I haven’t figured out how to add some space in between there yet.

As soon as I figure out how to fix that, I’ll activate the plugin, because having links right there at the end of an article in invaluable for keeping readers glued to your site. Most blogging platforms should have something available to do this. A quick Googling will probably turn up something for you.

Wow, this was a long post. But really, everything I’ve written about is very important for you to consider when setting up your blog or optimizing an existing one. Getting stuck in the Supplemental Results section is no laughing matter - it can seriously tank your page rank, make it hard for people to find you and keep your writing from showing up on search results. Not good.

But with a few relatively simple tweaks, you can be well on your way to eliminating the duplicate content issue and improving reader usability at the same time. Happy SEOing!

310 redirect, blog, duplicate content, excerpt, meta description, more tag, robots.txt, SEO, supplemental results, title tag

Tags: Blogs and Blogging //