WordPress 2.3 Changes
Well the new version of WordPress is here and it is great! While some people are complaining about lack of plugin compatibility, the pros far outweigh the cons in version 2.3. With a little tweaking WordPress is a powerful SEO machine. It is a very good content management system, but what separates it from other database driven CMS’s is its inherent support for SEO. There are several plugins that are vital to good SEO that I have written about. Most of the key plugins still function. One of the best changes to WordPress 2.3 is its capability to show when plugins have new versions. It also eliminates the need for a WordPress version check plugin since it tells you in the dashboard if a new version exists.
The upgrade of WordPress is always pretty easy and this update is no different. I was able to get it up on 17 blogs in a couple of hours. It is important to deactivate all your plugins before this update if you normally don’t do that. I like many webmaster can get pretty lazy when it comes to upgrading, so this time cover all the bases since there are many changes to the database in this upgrade. So please back up your database before updating, especially in 2.3. The WordPress site has a list of compatibility issues with themes and plugins here. This page is the features page with all the new stuff, but also has links to the plugins and themes compatibilities. The list is incomplete, but for the most part if your theme is widget compatible you should be all right.
Major WordPress 2.3 Features
The most obvious feature is tagging. WordPress has really gotten on the tagging bandwagon, probably in response to SES in San Diego where everyone was talking about tagging. One of the most obvious compatibility issues is with Ultimate Tag Warrior. This plugin was named as one of the most important plugins at SES, so it is a little weird that it won’t work with the new WordPress. Granted a lot of its features are now standard in the new upgrade and I am sure the developer will have a new update out soon. I personally have issues with a lot of tagging. I agree that tagging can be useful for posts that fall under multiple categories, but I have concerns over duplicate content issues that can arise from some tagging strategies.
Duplicate content is one of the biggest vulnerabilities with WordPress and giving search engines multiple ways to list the same content is dangerous. I use Technorati to handle tagging and tag clouds. The question is “How much does tagging help usability?” This is a big topic, but I prefer search over tags as a means for visitors to find what they are looking for on my site. Cluttered and long pages can easily disrupt a users concentration as they are searching for information on your blog. Deep link navigation and bread crumb navigation are the best ways to let your visitors know where they are, and where they have been. Previous and Next buttons can get confusing quickly.
One of the best things about the new tagging feature is the related posts by tags. Being able to have all the posts within specific tags listed can help users find all the info that your site has to offer on any given subject. The problem will be in filtering the output so you don’t have too many options for a user. Again cluttered sites are hard to follow and won’t get return visitors or high page views. If you aren’t sure of the difference or importance of these metrics read my post: Hits, Visitors, page views explained.
The tagging features eliminate the need for the following plugins:
- Ultimate Tag Warrior – this plugin is pretty hard to use for regular people like me anyway.
- Jerome’s Keywords – I always used this and was always irritated by how it would loose the keyword filed if you didn’t add the custom key “keywords” in the custom fields. I am still testing how this effects the meta tags.
- Simple Tags – I still use this because of its additional Technorati features.
- Bunny’s Technorati Tags – I always used Simple Tags so don’t know much about Bunny or her plugin.
If these were paid solutions I guess you would wonder if WordPress is becoming the Walmart of content management systems by pushing out the little guy. I will keep everyone informed on how the many tests on tagging that I am running are going.
Along with more features within the visual editor and tagging, the new WordPress also takes care of a couple of permalink and domain problems that have plagued them in the past. You now have control over the www and non-www version of your domain. We all know that Google can see the www and non-www version of a site as 2 different sites. Even though they have solved a lot of this in the Webmaster Center where you can assign the proper FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) of your domain, it is good to have that backed up by WordPress. They have also fixed some of the slug and URL naming issues that occur when importing blogs like Blogger sites which tend to cut off the post title in the URL.
WordPress has always given you the control over the URL through the slug, but now you can be safe in importing or creating long URL’s with their new support of “pretty URL’s”. I know that there are experts out there that claim the URL isn’t important as much in blogs, but I disagree. I go as far as to end the URL string with a .html. While this might not matter to spiders, it does resolve canonical name issues that happen when the trailing slash is not included in the URL string. Yahoo might not care, but Google definitely does. I use the .html in the permalink to resolve this problem. Read more about it on my post – WordPress Permalinks Changing Links On An Existing Site - for more info.
The bottom line is WordPress 2.3 is a great update and worth the time. Back up everything and take it slow and you will be fine. I only scratched the surface of all the features. I have found the new version to be fast and clean. They did an awesome job with this update of WordPress.
WordPress Robots.txt For SEO
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about changing WordPress permalinks and how best to avoid duplicate content. I have gotten a lot of questions about the robots.txt portion of WordPress SEO. It is important to understand that the robots.txt file must be in your top directory. There is some speculation about this and the use of wildcard (*) within the robots.txt file. Spiders or bots are different, but you can look at this page on Google’s Webmaster help site which outlines their policy on robots.txt. Here is a quote directly from Google on placement of the robots.txt:
The robots.txt file must reside in the root of the domain and must be named “robots.txt”. A robots.txt file located in a subdirectory isn’t valid, as bots only check for this file in the root of the domain. For instance, http://www.example.com/robots.txt is a valid location. But, http://www.example.com/mysite/robots.txt is not.
OK so now what do you do?
SEO Strategy With The Robots.txt For WordPress
We all know that duplicate content is bad. WordPress in its very nature is a dupe content nightmare. There are many ways that the same page can have different URL’s and our job is to limit what the spiders crawl, without affecting the sites usability.
Not all spiders are the same, in fact it is unclear if they all support the wildcard, but Google does. The question is, do you optimize primarily for Google? I do. Yahoo does not have as strict enforcement of their content guidelines as Google does.
Below is how I set up a robots.txt on a test site that has excellent placement for specific keywords. I will keep everyone informed how the progress of the site in the SERP’s goes. Even though Google has eliminated Supplemental listings, they still retain a basement for dupe pages. My test site had a bunch or pages in the sup index, so we will see if the WordPress SEO robots.txt file has helped.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /dh_
Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /adlogger/
Disallow: /ads/
Disallow: /mint/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /20*
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: /*.php*
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.txt$
Disallow: /*/feed*
Disallow: /20*
WordPress Permalinks: Changing The Links On An Existing Site
Even though this article is primarily about WordPress, it is important for anyone that has a website whose URL structure is less than optimal. We all learn by doing, SEO isn’t a precise science, in fact the rules change all the time. With WordPress you have options when setting up your site, but what if you didn’t set it up right in the first place?
Well that is what happened to me. I followed the guidelines on the WordPress permalink page, and used the year, month, and day string in my URL structure as recommended. I set up my blog like that as well as most of my clients’ blogs. I jumped right into WordPress without really testing the waters like I should have. The problems weren’t really on this site, but on my wife’s site homesadvisory.com which has a 4 PR on the home page, but isn’t getting any love in Google. I found that a lot of her articles were in supplemental results. I know that Google is eliminating sup results, but I really don’t think that is going to do anything for her SEO.
After much research I realized I had broken one of my oldest rules: no duplicate content! So what to do? I found a lot of great websites with many different answers. I decided to just do what I knew is best, solid URL’s and no chance of dupe content.
The important thing is I don’t want to loose placement for posts that are doing well. For example I am #2 for “rss syndication services” which is accounting for 20% of my traffic. So if I change the permalinks within WordPress, I know that at the site level I am OK, but what about the links within the SERP’s and all the other sites that link into my posts?
The answer is a cool plugin called Permalink Migration from Dean Lee. It allowed me to easily change all the links on my site from /2007/05/02/postname to /postname.html. You see the main reason I want to do this is to stop Google from spidering my archives. I can easily do that by adding Disallow: /20* as a line within my robots.txt file, which will stop any date based archive pages or posts from being re-spidered, eliminating the dupe content.
This isn’t the only step though. If you use a sitemap plugin like me, you have to go in and manually change the settings to NOT add the archives to the sitemap. My sitemap is now totally clean and my URL’s are cool. The only thing left is the links within the posts themselves. I firmly believe in Deep Link Navigation so my articles have tons of internal links. These unfortunately weren’t changed.
I am currently looking into doing a replace within the MySql database rather than modify hundreds of posts. I’ll add comments to this post on the progress. If you have a WordPress blog and are using date based URL’s, you need to change your permalink structure! Leave any questions as comments on this post.
WordPress Search Engine Optimization Server Side
WordPress is ready and willing to be your partner in search engine optimization. This new series will focus on the best ways to optimize your WordPress installations. It is going to be broken down into 2 parts:
- Server Side WordPress Search Engine Optimization – these articles will deal with the backend, management dashboard, plugins and themes. We will be exploring the proper use of the robots.txt file with WordPress as well as other server-side technology to best optimize your blog and feeds. We will also look at the installation of analytics tracking, setting up specific blog oriented goals and getting your blog ready for submissions and planting.
- Front End WordPress Search Engine Optimization – these articles will deal with how to optimize your content, obtain trackbacks, submit your blog, submit your feed and plant your articles. We will also be looking at the front end of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Center, Yahoo Site Explorer, FeedBurner and powerful services such as Technorati, Del.iso.us and mag.nol.ia.
I know that there are more blogging platforms than WordPress, and that the backend articles are not going to help people running TypePad, but the front end posts will help anybody with a blog. I use WordPress and am an expert at customizing and marketing that platform. As every professional blogger will tell you: “write about what you know”!
Getting Started With WordPress and SEO
We are going to assume you have hosting that either offers WordPress with their packages, or that you have control over your servers and can install whatever you want. I host with Rackspace Managed Hosting and have 4 servers, 3 of which are Linux. If you are ready to get a blog going and either have hosting that doesn’t offer WordPress or want to upgrade, call me at 727-856-4695 and I can hook you up with all kinds of different hosting. My Social Network Marketing packages all include hosting if you don’t have a blog and want one.
Once you have installed WordPress and chosen your theme, the fun stuff begins! It helps for you to have a theme that is optimized. A search for WordPress SEO themes will show you a ton of excellent themes that are ready for SEO. While it is true that you have hundreds of choices, you want to keep it simple. Themes that are 100% CSS driven are hard to modify if you aren’t a serious coder. I normally don’t promote any one website over another, but there is a very solid themes system from Easy Web Tutorials that is among the best and easiest to customize.
The theme is extremely important since it dictates how your blog is presented to the search engines. Things like meta descriptions and post headers are extremely important, and are usually within the index.php, single.php and page.php. The page is extremely critical if you use them as well as posts. Standard page code has the title of the blog appear as the primary meta title, I usually remove that line of code so that only the actual title that you input into the visual editor is the title of the page, not the complete title of the blog THEN the page title. Most search engines don’t read meta titles past 85 characters.
If you are unsure of anything I said in the last paragraph, please leave a comment with your question and I will answer it.
Once your blog is installed and you have chosen and installed a theme, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. For search engine optimized WordPress installs you will need several plugins to help the search engines help you. My next post in this series will list all of the plugins I use, where to download them and how to configure them.