Search Engine Traffic

If you run your own Wordpress blog with its default site structure configuration and installation, your blog will more than likely be penalized by Google as having duplicate content without you knowing, which will seriously affect your search engine traffic. To avoid Google’s so-called supplemental result penalty on your original content, you need to implement a few simple steps on your wordpress blog installation to get rid of duplicate content problem.

So what’s Google’s supplemental result and why is it bad? Google’s indexing algorithm try to keep just one copy of the original content in its index database, when it detects a duplicate content, that will be put in a supplemental index. Once in there, your page will be impossible to find by searchers.

Redirect non-www to www.yourdomain.com

This can be done either through an .htaccess entry, or through a plugin called “permalink redirect”. Also redirect all http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php to http://www.yourdomain.com/
RewriteRule ^(.*[^/])$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1/ [R=301,L]


Organize Site Structure to Kill Duplicate Content

You should always use the ‘read more’ feature on all your posts. This ensures that your original content only exists in the post page not on your index page or category archive pages. On your category pages, you also need to enable the excerpt.

Another way you can do this is to instruct the search engine spiders not to index certain pages on your blog by using the nofollow attributes through this “wordpress duplicate content cure” plugin. Additionally you can implement the so-called silos on your blog. We will talk about silos in an upcoming post.

With these simple changes to your wordpress installation, your blog content should start ranking high in the big search engines.

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