Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.
For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric – Making Yourself Known.
This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.
Techie SEO considerations.
Dup Content on Blogs
Google is extremely vigilant detecting and penalizing duplicate content in their search engine results, with often unwanted side effects.
When you make a post on your blog, a page is created for that post with the full text. In addition, the full text of the post is added to a Category page, and also to an archive page. That makes 3 copies of the same text on your site. When Google’s indexing spider (Googlebot) crawls your site, it notices 3 identical pages and assumes that you are trying to pad your content by repeating yourself 3 times.
2 Levels of penalty, SERP filters kick in. One, the allegedly duplicate pages are penalized. The other penalty or filter is trickier. Googlebot takes the total amount of content on your site, and then checks to see how much of that content is duplicated on your site, or elsewhere on the web. If the percentage of content on your site is duplicated elsewhere, Google concludes that your site may be lower quality and may not be of interest to Google’s search/browsers.
The whole thing is a LOT more complex than this but this is a good way to think about it. In fact there is no magic percentage or threshold, but rather a long list of ‘signs of quality’ which Google’s algorithm calculates to assign rank.
The Fix
A discussion at Webmasterworld gives the code to place in the HEAD of header.php.
Also, WordPress Support recommends the same code to fix the issue of dated posts being indexed, and the page disappearing.
Post Regularly and Post Often! — keep going and don’t slow down! It WILL pay off! If you can’t or don’t have time to write the posts yourself, hire a writer.
Some Useful SEO Plugins
Allows keywords to be associated with each post. These keywords can be used for page meta tags, included in posts for site searching or linked like Technorati tags.
Social Bookmark Creator
Add social bookmark links to your blog.
Auto Social Poster – automatically submits to social media sites. (A MUST have!)
This is one of the best. This plug-in replaces the built-in ping (works? doesn’t work?) with a function that pings only when you publish not when you save.
