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Something is wrong, the Google Search Result from my blog looks bad, don’t laugh please :D

Posted by Daniel - 936 Views

I was checking my blog’s pages which are already indexed on the Google Search and I spotted some of the items there are look really-really bad. It gets me to realize that I am not doing the best yet in optimizing this blog for search engines. Then I asked myself “Do I exactly know how to get a better result in SEO?“, the answer is “No, I have idea at all…” but it won’t stop me from doing search and research to get the best result in SEO with an appealing look without ignoring that I am also building this blog for human like you.

Well, I guess I am talking too much, right? :D OK, lets start with Google Search. As I said before that most of the items shown there are looking bad. Means they’re not appealing enough to persuade the searchers to click it. Following are the reasons why I said they’re not appealing enough:

1) SOME USELESS PAGES ARE ALSO INDEXED. What I mean by “useless” is: pages with no informative content in them, pages aren’t fulfilling the searchers need. From their point-of-view those pages are useless. They are pages such as wp-login.php and wp-register.php.

done: Adding the following META Tag to the header section of those page and other similar pages will prevent the crawler from indexing the pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

2) DEFAULT WORDPRESS PERMALINK STRUCTURE IS STILL SHOWN THERE. I have no idea why several pages with URL structure like “www.averagecoder.net/page/3/” can be indexed there. As long as I can remember, from the first second I set the WordPress Privacy setting and robots.txt file to “Open For Crawler” I already set the permalink structure like the current one.

done: I think disallowing it from robots.txt by using the line below will do the job:

Disallow: /page/*

3) ALL OF MY INDEXED PDF FILES ARE HAVING MY BLOG NAME AS THE TITLE. Every post on this blog can be converted into PDF by clicking the link at the end of the post, that’s why I have PDF files indexed there. But, instead of using the post title, Google fetch the header on the PDF as the search item’s title. It’s quite reasonable since all of my PDF files has the same title on the header (my blog name) and this is not good.

done: Using the post title as the header of the PDF. This will requires me to edit the ContuttoPDF Plugin code.

4) THE PAGE’S TITLE AND THE DESCRIPTION DOESN’T REALLY MATCH. Sometimes Google Bot didn’t fetch the appropriate post content to be set as the description. I am not really sure why it could happened but I guess it’s in the way I choose the keywords - I can’t deny that my keywords prediction and the placement are terrible. So, it’s reasonable if the bot fetch the comment instead of the post content or the description meta tag because it couldn’t find the keyword entered by the searcher in the post content or the meta tag.

todo: be more careful with keyword prediction, more research is mandatory I guess and make sure the chosen keywords are well placed within the post content and description meta tag.

Any suggestions? Or you just want to be a spectator? :D That’s fine. Make sure you subscribe to this post by writing a comment and then submit it with [Notify me of followup comments via e-mail] checkbox checked to get notified by my updates on these SEO methods.

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6 Responses to “Something is wrong, the Google Search Result from my blog looks bad, don’t laugh please :D”

1. oeroek Says:
   February 28th, 2008 at 3:17 pm

   there is a list of things you can do further to the ,usefull, things you already changed.

   Make the link to the PDF file nofollow, it is duplicate content

   Give every page an unique title and description, download the plugin all-in-seo to do this http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

   Download the robots meta plugin to determine which pages should be nofollow. you can nofollow category and tag pages to prevent duplicate content.http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/#post-2281

   Use the slugs. your url resembles the title. IN the sul you can force wordpress to use antoher url. Fill in your title without noise words such as “is”, “and”, etc.

   IN permalink structure do not include category. Just use averagecoder.net/post-title(minus noise words). overhere you will find a guide to redicrect your old urls. http://www.joostdevalk.nl/changing-your-permalink-structure/

   Also read this post http://www.joostdevalk.nl/wordpress-seo/

2. Daniel Says:
   February 28th, 2008 at 5:02 pm

   @oroek: Thanks for your input. It is appreciated :) I had all-in-one seo plugin installed and it’s good and it already has options to set which parts of the site should be set to noindex. I think let the crawlers follow - for example - the category page is OK as long as they are not indexing it, right? Am I wrong?

   I already use slug, but maybe tweaking is necessary. I am still not sure about changing permalink structure since the current format has been indexed by some search engines even I can try to delete the old pages from their webmaster tools if I decided to change the permalink structure. This is my robots.txt in case you need to see it.

   Thank you :)
   _____________

   Daniel

3. oeroek Says:
   February 28th, 2008 at 5:13 pm

   Some people that have categories and tags have noindex on one of them or even both. That should be sufficient.

   Also, you may want to limit outgoing links to tag pages and category pages from single posts. Look at this plugin and read the description, it explains a lot and helps you make it happen.
   http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/#post-2281

   It is not necessary to remove the pages from webmaster tools. Just redirect them to the new page. Read the article http://www.joostdevalk.nl/changing-your-permalink-structure/
   If it is too complex, just leave it as it is.

4. Daniel Says:
   February 29th, 2008 at 1:31 am

   No, the regex for .htaccess it’s not too complex at all, I have done it here on local server but please consider this scenario:

   Let’s say the Google Search Cache has this URL structure (for this page):

   http ://averagecoder.net/blogging-stuff/searh-engine/
   something-is-wrong-the-google-search-result-from-my-blog-looks-bad/

   Then I change the structure to this one:

   http ://averagecoder.net/
   something-is-wrong-the-google-search-result-from-my-blog-looks-bad.html

   When Google Bot crawl the site, it will find that I have 2 identical pages with 2 different URLs, one URL on their cache and the 2nd is the latest one found during the last crawl. Even I had redirected it using .htaccess rewrite rule, it will still find the page with the same content as what it has on their cache but with different URL Structure since the link for the same page has been changed. I am afraid it’s going to be treated as duplicate content?

   What do you think? Is it how it really works?
   ___________

   Daniel

5. oeroek Says:
   February 29th, 2008 at 4:29 am

   The problem with duplicate content is that Google needs to know which page is the original and that both pages may have their own backlinks, splitting their voting power.

   That is why you use a 301 redirect. This means a permanent move and states to Google that the 301 source is the old page and the 301 target is the new page. All backlinks, pagerank, etc, will be directed to the 301 target.
   So using .htaccess the correct way, with a 301, does not lead to duplicate content.

   http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

6. Daniel Says:
   March 2nd, 2008 at 3:32 am

   @oeroek: Great, you just gave me the courage to change my permalink structure. You can see the report on one of my post below:
   Change the WordPress permalink structure to the best format.

   FYI: I had disabled the noindex options for several pages on all-in-one-seo plugin since I think I putting this code into header.php of my current theme is a better way:

   <?php if((is_single() || is_page() || is_home()) && (!is_paged())){ ?>
           <meta name=“robots” content=“index,follow” />
   <?php } else { ?>
           <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex,follow” />
   <?php } ?>

   Thanks Oeroek :)
   ___________

   Daniel

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