SEO for WordPress is a topic that many people have an interest in for obvious reasons and experts argue that it is not the most optimized platform straight out of the box. Fortunately there are a lot of plugins to help users fix the most common “problems” but there is also a lot of advice out there that can be confusing, particularly to newer users or non technical types which includes a lot of WordPress bloggers.
In this sort video Michael Gray tackles structural advice and the hotly debated duplication issues – you will note his comments at the beginning of the video regarding Google’s statements about duplicate content and his own experiences. Ultimately, how much of a problem this may be is often argued in SEO circles and there seems to be varying opinions. Nonetheless it is a fact that WordPress does store the same content in various places such as the archives, the main page of the blog, the individual post pages etc. If all this is new and confusing to you, you might want to learn more about setting up a robots.txt file for your WordPress installation and use a plugin like Google XML sitemaps in conjunction with All In One SEO as a starting point.
Ultimately, if you can make the Googlebot’s life easier it certainly won’t do you any harm.
Tips on how to avoid duplicate content and set up theming or siloing on your wordpress blog installation.
December 27, 2009
SEO, Wordpress