Negative SEO

Infographic: Testing Social Media Signals in Search

How Social Media Activity Impacts Organic Search Rankings

Can social media activity impact organic search rankings? Popular wisdom says yes, but we set out to prove it with a simple test. We’ve compiled our findings into an easy-to-follow infographic.

Use This Graphic for FREE on Your Site!

You may use the infographic above on your website, however, the license we grant to you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work to us with a link back to our website by using the following embed code.

Embed Code

<div style="width: 420px">
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-social-signals.jpg" />
<img src="https://tastyplacement.com/wp-content/uploads/testing-social-signals-thumbnail.jpg"
alt="Infographic: Testing Social Signals" /></a><br/>
Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an <a href="https://tastyplacement.com/">
Austin digital marketing, SEO & PPC agency</a>. To view the original post, see the original
<a href="https://tastyplacement.com/infographic-testing-social-media-signals-in-search">
Social Media Infographic</a>. </div>

Want an Infographic for Your Site?

Check out our Infographic Development services and see what TastyPlacement can do for you!

…and the thumbnail!:

Infographic Thumbnail

How to Promote an Infographic

Infographics have emerged as a sound, white-hat way to generate high-quality natural backlinks. Even a moderately successful infographic can go viral and bring a few dozen high-quality backlinks. But creating an infographic—as much work as that is—only gets you halfway there.

If you cleverly promote your infographic, you can greatly increase your chances of going viral and generating higher numbers of backlinks. We know because we’ve done a fair amount of infographic development here at TastyPlacement.

The Quid Pro Quo of Infographics

The name of the game in infographic promotion is that a webmaster gets to display your hard-earned content (the infographic) and in return, you earn a backlink from the website displaying the infographic. A preliminary task in promoting your infographic is to place your infographic where it is easy to find and in a manner which is easy for webmasters to employ.

Set Up Your Infographic “Home”

First, pick a “home” for your infographic—this ideally should be the same site where you want to send your backllinks. Your home location will house the infographic itself (1000 pixels wide is fairly standard), and ideally an “on-page display” version for the page itself for faster loading and easier visibility on a typical webpage (about 540 or 600 pixels wide), a mini-thumbnail for Facebook shares (more on this in a minute) and of course, your recommended embed code.

Your embed code should be dead easy for any webmaster to simply grab in a block. The embed code should be simple html, and should contain the entire “package” for the infographic: the on page display version, a link to the full infographic as well as author attribution and your desired links.

When we promote infographics, we host the preview image and the full infographic—it’s just too complicated to ask webmasters to download the infographic, install it on their site, then update all the links. By hosting the images, you make it easy and idiot proof. Because we are hosting the infographic, and the files are large, we create our infographics in jpeg format: that allows us to compress the file down for faster loading and less bandwidth usage.

To see all these elements coming together on a proper infographic “home.” see the page we’ve set up for our “Austin Startup Scene” infographic here:

https://tastyplacement.com/start-up-infographic

Include a Facebook-Ready Thumbnail

You will also notice another element on that page: a square thumbnail of the infographic at the bottom of the page. We added that thumbnail to our infographic page after we learned that when someone posts a share link on Facebook, Facebook will search the page for roughly square-shaped images to offer as a thumbnail choice to represent the share. Because infographics tend to be very tall images, Facebook won’t generate a thumbnail from the full infographic. You have to hand-feed an agreeably-sized thumbnail.

Now Let’s Promote: Make it Searchable

With our infographic set up and set to share, you want to make sure your infographic can be easily found in search engines. Make sure you’ve got the terms “free” and “infographic” in your title tag and body copy. “Free infographic” is searched 2900 times a month in Google, as reported by the Adwords keyword tool.

Finding Webmasters With MyBlogGuest

[update] When we originally posted this thread, we recommended MyBlogGuest as a means of reaching promotion-minded webmasters. We no longer recommend MyBlogGuest as a responsible means of promotion.

Promote Through Social

Promote your infographic through your Twitter account with #free #infographic hash tags. Include a shortened URL with a link to your infographic home. You should also post a link to your personal and business Facebook pages. We think it’s ok to re-post an infographic every few weeks.

Promote through Infographic/Visual Graphic Directories

We promote our infographics through infographic and visual graphic directories. These diretories exist for the purpose of displaying and housing infographics. You’ll get a mix of dofollow and nofollow links from these directories, and you’ll get the chance for webmasters to find you there. Below is the list of sites we employ (Visual.ly is easily the most popular and authoritative of this group):

  • http://www.infographicsarchive.com/submit-infographics/
  • http://submitinfographics.com/
  • http://infographicsite.com/submit-infographic/
  • http://visual.ly
  • Reddit.com/r/infographics/
  • http://www.nerdgraph.com/submit-infographic/
  • http://www.infographicfile.com/
  • http://www.infographiclove.com (this is a paid submission)

To find more locations for submission, try a Google search for (keep the quotes) “Submit Your Infographic”. That query will yield sites with infographic submission forms.

Use Specialized Searches to Find Bloggers and Webmasters

If you really want to take your infographic promotion to the next level, you can do a little curation of specific websites. This technique is going to take a bit more time, but will generate the highest value links.

First, let’s search for existing sites that display infographics. It makes sense that a webmaster that already displays infographics would probably post another in the same topic area. For our sleep infographic, we think our content would be valuable to sleep doctors. So we enter a Google query as follows: “sleep doctor” infographic. This query led us to a few sleep doctors and mattress and pillow manufacturers that already display infographics. One mattress manufacturer has an active blog with a PageRank of 4. We’d like to get a link on that site, so the next step is to write an email to that webmaster. So, we wrote the following message:

“Hi, we were browsing the site __________.org, and we notice 
you display Infographics for your readers. We have a useful
Infographic on sleep science that you can display for free
on your site. We've already coded the HTML so all you would
need to do is paste in the code to your website. You can
find the Infographic here: [link to infographic page/embed
code]. 

If you have any questions about how to post the Infographic
on your site, please let me know. “

Good luck using these tips in promoting your infographic. If your infographic is attractive and useful to readers, you should have have no trouble in ultimately generating 100s of links.

WordPress Tutorial: Display All Posts on a Page

How to Create an Interior /blog/ Page That Mimics a Traditional WordPress Front Page

We got hung up recently trying to create an interior blog page (i.e., www.agreatsite.com/blog)  for a client’s design. This problem is more common now with full-featured templates and frameworks that employ sliders and carousels on the front page that are triggered by a template’s index.php file.

First, Create a Custom WordPress Page Template

First, you’ll need to create a custom WordPress page template. All WordPress templates have a page.php file as part of the default template–we simply want to vary that file a little bit. Make a copy of your page.php file and name it page-blog.php.

Next, you need to enter a few lines of code at the very top of your new php file:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Blog
*/
?>

The code above is a naming tag–the template name, in this case “Blog” will be the name that appears in the template selection box at the WordPress page edit window, which we’ll screenshot below.

The Code

Now, you can’t simply run the regular WordPress loop on our custom interior page, we are going to use the WordPress template tag get_posts to query our WordPress database and grab our posts. The following code accomplishes this:

$myposts = get_posts('');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post);
?>
  <div class="post-item">
    <div class="post-info">
      <h2 class="post-title">
      <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
      <?php the_title(); ?>
      </a>
      </h2>
      <p class="post-meta">Posted by <?php the_author(); ?></p>
    </div>
    <div class="post-content">
    <?php the_content(); ?>
    </div>
  </div>
<?php comments_template(); ?>
<?php endforeach; wp_reset_postdata(); ?>

For the purposes of illustration, a greatly simplified version of the preceding code, without any html markup, hrefs, author information, post date data, or comment section would be as follows:

$myposts = get_posts('');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post);
?>
 <?php the_title(); ?>
 <?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endforeach; wp_reset_postdata(); ?>

How it Works

So what’s happening here? Well, the heart of the whole process is get_posts–this template tag queries the WP database and gets our posts.

Next, the foreach construct processes each post in turn–thus we’ll have all our posts on our blog page.  The setup_postdata WordPress function, well, sets up our data so it’ll display properly (otherwise the_content may not display the text of our posts. Finally, the wp_reset_postdata restores the $post global variable.

Once you’ve created the file, you’ll obviously want to upload it to your template (theme) directory.

Setting Your Blog Page

Your next step is to simply set up your blog page within the WordPress dashboard. From the WP dashboard, go to Pages, then Add New and create a page with a title “Blog” (or whatever is suitable). Remember the custom template we created above under the heading First, Create a Custom WordPress Page Template? You should now see your custom template name appear under the “Template” pull-down in the Page Edit screen, as indicated in the pic below by the green arrow.

Set the blog page by selecting the “blog” template

You don’t need to put any text in the text edit window, you just need a title–you won’t be displaying any page text here, you’ll be bypassing the specific text of this post and grabbing posts from the database.

Some Background on Why This Was Needed

Incidentally, framework and template designers that hijack WordPress’ index.php file to display a homepage slider, while requiring WordPress’ reading settings to be set to “Your latest posts” as shown in the screenshot below are doing a disservice to users (hence mandating this tutorial). The sounder practice is to code sliders and homepage features into a custom WordPress template.

Pictures From Pubcon Paradise 2012

I thought this was appropriate as an introduction, from the opening evening networking event sponsored by TastyPlacement:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Day One of Regular Pubcon Sessions:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Evening Networking Party Sponsored by the Social Media Club of Hawaii:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Day Two of Pubcon Regular Sessions:

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Wrap-up Party at Jimmy Buffet’s

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Pubcon Paradise 2012

Video Tutorial: All in One SEO Pack to Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin Migration

We’ve seen the light and are converting to the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin on all of our sites. However, when migrating from your existing SEO plugin to the (superior) Yoast plugin, there are a few tricks along the way that will help your conversion go seamlessly and keep your pages displaying properly. This tutorial walks you through the migration from the All in One SEO Pack to the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. Watch and learn – you (and your website) will be glad you did.

Video Tutorial: How to Clean Up Your WordPress Head

By default, WordPress prints a lot of extra code to the “head” section of webpages that it generates. For example, it prints a “generator” meta tag that identifies the site as a WordPress site–that can serve as a flag to hackers that specifically target WordPress sites. In this video tutorial we’ll learn a quick and easy way to clean the following items from your WordPress installation:

Here’s code to install in your functions.php to follow the above tutorial:

remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
remove_action('wp_head', 'feed_links', 2);
remove_action('wp_head', 'index_rel_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3);
remove_action('wp_head', 'start_post_rel_link', 10, 0);
remove_action('wp_head', 'parent_post_rel_link', 10, 0);
remove_action('wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link_wp_head', 10, 0 );

How to Add a Sidebar to Your WordPress Theme

Most simple WordPress templates/themes generally employ a single sidebar. But, in keeping with WordPress’ open architecture, you can easily add a second (or 3rd or 4th) sidebar to your site’s theme. And, you aren’t restricted to using your sidebar in the typical sidebar area–you can put your new sidebar in a header, a footer, or any other area in your template. Additional sidebars let you place any WordPress Widget (such as Recent Posts, Pages, Links/Blogroll, Calendar, Tag Cloud, as well as any custom widgets) into new areas of your WordPress template. This technique is especially powerful when combined with custom WordPress page templates–with additional sidebars, we can have custom sidebars for each of our custom page templates. This is the approach we’ll teach you in this tutorial.

Laying the Groundwork for Your New Sidebar

So what we’ll do in this tutorial is to add a second sidebar to one of our custom template pages in our WordPress theme. We have a custom homepage in our template where we want to include a robust call to action to our website visitors rather than a Category list which is more appropriate for blog readers. The screenshot below shows the default “Sidebar 1” sidebar from our simple template, and we’ll add a second sidebar called “Homepage Sidebar”.

Add WordPress Sidebars

Let’s first take a 10,000 foot view, we are going to employ the following steps to add our sidebar:

  • We are going to register our sidebar within the template by making an entry in the template’s functions.php file.
  • We are going to create a separate, custom sidebar file called sidebar-homepage.php.
  • We are going to include a reference to our custom sidebar-homepage.php file in our custom page template.

That’s it! With these three steps, we’ll have a 2nd sidebar that will display on our custom homepage. With the same technique, we could create additional sidebar areas, the steps would be the same.

Step 1: Registering the Additional Sidebar Within the WordPress Template

First step: we start by registering our sidebar within the template’s functions.php file. 99% of all WordPress templates/themes have a functions.php file. If your theme doesn’t have one, simply create a file in a text editor (we like Notepad++ in the Windows environment and TextMate in the Apple environment). If you don’t know how to find your theme files, you’ll find them in your web host in the following directory: www.yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/.

You’ll want to begin by finding any existing “register_sidebar” entries in your functions.php file. Ours had the following existing sidebar definition for our single default sidebar:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) {
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
}

To register our second sidebar, we simply add the following code to the functions.php file:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) {
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Homepage Sidebar',
'id' => 'homepage-sidebar',
'description' => 'Appears as the sidebar on the custom homepage',
'before_widget' => '<div style="height: 280px"></div><li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
}

So what did we just do?

  • We told our WordPress installation, “we are adding a second sidebar area that we’ll use in our theme”
  • The sidebar’s name is “Homepage Sidebar”
  • The ID of the sidebar (we’ll refer to that ID later) is “homepage-sidebar”; you can choose “footer-sidebar”, “second-sidebar” or anything you want
  • We added the description “Appears as the sidebar on the custom homepage” that will display just under the sidebar’s title.

If you upload your new functions.php file to your WordPress installation, you should see your new sidebar if you browse from your WordPress dashboard to Appearance, then Widgets. It should look like the following picture. We’ve already added a Text Widget with the title “Contact Us” to ours, but yours will be empty when you first look at it. But, all we have done is create the sidebar so far; we haven’t yet taken the steps to display the sidebar anywhere in our theme, that will come in the next steps.

Add WordPress Sidebar Step 2

If you see your new sidebar in the Widgets area of your WordPress Dashboard, you are ready to move on to the next step.

Step 2: Create an Additional Sidebar File

WordPress themes use a default file called sidebar.php to display sidebars on pages and posts. But, our goal is to create a second sidebar, we’ll do that with a separate file called sidebar-homepage.php.

Again, we’ll open our text editor and create a file and paste in the following code and insert the ID of your new sidebar within the “dynamic_sidebar()” declaration like so:

<div id="sidebar">
   <ul>
      <?php
      if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('homepage-sidebar') ) :
      endif; ?>
   </ul>
</div>

Now, we have to note that our example sidebar file is highly simplified. Most sidebar files have more code–this extra code displays core navigation in the event the sidebar does not have any widgets installed in it–but for the purposes of this tutorial, we have to simplify it. As an alternative, you can simply copy your sidebar.php file and rename it. Don’t forget to include your sidebar ID within the dynamic_sidebar declaration (shown in red in the code example above)–that sidebar ID tells WordPress which sidebar (which we registered in Step 1) to display.

Step 3: Call the Additional Sidebar from Your Theme Files

We’re almost there. Now, all we need to do is call our new sidebar file, sidebar-homepage.php from our template files–keep in mind that our file name must follow this construct: sidebar-_______.php; we’ll see why in a moment. In our example, we’ll call our sidebar file from a custom template page–but you can call your new sidebar from a footer file, header file, or any theme file that displays on your WordPress site.

The function in WordPress that calls sidebars is get_sidebar(). When get_sidebar() is used with no information within the parenthesis, WordPress grabs the default sidebar.php file. But we want to grab our sidebar-homepage.php file, so we put “homepage” in single quotes within the get_sidebar parentheses. This tells WordPress to grab a file called sidebar-homepage.php . The code we want to insert in our template file is the following:

<?php get_sidebar('homepage'); ?>

What we’ve told WordPress to do is the following: we want to grab a sidebar file, but not the default sidebar, we want a file called sidebar-homepage.php. With this string of code, we’ve successfully grabbed our custom sidebar file.

Our New Sidebar

If you’ve coded your additional sidebar correctly, you can drag Widgets from the WordPress dashboard to your new sidebar and you’ll see the widgets displayed on your WordPress site. Here’s our new sidebar displaying on our homepage, while we display our default sidebar on interior pages and blog posts:

Our New WordPress Sidebar

Other Approaches to Adding Sidebars

Our method is one of many, there are more elegant ways of accomplishing the same result without creating separate template files, but the method outlined here is simple and reliable. Please comment below if you have questions or run into trouble.

Your WordPress site needs SEO. Buy our WordPress SEO book at Amazon. Now in the second edition!

 

Siri Search Optimization

You may have heard that the iPhone’s new voice-command and personal/search assistant “Siri” will be “the end of SEO as we know it.” Undoubtedly a shift is coming, but I for one doubt it will be as disruptive as the apocolyptos might have you believe. After all, we’re not all going to use only our phones for everything. We like our laptops, and in addition, bargain hunting (AKA commercial search) is deeply ingrained in human nature.

There are a lot of fun things Siri can do including transcribing text to voice, setting reminders, playing music, checking the weather, getting directions, and yes carrying out search queries. Undoubtedly, Siri will catch on like wildfire, and as a result will compete with many apps and tools, including search engines.

Optimizing for Siri

The integration of Siri will begin to affect strategies and optimization efforts, but most of these things should be part of an immersive SEO program from the start.

Local Search for Siri

People search from mobile devices on the move; they’re not sitting down to do in-depth research. A majority of mobile searches are location-specific including directions, finding nearby restaurants, or other local services.

With Siri, it’s not about people getting to your website through Google placement alone because visibility comes from other sources. Siri wants to give users a visual experience and draws data from local listing sites such as Yelp, Google Maps, Citysearch, YP, etc. There are more than 60 of these sites on which it is well worth your time to create a listing. It’s not just for Siri, getting listed on (and links from) all these sites improves local listing and organic placements in SERPs as well.

Obviously, you’ll want your information to be correct, up to date, and fully filled out on these sites with accurate address, phone number, images, positive reviews, and a high number of ratings. For more info on local optimization, check out our post on local listings SEO.

Rich Snippets and Schema Tags

Schema.org lets you use a specific markup language (web code) to identify specific information about your business and web presence and make that information more easily found by search engines.

Search engines are using on-page tags in a variety of ways. Google uses them to create rich snippets in search results and will continue to do so more and more. These snippets include author information, address, phone number, operating hours, and so on. So you can see how these tags have value to local searches such as are the focus of Siri. Offering a highly structured format for this information makes it that much easier to be found.

Variety in Linkbuilding and Long Tail Keywords

This is the first version of Siri, and its depth of language capabilities will continue to increase with new versions. Therefore the following effect will only continue to grow. Already, the length of Siri queries are longer because users are searching in natural speech rather than pecking away at keyboards or small iPhone touchscreens.

The result is more long-tail and highly targeted searches. Optimizing for long-tail means more words on the page and more flexible link building. Both of these strategies work in organic search as well, so you won’t even have to duplicate your efforts.

It used to be that you chose your anchor text and could simply bang away at it over and over. With enough links, you’d move on up. That hasn’t been best practice for a while, and Google is becoming even more focused on natural-looking anchor text profiles. Not only is this a safety-first method, but it’s also more efficient. Flexible anchor text (anchor text with the keyword integrated here and there, but also broadly varied) is more efficient in increasing rankings, even for the targeted, high-volume terms.

Back to Siri, the efforts you make to naturalize and get the most out of your link profile will also help you rank for long-tail searches, which Siri is all about. As a bonus, long tail searches are more targeted to the specific needs of a given search query and therefore convert at higher rates.

The iPhone 4s (S is for Siri? Seems that way to me…) is Apple’s best-selling phone to date, with 4 million sales in three days. Verizon started carrying the iPhone earlier this year and even Sprint has had no choice but to jump on the bandwagon. It’s a monolith, and it’s the impetus for a new fold of search optimization.

Free Local Listings for SEO

Local listings are an increasingly large part of search. Google places results now pop up at the top of search results automatically. This is good news for local businesses. If you have a physical location, you better take full advantage of the opportunity!

You should always start by claiming your business on Google Places, then work your way down by submitting information to Yahoo Local, YellowPages.com, and maybe even Bing Local. From there, you want to convince search engines that your business exists and is significant to users. To do that, you’ll have to submit to many alternate local directories.

In Chapter 9 of our book, SEO for WordPress, we talk about local listings and their explosive power in the hands of local businesses.

We at TastyPlacement have been scouring local directories to figure out which best factor into local rankings.

Directory Link Post speed Pictures Notes
Kudzu.com Yes Slow No
MojoPages.com Yes Immediate 4
SuperPages.com(search)
Supermedia.com(data entry)
Yes Moderate 4
InsiderPages.com Yes Immediate 4
ExpressUpdateUSA.com No Moderate No
advertise.local.com Yes Moderate No Upgrade to Premium to add pictures
local.botw.org Yes Moderate Logo only Must email a representative to edit mistakes
MerchantCircle.com Yes Immediate 4 Must email a representative for multiple listings
Hotfrog.com Yes Immediate 4
Yellowbook.com Yes Moderate No May require phone verification
Foursquare.com Yes Immediate No Customers can check-in
thinklocal.com Yes Moderate No
cityslick.net Yes Moderate No
USYellowPages.com No Slow No
MyCity.com Yes Immediate Logo only
BizJournals.com No Slow No
mapinsight.teleatlas.com/mapfeedback No Slow No Provides a tracking number
justclicklocal.com No Immediate No
DiscoverOurTown.com Yes Slow No
MetroBot.com No Moderate No
BestDealOn.com Yes Moderate No
Manta.com/claim Yes Immediate Logo only
Infignos.com No Slow No
Yellowassistance.com No Slow No
MyHuckleberry.com Yes Immediate 4
BrownBook.net/business/add Yes Immediate 4
CitySquares.com Yes Immediate No
Navteq.com No Slow No
CitySearch.com Yes Slow Logo only
Yellowee.com Yes Immediate Logo only
MatchPoint.com Yes Immediate 4
Mapquest.com Yes Moderate No They have a number of options for verification
Sustainlane.com No Immediate 4
Localprice.com Yes Slow No
Thumbtack.com Yes Immediate 4
Scrub the Web No Slow No
CommunityWalk.com Yes Immediate 4
ChamberofCommerce.com Yes Moderate 4
From the Wordpress SEO book

Should You Disallow Old Link Structures With Robots.TXT?

Questions from Readers…

We’re getting great questions from readers of our book, WordPress 3.0 Search Engine Optimization. Today, Michael tackles a question sent in by Jeff of Houston, TX. Remember, send in those questions and feedback! We’re always  thrilled to help out our readers.

Hi Mr. David,

I’m sorry to contact you with such an insignificant matter, but I just got your book today and wanted to ask if you could clarify an issue that I have encountered. My site has been up for about 6 months and I had been using a permalink structure of /year/month/day/postname and I changed it to /category/postname. I also used Deans Permalink Migration plugin to add 301 redirects for published posts.

I want to use your Ultimate Robot.txt file to my site, but I’m wondering if I add the “Disallow: /2011/ ” directive to eliminate duplicate content in my archives, will it disallow my previous posts that had /2011/ in the old permalink structure? Any help or clarification on this issue would be very appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Jeff

Houston, TX

Jeff,

We love hearing from readers.

Yes, I believe that if you add the directive Disallow: /2011/ you will remove year archives from indexing, but also any post that uses the year in that position as part of its permalink structure. I tested it, and it appears to disallow the content.

You can test your robots.txt file by using Google Webmasters’ Crawler Access testing tool. The tool lets you test the text of a robots.txt file and compare it to a specific URL. The tool then tells you if your robots.txt file is allowing or blocking the URL. You can find the tool by logging into Google.com/webmasters and then selecting “Site Configuration” and then “Crawler Access” from the left menu. We didn’t cover this specific tip in WordPress 3.0 Search Engine Optimization, but we will implement it in a future edition of the book.

Now, but you say you’ve changed your permalink structure–that should solve the problem. In the case where a robots.txt entry would block regular blog posts from getting indexed when blocking year archives, the solution is clear: don’t block either. Just make sure your year archive is set to display excerpts of the posts, rather than the full text of the posts.

Michael

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