Comments on: How to Optimize Your WordPress Archives for SEO

By: Alan C

Alan C — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 13:42:32 +0000

Some good information here, but there is some that is inaccurate and needs to be corrected.

tldr; “Power” is PageRank. Some techniques described in this article bleed PageRank and constitute PageRank sculpting which can cause a site to be punished by Google.

Let’s start by talking semantics. Everyone needs to be aware that the author uses “power” to discuss internal distribution of PageRank. Just a nit, but some people may not make that important connection.

On the topic of no-index links… Consider an extreme situation. You could no-index 99/100 links on a page. The remaining 1 link still would basically only get 1% of the “power” or PageRank, not 100%. The other 99% is lost. This method is one type of PageRank sculpting and one that can get you penalized by Google. So take care how extensively you use it. Matt Cutts of Google has spoken to this very subject.

On duplicate content… Tag archives and category archives only truly create duplicate content when your site has very little content or has excessive organization for its size. If you have 100 posts in 10 categories with 5-10 tags, the content duplication issue is non-existent. If you have 10 posts in 10 categories with 10 tags, you have a content duplication issue. But make no mistake, the real reason you’ll get punished by Google in the later case is because of a lack of content. Again, Google has spoken to this very subject.

On anchor text… Google has explicitly stated that they expect to see natural anchor text profiles on both internal links and backlinks. If you only use keywords as your anchor texts, then you are creating an artificial anchor text profile. In other words, over-optimization of “topic indicators” can get you penalized.

The real takeaway point hiding in this article is one that Matt Cutts has talked recently about: do not put excessive internal links on every page, whether in a sidebar archives/categories/tags list or in the footer.

Of course all of this represents a small fraction of what matters to onsite SEO. Proper site architecture with a sensible amount of natural content siloing will take care of all of the potential issues discussed in this article and in my reply – without having to resort to PageRank sculpting or no-index silos.

By: Taut Web

Taut Web — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:02:25 +0000

Thanks a lot for the great insight on wordpress SEO. I was a bit confused about the use of WordPress tags. Now I am convinced that It is better to use categories instead.

By: Wayne Skews

Wayne Skews — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 03:24:37 +0000

Thanks for that – I was using tags, archives and throwing everything in thinking it was helping my rankings – crazy now that I read your post. Surely if your pages are listed and your latest posts are listed then you would toss out categories as well? Also can you tell me that if I am trying to rank for a particular symbol and I link to a site that has good information – will this also hurt my ranking – or should I be linking to others a little as possibel?
And lastly – I see you have a doofollow on all these posts – does google really ignore them? Thanks.

By: faisal

faisal — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:26:49 +0000

So basically link to category and let everything else be taken from there? Top down link approach?

By: RLRowe

RLRowe — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 00:23:49 +0000

Finally some good info here, Thanks:)
But this is a very confusing issue. If I check all three (noindex for Categories,Archives,and Tag Archives) as advised elsewhere to avoid duplicate content issues, my page is nowhere to be found in Google using my keyword phrase.
Leaving Categories unchecked my page is the first result, seems like a no brainer but what about the duplicate content issue? Would leaving Tag Archives unchecked instead net the same result?

By: ranna azam

ranna azam — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:44:49 +0000

great SEO tips. it will be great help to people who are beginners in blogging stuff and the idea of creating custom content for the top of all your category based archives is awesome.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:48:26 +0000

That was a great tutorial Rae. I will start implementing this strategies on my own blogs. Cheers!

By: Soraya

Soraya — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:33:56 +0000

You are great Rae..allow me to call U “the SEO lady”…
I am learning so much with you..I started a restructure process on my site that I built it when a had almost zero knowledge on SEO, and I am considering lot of advises on how to work site architecture. Thanks a lot

By: Katie

Katie — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:09:54 +0000

Yikes. I do not use WP now but am in the process of choosing a WP theme. I have a statewide blog with regional categories and other topic categories. Because I am about the only poster statewide, I need to fill the region categories with things in case an office or a web page wanted to display only a region’s posts via RSS feed. As a result, some posts go into numerous categories. For example, today I wrote a post about Milwaukee WI. (in draft mode right now). It will go in the Southeast Wi Metro Milwaukee category. It also offered some Relocation advice so I will put it in the Relo category as well. Other times, I have general articles that I put in all the regional categories so those have something in them. Sounds like I am doing a major-bad.

In addition, I show my categories and an archive by date which I understand your article is mainly about and it is also not the way to go, but it got me thinking about my bigger problem of multiple categories selected for a post.

Can you offer some insight there? Considering Thesis and solostream for themes.
Thank you for the eye-opening post! I am glad I read it before I converted my blog to WordPress.

By: Usman

Usman — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 01:35:43 +0000

I’m using categories as well as tags for my site. I have very few top level categories and then sub-categorize the content into tags. So I have left both categories and tags open for search engines. Is it OK in terms of SEO?
Secondly, I have only shown titles of the articles instead of excerpts on the archive pages. Will this still count as duplicate content?
Another thing I want to ask is that I haven’t nofollowed anything on my site. Only using noindex for date based archives. Is it OK in terms of SEO?