Comments on: Category SEO For Wordpress Blogs and Ecommerce

By: karthik

karthik — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:02:37 +0000

Wonderful tips… Thanx…

By: Ghaz Ranjha

Ghaz Ranjha — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:30:11 +0000

Some spot on advice here, in particular for e-commerce sites.

Ghaz

By: Gab Goldenberg

Gab Goldenberg — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:00:54 +0000

What are you doing with the space then, Billy?

By: Vladimir Prelovac

Vladimir Prelovac — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:31:04 +0000

This is exactly what tags are invented for. They allow you fine tuning of the content so you do not have a problem where you have to put 100 posts up. A typical (optimized) tag page will contain only up to 5 posts.

I made an experiment using phrase ‘fresh yoghurt drinks’ for which my tag page still ranks no1 in google without any other relevant content other then title.

http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/improve-search-engine-placement-with-tags

By: BillyG

BillyG — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:11:10 +0000

I got rid of all of my categories a month or two ago.

I just didn’t display them initially, then I realized that I don’t even need them, because they seemed to affect results from the “Related Posts’ plugin. That also clears up a bunch of space on the sidebar.

By: Evan

Evan — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:35:27 +0000

This is great, thanks for the tips!

By: Gab Goldenberg

Gab Goldenberg — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:14:03 +0000

Garrett, I’m working with some guys to create just such a plugin for cat pages!

@Greg – Just don’t make full posts available on category pages. use the “more” quicktag to cut off what can be seen. See also Malcolm’s second comment.

By: malcolm coles

malcolm coles — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:54:58 +0000

If you disable the follow,noindex tag in all-in-one-SEO for categories then how do you prevent content duplication caused by category pages?

Google doesn’t care about this, surely. Content duplication is a filter, not a penalty. Google is not going to think your category page is the correct URL for an individual post. And no one is going to link to a category page mistaking it for your post, so there won’t be any link dilution. So this whole business with category pages and duplicate content seems like a red herring to me.

The one issue I do see is that often pages 2 and higher of a category loop tend to have the same title and meta description. So why not add page 2, page 3 etc to these automatically?

Here’s some PHP for wordpress to do this: http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/avoid-duplicate-meta-descriptions-in-pages-2-and-higher-of-the-wordpress-loop/

By: Travis - central ms programming

Travis - central ms programming — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:00:55 +0000

Why not add a sticky to your category pages with a couple of paragraphs of unique content, then limit your category post list to title links – so none of the content is duplicated? Then allow the cats to be indexed…
You could also silo the category pages so that no cross linking contamination occurs…

By: Stephan Miller

Stephan Miller — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:07:44 +0000

To add to Garrett’s comment. Here is a plugin that seems to work really well for rotating old posts back to the front page, with the option of making it visible in the feed or not: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/scheduled-post-shift-plugin-for-wordpress/