I am one of those types who think when something works well, it is a good opportunity to destroy it. After all, not to how development and innovation happen?
My construction business had been slow so I decided to build my homepage under some downtime.
I learned a lot about WordPress and SEO by my capacity improvement tweaking and dismantling of this site, and I think my tips can help beginners and experienced WordPressers both!
If you haven't already, I recommend you sign up for a free Google Webmaster Tools account. Much of the following service is based on the information you can get from this very important tool.
It's never fun to go to your account to Google Webmaster Tools to find that Googlebots are discover pages on your site that you didn't know existed, or URLs that are non-existent. Or to find that your home page is not indexed because there is a trailing backslash at the end of your home URL. The worst was when I thought that both www and non-www versions of my URL was indexed – it is not good for SEO.
I've tried many plugins along the journey. One thing I have tried to do is use as few a plugins as possible in an attempt to make the site as quickly as possible (since Larry Page is such a speed freak).
I am presenting here are some plugins that I have found help my site play nice with Google and is well worth the weight that they add to my WP installation.
When you have changed my permalink structure four or five times and my domain name twice, I had a mess that Google as pointed out to me during the "crawl errors" and "HTML errors" section in Webmaster tools.
Two plugins helped clean up a lot of mess: redirect and Link Juice keeper.
Redirection plugin, you can place 301 redirect to any URL within a domain. To tell the truth, in many cases, I had no idea where these bad URL came from – I knew only that Google is telling me where they crawl errors. And how I got all these errors are not in this post. When you use 301 redirect, transfer all the PageRank from the homeless to the page you're page 301-redirect to.
Link Juice Keeper (or LJK) is what I use to virtually clear all bad URLs that I can't find a page to redirect to. LJK redirects automatically to all non-existing URLs and 404 errors to your home page. So when you go through and 301-redirect URLs can point to good, specific pages, you can choose to take up the rest – LJK plus everyone else who shows up.
But be aware that any of the subsequent redirects that might better be replaced by LJK makes a redirect to a more appropriate page on your site, so it's good practice to periodically check if any new errors and correct redirect them if possibleinstead of just letting them go to your start page.
By providing a home to all of these "homeless pages ' you preserve any link juice that these pages are within the domain. If a page with an incorrect URL can be found on the ' net, then it has value — but not if it leads to a page that "the page cannot be found". Why not make use of all these pages and have them be paths to the content you want to rank for?
Another great plugin I came across is the cbnet Ping optimizer.
Did you know that every time you make an edit in a post or a page on your WordPress blog, you ping a bunch of update services like Google, Technorati and many more? This action allows them to know that you have some new content and that they should send their bots to take a look.
Is great … if you're like me, and constantly corrects some spelling or tweaking your pages very regularly. Perhaps you reformat a favour and keep update and publish it again and again until it looks just right.
While consciously improve your content, you can do yourself to be a spammer in the eyes of those update services. Cbnet Ping optimizer makes what is control the pings only ping update services when you create something new (a post or page) — not when you edit an existing entry or page. If you made a bunch of edits that have been modified significantly page or entry, so you can go ahead and manually force-ping services.
A Firefox addon that has been useful for me, SEO doctor.
SEO doctor gives good SEO-related information about the page displayed in your browser. It lets you know, for example, if you use two H1 tags (not good), as well as many other SEO mistakes.
SEO doctor told me that an important page on my blog was not to be indexed because of a canonical link. In the end I found that the plugin all in one SEO was the culprit. Once I unchecked the option Canonical URLs, problem solved. I still love the AIO SEO and think it is invaluable, but without SEO-doctor, I would never have found this problem.
The other day, I had noticed from my site meter account that Google indexed my site with both www and non-www URLs.
Site Meter, unlike many other trackers show Googlebot's visit, which I love. I have been able to see that Google actually came to my site with specific keyword search criteria! Trace these back to SERPs, I saw that there were both forms of URLs in search results. After a ruthless research I came across a site that is mentioned in the same WordPress problems. The author disabled plugin W3 total Cache and the problem was resolved.
I cleaned up my .htaccess file, and if the provisions revising and that seemed to fix it, but I'm sceptical. To be sure it does not happen again, I did the non-www URL (www is my standard format) link I use to check out my site from my desktop and bookmarks. So when I click the link, i see in the address bar of your browser to be sure that the non-www URL resolves to the www version.
The last thing you want is to make Google dissatisfied with you. For a beginner, I believe it is important to monitor all this vigilant until the dust that settles. If you do not believe that you must monitor your website, then you do something to optimize it, if you are, have you no feedback on the search engine and your progress might be hindered.
These are my favorite WP troubleshooting tips. What are your? I would like to hear about them in the comments.
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