Your Website Profit

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My blog currently has approximately 90 posts and 10 pages. That should mean Google will index 100 pages of my website, shouldn’t it? Now if you check the number of pages indexed, it will be just over 200. How is that possible, when many search engine optimizers struggle to get even half their website optimized?

The secret is, of course, WordPress. The way WordPress blogs are built, every post is accessible from several locations: the front page, monthly archives, categories and with WP 2.3, tags. Some SEOs advice you to “noindex” all the archive pages to avoid duplicate content penalties, but there’s another way to avoid them - a better way.

Search Engine Optimizing WordPress Archives

By only showing the excerpt of each post on my archive pages, I ensure the posts will be seen as unique content, while allowing Google to index the archive pages. This increases the number of pages that can be indexed dramatically, in fact more than doubling it.

I show 5 posts on every page and include every post in one category, one monthly archive and at least three tag archives. That means my number of pages increases on average by two for every post I make. Some more tags and variation easily increases that number to three, or above.

The Advantages

There are several advantages to a high number of indexed pages relating to search engines. The first is that search engines tend to place more value on sites with many pages. This is in part due to the higher PageRank (and similar ranks) this gives to the front page, which is often linked to from every other page.

The second advantage is long tail traffic. Obscure search terms often match very few pages, and in these cases your tag archive may rank for the term simply because it includes parts of two of your messages. For example, my tag archive for “traffic” could rank for something like “webmaster community traffic carnival”, because it includes the keywords from Carnival of Webmasters and 5 Ways to Reward Your Community. Searches like these are rare, but have enough content and they will happen.

Another advantage from this method of using the archive pages is the increased interlinking between your posts. This increases crawl depth and lets search engines find a larger share of your posts. That’s one of the reasons almost all of my posts are indexed.

by Sutocu | November 26, 2007