Hi all, I'm fairly new to SEO. Unfortunately, when I started my blog I made a few BIG errors that I now need to spend the time to correct. 1. I didn't use "pretty" permalinks 2. I installed my CRM (Wordpress) in its own folder and named it "wordpress" 3. Never built an htaccess file 4. Never built a sitemap 5. etc., etc., etc. So, now I have a couple of questions. 1. When I google my blog to see how it is indexed using "site":www.domainname.com" I only get one page However, when I google my blog using "site:domainname.com" I get every page in my blog? Is this significant and why? 2. If my index.php file is in the root of my domain, is it okay to leave the wordpress install in its own folder, as is, or is it more SEO friendly to move the whole Wordpress installation into the root? 3. When I make my changes to the formatting of my permalinks does anyone recommend a specific plug-in to help with managing? I've read about Dean Lee's Permalink Migration plugin, but it seems to have some security flaws. Any and all thoughts are welcome and appreciated.
Yikes, those are some big mistakes (save for #2), but they are correctable. Pick whether you want your site's pages to be at the www. or /domainname.com root. Then stick with it and 301 redirect the one you don't want to the one you do want to use. Yes, Google is ignoring the www. prefix (since it's a subdomain of the root domain, which is your domainname and its TLD extension). If you want to use this, 301 redirect the www. version to the non-www version. The same holds true if you want to use the www. version (just point the non-www. one to it). Basically what's happening is Google is considering the www. version of your Web site to be a completely different site (a copy or clone) and is dis-regarding it by applying a "duplicate content penalty" to the www. version. If you want the www. version to be used, do as I said earlier and point the http://domainname.com version to the http://www.domainname.com version - you can also tell Google which version to use in your Google Webmasters' Central account, if you've set one up that is. If you want WordPress to be at the root, but still installed to its own folder, go into WordPress via the Dashboard and point it to the domain root that way. (This is something I recommend you do anyway.) Then use mod_rewrite to mask the traces of WordPress on your site (to prevent people from realizing you're using it and trying to hack into it - you should also remove the generator META tag from your Theme's header.php file as well.) Just redirect them manually via your .htaccess file (a 301 redirect). If your site is still new, then just switch over and forget about it. You should also read these posts as well: http://www.theblogexperiment.com/blog-forum/showthread.php?p=14001#post14001 (read this post and then down to the end of the thread - Sarah provides a LOT of information, and answered my questions VERY well) http://www.theblogexperiment.com/blog-forum/showthread.php?p=14866#post14866 http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3708201#post3708201 http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182915 (since you're new to SEO)
I have nothing more to add. That was a great explanation and those links at the bottom of the page were handy.
Dan, Thanks so much!! Will digest everything tonight and tomorrow and try to put to good use. I agree, BIG mistakes, but I was complete newbie. I've been at it for five months now and my site/blog has done fairly well (inspite of my dumb beginners mistakes). I'm thinking with some decent SEO I can take it to the next level. At this point I'm just trying to do some quick fixes. Then as I learn, really start to optimize. Thanks again, John
Ah, thanks for the great explanation! I'm also new to SEO and this really helped out. Especially with the redirecting, I didn't know about that.
Dan, If you have the time and inclination, could you expand on this one a little more. My site is about five months old. It had been fairly well indexed by Google and I was getting decent SERP traffic up until a couple of weeks ago. At first I thought I was sandboxed, but now I think it's a combination of all the problems I've mentioned along with some duplicated content. Anyway, Wordpress is alread in its own folder and I have pointed it to the root. What I'm looking for more info on is "using the mod_rewrite" function. What is this and how does it work. Also, I thought WP was supposed to automatically generate a htaccess file. When I look at mine this is all that is in it: # BEGIN WordPress # END WordPress I'm using 2.3.1 (waiting a little bit to upgrade to 2.5). Thanks again, John
I'm not an Apache person (I try to touch the server as little as possible), but you might want to consider asking David K. Lynn (dklynn) over at SitePoint or SarahG over at The Blog Experiment. They work with it on a regular basis and will be able to help you better than I can (especially since I'm just getting caught up after beign away due to a family crisis most of the month).