Cordobo » SEO

WordPress: Limited Randomized Blogroll without Plugin

Andreas Jacob — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:10:05 +0000

Have you ever redesigned your blog and your new design only allowed a limited space for your “one mile high” blogroll? A friend of mine ran into exactly this problem with his newly redesigned blog.

The really simple solution we came up is resource-friendly while he can keep all of his links. Most probably the best thing of this simple usage of WordPress functions: it’s entirely based on WordPress’ template tags and there is no need for another plugin.

WordPress Template Tags

Our weapon of choice is the wp_list_bookmarks template tag. It comes in handy if you use a new WordPress theme as starting point, which already uses this tag. If not, now it’s the time to get rid of deprecated tags like get_links() or get_links_list().

To start, open the file where your link-list is located, most probably sidebar.php or footer.php. The default usage for wp_list_bookmarks is:

Useful parameters: limit and orderby

Remember, we need to limit the output because of the new design while still giving link-love to all of our blog-friends. To achieve this goal, we applied two parameters to the tag:

limit and orderby.

The Function

These two parameters combined provide us with the limited set of randomized links we need. Seven randomized links fit into the available space, so here is the final template tag with two parameters applied:

Jupp, it’s remarkably simple, but it works exactly as intended.

Canonical URL’s, Optimized Permalinks

Andreas Jacob — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:05:11 +0000

I updated my WordPress permalinks from an old-fashioned and quite outdated /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to the more optimized structure /%post_id%-%postname%/. Although I still like it if I can see the date and the entry title at a glance, the new structure has two advantages:

the new permalink structure is in some cases faster because of the way wordpress stores the URL information in the database (see further: Efficient permalink strategies for WordPress)
according to SEO’s, a link like cordobo.com/540-firefox-add-ons-for-developers/ is more likely to result in a better SERP position than (the same) link named cordobo.com/2008/09/30/firefox-add-ons-for-developers/

Migrating old permalinks to a new structure

To avoid duplicate content and 404 – Not found errors, you should redirect visitors and web crawlers (like GoogleBot) to the new URL with the HTTP Status Code 301 – Moved Permanently.

The fastest way to migrate your old permalinks to the new structure is Dean’s Permalinks Migration plugin. It’s from 2006, but it works great with WordPress 2.7.1. After uploading the plugin, activate it and enter your actual permalink structure (the old one), e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ on the plugin’s options page and save it. Now you have done that, change the “Permalink Settings” to the new structure, in my case /%post_id%-%postname%/.

Canonical URLs for comments pages

I really like WordPress new way to break comments into various pages, because paginated comments can reduce your traffic and save your visitors browser (or RAM) resources. But on pages with a lot of comments, it can create a lot of duplicate content, like it happened here:

http://cordobo.com/224-updateupgrade-to-wp-21/
http://cordobo.com/224-updateupgrade-to-wp-21/comment-page-6/
http://cordobo.com/224-updateupgrade-to-wp-21/comment-page-5/
…

A consortium of leading web companies, including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, created a new standard to handle this kind of unintended duplicate content – Canonical URLs.

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: [...] Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Quoted from Matt Cutts, SEO advice: url canonicalization

They came up with a simple solution, a reference in the of the page to the preferred URL:

To apply this link automatically to every page with comments, I added some lines of code to the functions.php file of my theme. Steve came up with a simple solution in his article Dealing With Duplicate Content Issues on WordPress Comments Pages:

function canonical_for_comments() { global $cpage, $post; if ( $cpage > 1 ) : echo "\n"; echo "\n"; endif; } add_action( 'wp_head', 'canonical_for_comments' );

If you use a plugin like All-In-One-SEO or Yoasts Canonical URL’s for WordPress, you don’t have to worry about it – both already take care about canonical URLs.

If you want to know more about duplicate content and how to avoid it using canonical URLs, watch Matt Cutts video or check the presentation he did at SMX West:

Googlebot versteht Javascript

Andreas Jacob — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:43:21 +0000

Einige russische SEOs haben sich die Mühe gemacht zu testen, ob der Googlebot Javascript-Weiterleitungen bzw. Javascript im Allgemeinen lesen und interpretieren kann.

Die Befehle des Javascriptes wurden vom Google’s Indexbot richtig interpretiert. Die Bots sind in der Lage diese auszuführen und sehen dabei das Endergebnis, nur sind die nicht in der Lage die Scripte in Teile zu zerlegen oder einen Bezug zu HTML zu machen. Die Algorithmen können gut differenzieren zwischen einem bösartigen oder ganz harmlosen Code. Diese Techniken sehen wie Tricks aus der Black Hat SEO, können aber einem guten Zweck dienen