Pointless WordPress SEO?
It’s funny how a whole industry has grown up around second guessing and hypothesizing about how to rank as high as possible in the search results.
Up until now I really haven’t done much to that effect – when it comes to the basic stuff I have 100% control over myself – like whether to use rel=”nofollow” on internal links. Today however I have installed some plugins and it will be fun to see if it will result in more Google-traffic.
1.) Add Meta Tags, arguably meta tags are a lost cause, since the site owner has full control over them they should not matter much. I have however heard from a witch doctor or two that they might affect how your listing is displayed in a positive way, we’ll see. I’ll keep my eyes open. Please enlighten me if you have a different opinion on this one.
2.) WordPress SEO Sniper Lite, this one is putting rel=”nofollow” on my internal category links. The intention is to prevent internal Google juice from flowing from single posts to the category listings. Since manipulating internal links is also something the webmaster has full control over I don’t expect much from this one either. The whole internal juice thing is probably just bullshit nowadays. Again, let me know if you feel otherwise.
3.) Permalink Redirect is routing prodevtips.com/some-article to www.prodevtips.com/some-article/ by way of 301. Apparently some quacks believe that Google won’t be able to tell the difference between link/ and link. I wonder… The nada to www route without messing with htaccess is nice though. Even if it is in fact a reality that link and link/ is not equal I don’t expect much here either, AFAIK basically all of my external links are on the proper link/ form.
4.) Nofollow Those Dupes will put a nofollow attribute on links in posts when they are displayed in a non-single fashion, for instance on a category page, with the goal of having them rank higher. However since I have WP Limit Posts Automatically turned on for these pages not many links will show on them anyway. Not much will probably come from this either.
5.) Upgraded Sociable to the latest version, the old one I was using didn’t have no follow. The new one has.
6.) No plugin this time, I simply changed the way the title is displayed from ProDevTips – Article Title to Article Title – ProDevTips, probably the most significant change of all.
Update: It seems like I was a little bit too fast, I got the old separator >> at the beginning of the title, not nice. I ended up installing Optimal Title to fix it. It won’t get me higher up in the results, not much anyway but it will surely result in more clicks and isn’t that what it’s all about in the end anyway, traffic?
7.) Update: I just did a replace in disqus/comments.php, href= is now rel=”nofollow” href=. I didn’t realize that disqus follows. This change will most probably be a boost in the long run.
On a side note, since pirates have begun stealing my content I’ve felt the need to install FeedEntryHeader. Yes it will be a nuisance for all you subscribers but I don’t particularly like the idea of having some assholes out there ranking higher than me with my stolen content and making money from it at the same time. I had to do something to annoy them.