Keeping up with Google’s ever-changing algorithm updates on WordPress
blogs requires constant monitoring and adjustments, which many
webmasters fail to keep up with. Following the Penguin algorithm update,
millions of bloggers experienced a halt or decrease in traffic.
Although keeping up with industry trends does require frequent
updates to continue performing well in search, most tasks are not time
consuming at all. This guide will help you understand recent changes to
Google’s algorithm and how to update your WordPress blog to follow the
new industry standards.
The Penguin and Panda Revolution
The Penguin and Panda algorithm updates targeted low-quality websites
full of duplicate content, spammy linking, and poor user experience.
WordPress is a wonderful content management system and blogging platform
out-of-the-box, but it does create massive amounts of duplicate
content.
The days of large scale link exchanges and linking to unrelated,
low-quality websites were abruptly ended by the Panda update. In
previous years, many bloggers would create low-quality sites with poor
internal linking structure, few quality pages and banner ads taking up
majority of the pages, which was halted by Penguin. Many bloggers,
especially personal bloggers, were left wondering what to do and how to
monetize their blogs.
Link Building for Blogs in the Post-Penguin World
Sure, the days of quick and easy links are over, but this doesn’t
mean there is any less value to link building. In fact, high-quality,
relevant links are valued more than ever. Before building new links, it
is imperative to go back and fix your current link profile. Start out by
pulling a backlink report of your website. Sift through each of the
results, identifying any low-quality or irrelevant links. Contact each
webmaster to remove the links. If you cannot find contact information or
the webmaster refuses to remove the links, consider using Google’s new disavow links tool.
Now that you have removed all low-quality links pointing to your
website, take a look at who you are linking to. Many personal bloggers
sell text link ads and sponsored posts for extra income. These days are
nearing their demise. Your PageRank is not only determined by inbound
links, but also outbound links.
Unless implicitly stated by the advertiser, I would highly recommend
adding the NoFollow attribute to any paid links on your website. Let’s
say you own a travel blog, and a travel company purchased a sponsored
post from you with the anchor text “cheap holiday travel packages.” You
would change the markup for the link to look like this:
This will remove any value passed on from your website to the
advertiser, and will help your website conform to Google’s webmaster
quality guidelines for link schemes.
Fear not, your blog can still be monetized. Consider signing up for Google’s display advertising network: AdSense.
Offering display advertising options is the safest way to continue
monetizing blogs. After all, Google wouldn’t offer it if it would hurt
websites. Be careful not to overdo it with the display ads.
Websites with 50 percent or more advertisement saturation will be
penalized, so placement and ad quality will be key to allowing effective
ads that will make you money. Consider looking into conversion
optimization and a/b testing to find which ads perform best in different
spots on your website, and be sure to filter the types of ads that can
be displayed so they are relevant to your audience. YouTube videos can
also be monetized, so consider starting a YouTube channel and
incorporate video into your blog.
Although most link building practices have been blacklisted by
Google, there are still many ways to build links to blogs. Instead of
exchanging links on lengthy links pages, consider exchanging guest posts
with highly relevant blogs. Write high-quality, enticing content that
other websites will want to reference with links. Sign up for Google
Plus and set up Authorship.
Look for websites containing recommended blog lists relevant to
yours, and inquire about getting listed. Review products within your
industry, and use social media to let those companies know you reviewed
their products. They may include your review in their list of
testimonials. Attend or exhibit at industry events which list attendees
on the event’s website with links. Become a thought leader in your niche
by creating and promoting linkable assets like white papers, guides,
videos, ebooks, and best practices.
Setting up Your Blog for SEO
Optimizing WordPress blogs requires a few plugins and configurations
to meet today’s industry standards. Start off by downloading and
installing a plugin called WordPress SEO. This is the
best SEO plugin available for WordPress, and it has an import feature to
import any settings from other SEO plugins.
Download and activate another plugin called W3 Total Cache.
This is the best caching plugin available, and works in unison with
WordPress SEO. W3 Total Cache will help decrease page loading speeds by
creating a cache of each page. Any time you mark a comment as spam, save
a draft of a post, or click off the page editor, WP creates a duplicate
copy of those pages.
Using the WP-Optimize plugin will purge all those unnecessary copies, which will save server space and speed up your website. WP-PageNavi
is another must-have plugin for optimizing your pagination by adding
the rel=prev and rel=next attributes. This will help your website be
indexed more efficiently and increase crawl depth.
Once all those plugins are installed and activated, you will need to
configure them. Use the WordPress SEO plugin to set up Google and Bing
Webmaster Tools from the “Dashboard” menu on the plugin settings. Next,
go to the Titles &Metas menu. On the General tab, check the box to
force rewrite of titles if your custom title tags are not showing up.
Check the box to Noindex subpages of archives. Check all four boxes to
clean up the head by hiding RSD links, WLW manifest links, shortlinks,
and RSS links.
On the Home tab, write a custom title tag and meta description for
your homepage. You will also want to go through all pages and posts on
your site and write custom titles and descriptions for each using the
post editor. Enter in the URL of your blog’s G+ brand page in the Google
Publisher Page field. This will set up the rel=publisher attribute for
your homepage and connect your blog to your G+ page.
Once all those options are set up, go to the Taxonomies tab.
WordPress creates massive amounts of duplicate content through
taxonomies. Every time a category, tag, date, or author archive page is
indexed, it creates a duplicate copy of each of those posts.
Check the box to noindex, follow the categories, tags, and format. Go
to the Other tab and noindex, follow the author archives and date
archives. Don’t worry about crawl depth from doing this. As long as you
have optimized pagination set up through the WP-PageNavi plugin, your
website will still be crawled effectively. I recently ran an experiment
on noindexing taxonomies in WordPress to test this theory out.
Next, go to the XML Sitemaps menu in the WordPress SEO plugin. Check
the box to enable XML sitemap functionality, and submit your sitemaps in
Google and Bing Webmaster tools. Check the boxes to ping Yahoo! and
Ask.com. Check the box to exclude taxonomies for categories, tags, and
format.
Now go to the Permalinks menu and check the boxes to strip category
bases and remove ?replytocom variables. You will also want to go to the
WordPresspermalink settings and strip categories and datestamps out as
well. On the Internal Links menu, check to enable breadcrumbs and
implement breadcrumbs on your posts. A snippet of code will be provided
in the plugin.
Setting up G+ Authorship
Setting up Google Plus authorship is very quick and easy on WordPress sites. Download and install a plugin called Google Author Link.
Under the settings menu for the Google Author Link plugin, select an
author for the homepage of your website. Now go to the Users menu in the
WP dashboard and edit each user’s profile. Add in the URL to each
author’s G+ profile. Next, ask each author to add a URL to your website
on the “Contributor To” section of their G+ profile. Authorship is now
set up on your blog.
Setting up Microdata
Microdata is still a relatively new concept, first introduced with HTML5. Schema.org
is a joint project by Google, Yahoo and Bing to help webmasters mark up
their websites so search engines can better understand their content.
Bing and Yahoo give a boost in rankings just for setting it up while
Google changes the appearance of your listings in search engine result
pages to increase clickability.
Before setting up microdata, you will need to change the doctype of
your website to the HTML5 format. To do this, go to
Appearance>Editor. Select the header.php file. At the very top of the
header.php file, you will see a doctype. If it is not already in HTML5
format, change the doctype to
Now that your website is HTML5 compatible, you will need to download and install a plugin called Schema Creator by Raven. Once activated, the plugin will automatically add schema.org microdata throughout your website.
Setting up microdata is as simple as that. If you would like to add
in more microdata, go to your post editor or page editor, and you will
notice a small icon with the letters “SC” in it at the top of the
editor. This tool will allow you to add in microdata for people,
products, events, organizations, movies, books, and reviews. It will
create a short code and place it within the page for you.
A Few More Quick Tips
Now that your website conforms to today’s Google algorithm standards,
there are a few other simple maintenance activities to keep in mind:
Always update your version of WordPress and all plugins as soon as
updates are available. If you fail to keep up with updating plugins and
versions, you may run into compatibility issues later down the road that
will break your website.
Also, make an effort to publish new content at least once per month.
Google loves fresh content, and favors websites that are updated
frequently. If you get lazy about posting regularly, your traffic and
rankings will suffer.
One final piece of advice is to monitor your analytics and webmaster
tool accounts at least once per month. This will help you monitor
technical issues that may arise as well as traffic drops. If you notice
any abnormalities or receive warning messages in webmaster tools, act on
these issues in a timely fashion.
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