Is Your Web Site Leaking Page Rank?
Posted by Dave Jesch in SEO on July 10, 2010
Many shared web sites and blog templates, and this includes many WordPress themes, have promotional links placed in the footer or sidebar. Often times, these links are simply promotional links for the theme’s author. Promoting a theme author isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes the theme author places multiple links. Or places links that are paid advertisements to other sites. Any link from your site passes the Page Rank from your pages to the referring page. In most cases, this is okay. But when there are links to unwanted pages, this is referred to as “leaking Page Rank.”
The first step in resolving this potential situation is to identify the existance of unwanted links. Sometimes this can be done by simply looking at your footer’s contents. But if the theme author is sneaky, the links can be hidden. There are some tools available on the web that can help with this but you can also look at the HTML source for the page if you’re feeling adventurous.
Fortunately for WordPress users, it’s very simple to change themes. So if you find that there are extra links that come with your theme, you can look for a new one that doesn’t have them. Another possible remedy is to find a consultant that can modify your theme to remove the excess links. Depending on the complexity of the theme and the talent of your consultant, this could be done in just an hour or two.
It’s good to allow credit to the theme author, but you also don’t want too many unnecessary links from your pages. One possible solution would be to have your consultant change your theme to limit the links to the theme author to be from your home page only. So rather than having links from every page on your site, you’ll have them from only one page. You can also place rel=”nofollow” attributes on the link.
There are some simple solutions to the problem of having too many outbound links. The first step is identifying if there is a problem. Once identified, changing the links or changing the theme entirely is a relatively simple process. Since it’s your site you should be aware of the implications and choose to have or not have the links.
How the Search Engines Work
Posted by Dave Jesch in SEO on July 3, 2010
Many webmasters don’t really know how search engines work. But anyone who is interested in Search Engine Optimization should know at least the basics in order to improve their own page’s ranking.
Any search engine works in three basic parts: the crawler, the indexer and the query processor. Understanding how these parts work together is crucial to your online success.
The Crawler
Google’s craler is called “Googlebot.” This tool is what crawls the web looking for content. The crawler works a bit like a web browser in that it visits your web site and requests pages. Doing this, it can build up a picture of the organization and content of your site. After crawling your site, the indexer follows all of the links on your site, looking for more content. This is how the crawler determines what sites are related to each other and how they’re related.
Most crawling programs don’t know about a new web site until it finds a link to it on another page. Some search engines also have a URL submission tool where you can add your own domain name to the list of web site to crawl.
The Indexer
The Indexer takes the page content found by the crawler. It sorts all of the content and puts it into a database. While doing this, the indexer usually ignores what are called “stop words,” such as is, on, and, the, etc. It pays more attention to keywords and phrases.
Query Processor
The Query Processor is the search engine’s public face. This is the web site that most people would identify with the the search engine.
When someone types something in to the search engine, the request is sent through the Query Processor. This searches through the pages in the database to find what the user is looking for. The different search engines use different algorithms to determine the order in which to display the search results.
Each piece of the system is dependent upon the other. It starts with the crawler and ends with you typing something in to the search engine’s web site. A better understanding of how these tools work together allows you to use them to your best advantage.
Sitemaps in WordPress
Posted by Dave Jesch in WordPress on June 27, 2010
A friend of mine was looking at my web site a couple days ago. He asked me why I didn’t have an HTML Sitemap available. To be honest, I didn’t really think I needed one since I don’t have that much content. But it got me thinking that a plugin that would automatically generate the Sitemap contents would be a handy thing to have.
So yesterday I sat down for a little bit and hammered something out that will very easily add an HTML based Sitemap to any WordPress page that you like. You just add a simple “shortcode” to the page where you want the Sitemap to appear and — presto: Instant Sitemap. This plugin, used in conjunction with the Google XML Sitemap plugin that I recommend, gives you all the Sitemap features that you could want. Sure, there may be some other plugins that will create a Sitemap for you, but this one is very small and very simple to use. And ease of use is a big thing to many WordPress users.
If you’d like to take the plugin for a test-drive, you can find it here: DIY HTML Sitemap WordPress plugin. And if you’d like to see what the sitemap looks like, you can visit my new Sitemap page. Let me know what you think.
WordPress 3.0 Released
Posted by Dave Jesch in WordPress on June 17, 2010
My last post, just a few days ago, was talking about the third Release Candidate for WordPress 3.0. That release is only a few days old now and Automattic has released a finalized version 3.0.
This release has lots of stuff in it. The one feature that I’ve looked forward to the most is the Custom Content Types. I’ve already worked with them in a beta release, but now I feel confident in moving forward with my plugin development that is going to be using this feature.
They’ve also fixed 1,217 bugs, merged WordPress MultiUser with standard WordPress (important if you’re hosting multiple sites on a single domain), and there’s a new custom menu creation facility (which in the beta looked very promising.)
There’s lots of new stuff in there, as well as a brand new default theme which has lots of features and customizations you can do to it. So goodbye “Default” and “Classic,” hello “TwentyTen.”
WordPress 3.0 RC 3
Posted by Dave Jesch in WordPress on June 11, 2010
The third release candidate for WordPress 3.0 has been released. Automattic is suggesting plugin developers to test their code with this latest release, so my guess is that they’re getting close to completion. Looks like I’ve got some work to do over the weekend, testing some of my own plugins.
