John Doherty's Blog

14 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 18 comments

How to Noindex and Organize Categories and Tags in WordPress

Duplicate content can be a killer for websites, especially blogs and news sites, if the organization is not handled correctly. Often websites such as blogs and news sites are organized into categories and are then interlinked by other means such as sidebar widgets, related post plugins, and tags in WordPress. With all of the different ways of organizing sites, though, and the reality of pagination, we can quickly get into a hot mess of closely identical pages across our site that do not add value to the user experience and could be treated as duplicate content by the search engines.

So how do we decide what content we want the search engines to index and rank, and once we decide how do we make this happen?

In this post I am going to introduce you (or remind you, if you already know about them) to a few meta tags, placed in the <head> section of your site, that will help you with dealing with duplicate content. At the end, if you’re using WordPress, I’ll show you how to do it using Yoast’s SEO plugin.

SEO is NOT Your Whole Marketing Strategy

I work with companies of all sizes in my job as an SEO Consultant at Distilled in New York City (the best city in the world). I have a Fortune 500 company that you have definitely heard of, a hotel chain you have definitely heard of, and two startups that you may not have heard of (yet). I love it when a company “gets” SEO and wants to bake it into their company. In fact, I tweeted this tweet today after spending a full day at one of my startup clients working with them:

I realized today just how much SEO ties into a whole business. If only more business people understood that…

— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) January 13, 2012

I get stoked when companies start to get SEO, but I have one thing to say:

SEO is NOT your full marketing strategy

10 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engines 6 comments

Google Showing Official Sites in Instant Search

This morning I was doing some searches for a client using some common websites and I saw this when searching for “Facebook Login”:

When you click this, IT TAKES YOU DIRECTLY TO FACEBOOK!

03 Jan

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 9 comments

SEO for Longtail

Oftentimes in SEO, people hear about “head terms” and the value of doing keyword research to try to capture large search terms that will bring lots and lots of traffic to your site. While I do not wish to give the impression that this is not a valuable endeavour (it definitely it), there is much more to SEO than just head terms. Let me tell you from personal experience, there is nothing worse than having a boss who thinks that getting the #1 ranking for that one term is going to win them the Internet, and that is all they want to focus on.

A lot of value exists in the longtail of traffic, those 3+ word terms that drive a lot of traffic to your site through fairly unique queries. Let’s look at some numbers, graphs, and statistics from different sites around the web that hopefully will show you the value of longtail traffic.

Let me also point out that SEO for the longtail has changed since the Panda update and since Google started hiding our search referrer data for logged-in users. While these have changed HOW we go about our work a bit, they have not changed the WHY or the importance of it.
Read more about SEO for Longtail …

27 Dec

John Doherty Posted in Search Engine Optimization 6 comments

The Power of Guest Blogging

I’m often asked to guest blog on websites. I do so because I love writing, but what is the purpose of guest blogging? Why do it? Why allow others to guest post on your site? How do you even find these relevant people?

Those are all questions I will try to answer today, with some real data to back it up from an SEO and traffic perspective.

ETIQUETA CANONICAL RETRASA CON GOOGLEBOT EN LA WEB CONTRA INDICE DE MOVIL

Attention: This post is the translated version of the Canonical Delays post. It is for testing purposes with the hreflang=”” parameter.

Recientemente he estado notando una tendencia interesante cuando publique blogs. Cuando mis posts publicar, automáticamente Twitter por un plugin llamado WordTwit. Mis mensajes son siempre indexados dentro de dos a cuatro minutos.

Lo que estoy notando, sin embargo, es que mis mensajes son cada vez más la indexación con el parámetro, al igual que “utm_source = rss?”: Read more about ETIQUETA CANONICAL RETRASA CON GOOGLEBOT EN LA WEB CONTRA INDICE DE MOVIL …

John Doherty