WordPress (.com) and SEO

[MarkWill]

I am in my 30 day trial and very interested in my results. I think I am probably in a small minority in having the same web site up and running for approaching 17 years (registered in January 1995 :)) but only now am I looking at SEO seriously (to the extent that I want to learn more myself, as opposed to having others promise great fortune!)). Anyway, before committing to SEOMoz on an ongoing basis I want to understand just how actionable the information on my dashboard is. With that in mind, here's the first of what is (hopefully) a series questions that about low-hanging fruit I might be able to check off quickly.

I recently brought up a new blog on WordPress.com (note - hosted by WordPress, not a self-hosted implementation). I have had this blog running for less than a month and have just 18 posts. And I am being overwhelmed with thoudands of errors/warnings from SEOMoz. These fall into a few categories:

• Duplicate content: As I understand it, each TAG I associate with a single blog post creates a unique URL. For example, if I have a single post with tags for "flowers", "wine" and "cakes", I get URLs generated such as <blog url="">/flowers, <blog url="">/wines and <blog url="">/cakes. Obviously, tagging posts is a common scenario. Must I just accept these duplicate content warnings?</blog></blog></blog>
• Title element too long: These are self generated by WordPress.com and the default format includes the date the post was submitted (which takes a bunch of characters followed by the title used). Many of the posts are well over 70 and this seems really easy to do.
• Missing meta-description: As far as I can tell, Wordpress.com doesn't give me an option to specify these.

So, must I just accept these issues if I use WordPress.com (which, again, seems like a very common scenario) and how negative is this to me?

Thanks.

Mark

[BTeubner]

Honestly, I take everything from the dahsboard as a suggestion. Just cause the dashboard says something is a 'warning' or 'error', doesn't mean that the same logic isn't driving traffic, sales, leads, etc. Look at the suggestions, but make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot by 'fixing' something.

I guess the value is that you have an unbiased set of eyes (even if they are artificial!) keeping a watch on your site, especially when you implement changes which may send crawlers for a loop.

Just my take on it. We don't really use it much but when we do, we have found issues that we otherwise would not have.

[MarkWill]

Thank you for the response. Yes, that is pretty much the way I've been thinking about this but...

• The perfectionist in me wants to "get to zero". This may not be possible or even necessary but converging on that is something I'd like to consider.
• More importantly, if I accept these issues - and maybe I have no choice - then I have a TON of noise and it's difficult to see the important stuff. So, to my surprise, I have THOUSANDS of errors and warnings. If new ones come up they migh be very important - but if all my "accepted" warnings are still there I may well miss them.

If I come to the conclusion that these issue for WordPress are non-factors (and I am not there yet) then it would be good to be able to "hide" these from the dashboard so that the remaining, hopefully actionable, ones are not hidden in the noise.

Thanks,

Mark

[ClickValueMedia]

Hi Mark,

There are several plugins for wordpress that you can use to get around this dupe content issue with tags, categories, author pages etc. The fact that you are running a hosted WP and not your own install means you can't add these extra plugins as far as I am aware. Again using a hosted WP you also can't change the URL structure to a custom one.

So you mention you have a 17 year old site. Is the setting up of the blog on WP to drive traffic and some links to your main site?

Have you considered adding a wp install to your own site, and ading those 18 articles you've written to your site, that way you can take advantage of all the great SEO plugins and optimisie everything as needed.

Some SEo plugins for WP i like are

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/

Derek

[CompleteOffice]

Thumbs up for suggesting a wp install to his current site. Without this, theres no point doing SEO because the blogs not run your site and you would not get any sweet nectar from it.

[MarkWill]

OK, it looks like I will have to bite the bullet and host WordPress Looking at that now but a few more SEO-related questions...

With WordPress.com I set up the domain feature such that my blog was at http://blog.<mysite>.com</mysite>. The default installation for WordPress (if I host it) seems to be http://www.<mysite>.com\blog</mysite>. Are there any specific SEO-related drawbacks to using the second format? I have no idea how easy it is to modify the installation to support the first format but I am happy to switch to the second if there are no drawbacks.

Also, given that Google, etc has crawled against my WordPress.com blog (so, the first format above) would you anticipate a penalty in switching from the first format to the second? Would this not show up as (yet another) duplicate content hit and, if so, how long would this typically take to work itself out  (once the first format above is no longer available)?

Thanks again.

Mark