What is the best method for indexing blog pages?

[coxen00]

I have a client whose blog has hundreds if not thousands of entries.  My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google?  Can we do this dynamically?  And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all?

Thanks,

Chris

[RyanKent]

**My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? **

I am assuming that since each entry is unique content and is offered on your site that you desire people to read it. If that is the case then yes, it would be a tremendous help to be indexed by Google. If the pages are not indexed by Google, then how will people find these pages? It will only happen if they are either already on your site, or are told about the pages or linked to the pages.

Having a page indexed by Google allows people to find it through a normal search, which is how most pages on the web are discovered.

Can we do this dynamically?

Yes. You can submit a simple sitemap to Google, and they will try to crawl your site's pages if they have not already done so. It is important you do not block their efforts in your robots.txt file nor with any "noindex" meta tags.

** And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all?**

Canonical tags help ensure the correct version of your blog entry, or any web page is indexed. If your page can be accessed through multiple URLs, then it should be canonicalized so the proper version of the page is indexed.

[coxen00]

Thanks for the reply. Follow up to your response, I am familiar with sitemaps, but what I meant by dynamically was is there a way to insert the title tag dynamically on each blog post via the cms? Also should each title tag for the blog follow a formula like: Client Blog: article a Client Blog: article b Client Blog: article c (and so on) Also thanks for the info on the canonical tags. So for a typical blog, will google treat each entry as a unique page? I want to make sure we don't get dinged for having duplicate pages.

[RyanKent]

is there a way to insert the title tag dynamically on each blog post via the cms?

CMS is software, and every software package is different. I will share there should be a way to do it, but you would need to search your CMS provider's site to get the details.

For your titles, I am not clear what you are asking. I would recommend the title tag for your blog matching your blog's title. You may want to add your site name or category name depending on the situation. For example if your site is "Chevyworld.com" and you have a blog entry titled "1982 Stingray, the end of an era" then the post title could be:

1982 Stingray, the end of an era

1982 Stingray, the end of an era | Chevyworld

1982 Stingray, the end of an era | Corvettes | Chevyworld

In the first example, your CMS would be adjusted to use the blog title for the title tag. In the second, the blog title plus your site name would be used for the title tag. The last example uses the blog title, the blog's main category tag and the site title.

Will google treat each entry as a unique page?

You need to ensure each page can only be accessed by one URL. For example, take a look at the following blog article's URL:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html

Now try to access that same article with various other URLs such as without the www or with adding a trailing slash character:

http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/25/rachel-weisz-daniel-craig-married_n_884653.html/

Notice that when you try to remove the "www' the same article appears but the site's redirect works and adjusts the URL by adding the "www'. Does your blog article redirect itself in this manner? Or does it display for both the www and non-www url?

Another example is the trailing slash. In this case the URL is adjusted and a question mark is added. If you View Page Source you will see there is a canonical meta tag which ensures the correct version of the page is consistently used by search engines.