Affiliate Programs

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Last night I was browsing some forums and came across some members who had questions about building backlinks, commenting on other blogs and Google’s Supplemental rankings as it pertained to WordPress SEO.

As usual, there were some wild answers!

The first forum post I came across was from forum member who asked if commenting would help his new blog.  The range of answers varied from “Yeah it helps” to “No, all comments have rel=”nofollow” attached to outgoing links an it doesn’t help” (obviously this person doesn’t know what he’s talking about, big surprise in a forum, huh?)

This is how I answered that person…. 

Okay boys and girls, I’m going to help you out.

It seems the subject of commenting on other blogs is a big issue. Everyone has their own opinion on it, but here are my experiences on it.

1. Traffic - No-Follow or Follow, if you leave good comments blog readers will click on your name and come to your site. I often use my blogs name or anchor text in the place of my name where it ask for it on the “Comment” field.

2. Backlinks - I believe Yahoo, MSN and others give some weight to links with no-follow attached. There is also some who believe Google will follow a no-follow link. I happen to be one of those people. As to how much weight G gives that link is anyones guess but I think it was either Grey Wolf or Shoemoney who had an excellent article on this subject a while back. Their reasoning was that “if there is a link with the “nofollow” attribute that is being clicked regularly, do you believe Google’s not going to follow it?”

Hunt out bloggers who have installed the Do-Follow Wordpress Plugin and have joined the Do-Follow movement. This plugin strips out the rel=”nofollow” attribute from outgoing links in the Comment field.

You can find blog owners who have joined the Do-Follow movement here. D-List of bloggers who follow your link back.

Obviously the WP Do Follow plugin is seperate from the Do-Follow List, don’t get them confused..lol

This is a good list. However, I’m seeing some Blogger owners who’ve joined the Do-Follow movement still have the “nofollow” attribute on their comments. I believe it’s unethical to join the D-List and still have the “nofollow” attribute attached to your commets, but there are people doing it. I just bypass the Blogger sites unless they have a high PR, in which case I figure I can lure some readers over to my crib. At last count, there were something like 170 sites on this list.

3. Networking - If you really like a site and they have “nofollow” attributes in the Comment section, go ahead and strike up a friendship. You never know where it will lead. It’s not uncommon for them to link to you in their Blogroll. Most bloggers do not have a “nofollow” attribute on their blogrolls.

Another question I responded too was from a reader who had a lot of pages ending up in Google’s Supplemental rankings. The reader was under the impression that Google was penalizing his blog because he used Wordpress. Unfortunately many have this view. There are also those out there who are “swearing” that Google does not like blogs and will only allow a few into the top SERPS. (wrong again)

I’m not sure where the “Google Penalizes Blogs” thing comes from. Google loves blogs more than any other SE out there. It’s been said more than once that Google loves blogs because the content is updated regularly.

Google doesn’t like splogs or duplicate content blogs. Know the difference!

Now, as far as the original questions was asked about WP blogs being sent to Google’s Supplemenatl rankings, I think most bloggers face that with some pages on their site. Heck, static html sites face this problem also!

One problem with WP blogs ending up in Google’s Supplemental rankings is the WP themes their self. Not all designers are SEO savy. Most WP themes I see are too heavy on H1 and H2 tags. Some put the sidebar info ahead of the content. This is not good because it makes your pages look nearly the same to the search engine bot.

Long story short, there could be a mountain of reasons some of your pages have ended up in Googles Supplemental rankings. I find that my shorter content stories are ending up there quite a bit. It’s my long winded authority articles that stick.

Also, if all your meta tags on every post page are the same it’ll help in getting your post into the Googles Supplemental rankings. Use a Plugin that will take your tags and insert them as Meta Keywords and a Plugin that uses the first one or two sentences of your post as the Meta Descriptions. Yes Vern, Meta Keywords and Descriptions are still important in SEO.

Also, just because your articles are ending up in Googles Supplemental rankings, doesn’t mean they’ll always be there. Someone recently stated that Googles Supplemental rankings are like forced work camps for weak post pages. (I can’t remember who said that, I read too many blogs!)

Here is what I’m experimenting with to try and get some of my better articles out of Google’s Supplemental rankings. I’m linking to these pages internally, I’m asking others to link to them externally, and on some I’m updating the content on a few pages and I’m trying out several robots.txt files.